On This Day

Nonfiction books need compelling beginnings. And on this day, January 15, there are many from which to choose. In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, here are a few momentous moments in history. The books shown complement these moments. (Note: Try as I might, I could not get the sizing right, my apologies!)

On this day in 1810, American abolitionist and feminist Abigail Kelley Foster was born. Her 1850 quote from the Woman’s Rights Convention hangs in my office: “Sisters, bloody feet have worn smooth the path by which you come here!”

On this day in 1896, Matthew Brady, American photographer, died. Think of how different our knowledge of American history and the Civil War would have been without him. His work birthed the entire field of photojournalism.

On this day in 1777, my now-home state of Vermont declared its independence from Great Britain.

On this day in 1870, cartoonist Thomas Nast drew a donkey to symbolize the Democratic Party. It stuck.

On this day in 1997, Princess Diana called for an international ban on land mines.

And on this day in 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born. I will not attempt to do justice to his life by summing it up so briefly here, but instead will leave you with this MLK quote, delivered upon his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.”

Personally, I cannot think of a better time to let those words ring in our ears, as we issue in a new political day in our great nation. Think of all the compelling beginnings yet to come.

Random Facts

As I held my mouse today and stared at a blank screen for a few minutes in my typical pre-blog-writing ritual, I was reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago in The New Yorker. There were two frames. In the first, a man sits before a typewriter that holds a blank sheet of paper. He is staring out a window. The caption reads “Temporary writer’s bock”. In the second frame, the same man sits in the same position staring out a similar window, but this time he wears an apron and the words “Butcher Shop” appear on the glass in front of him. The caption reads “Permanent writer’s block.”

Since I am not wearing an apron, I’m confident that what I’m experiencing is only temporary. Still, there is a deadline.

So, I’ve decided to share a few entries from a list of things I routinely paste into a document eloquently titled “book idea random facts.” These are tidbits about the natural world that I have found especially interesting. So interesting, in fact, that entire books could be written about each of them. Wait. . . someone’s already done that?

But not the book I’d write. That’s why I don’t mind sharing. It’s an open-source approach to non-fiction writing, the only kind there should be. Besides, you might not even be interested.

I have added attributions and links with more information to a few items, where I could find them.

Here goes, in no particular order:

It’s difficult to imagine an animal of one species giving birth to one of another species, but if you think one generation at a time, you’ll recognize an unbroken link from child, to parent, to grandparent and so on from yourself back to the first unicellular life forms.

Humans did not evolve from modern apes, but humans and modern apes shared a common ancestor, a species that no longer exists. — National Academy of Sciences: Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences

There are fossils on the summit of Mount Everest. OK, this doesn’t come as a complete surprise, if you know a little bit about geology — specifically plate tectonics. Still pretty interesting. On a related note, my father, a physicist and astronomer who enjoys making calculations about this sort of thing, figured that if, as a surprising number of people assert, the flood in Genesis is the explanation for these fossils, and that the water covering Mt. Everest evaporated and is now part of the atmosphere, the earth’s atmospheric pressure should be about 900 times greater than it actually is.

An average person has ten times more bacteria cells living in their intestines than there are human cells in their body (which contains 10 trillion to 100 trillion human cells).

All living humans are the descendants of a single woman who lived in Africa between 100,00 and 200,000 years ago.

A piece of matter the size of a pea from a neutron star weighs far more than an aircraft carrier.

Roughly 100,000,000 neutrinos — tiny high-energy particles produced by stars — pass through each square centimeter of your body every second. On average, however, only once in a human lifespan there will be a collision between a neutrino and an atom in your body.

It’s so cold on Pluto that when the former planet is in the part of its orbit that is more distant from the sun its atmosphere — probably methane and nitrogen — freezes and falls to the ground.

Most of Earth’s biomass - the weight of all living things on earth - may exist in the form of subterranean bacteria.

Your probability of dying from an asteroid collision with the earth is about the same as that of perishing in a commercial airline accident.

The Andromeda galaxy and our own Milky Way are likely to collide in about three billion years. Not to worry. If you happen to be around to observe the collision, the stars in each galaxy are so spread out that you probably won’t be affected.

Life as we know it would be impossible without supernovae, since elements heavier than iron (many of which are required for life) form only when stars collapse and explode.

It’s likely that the eye has independently evolved at least 40 times throughout the history of life on earth.

Fold sheet of paper on itself 100 times, and the result will be an object thicker than the diameter of the known universe.

If a grain of sand represented all the matter in the universe, it would float in an otherwise empty box 20 miles on a side. (an Isaac Asimov paraphrase)

If a star is a grain of salt, the observable stars (naked eye) will fit into a teaspoon. All the stars in the universe will fill a sphere 8 miles across. — Stephen Hawking, A Briefer history of Time

There are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the sea. There are also, to give another example, more cells in one finger than there are people in the world.
— Lewis Wolpert


I hope there was something here that made you stop, for just a moment, and gaze out that window. The one without “Butcher Shop” written on it.

What’s New for 2009, or “How Weird Is It?”

Trust Kathryn Lasky to be first up with what may end as one of the year’s best— One Beetle Too Many: The Extraordinary Adventures of Charles Darwin. It’s a sumptuous party for He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in certain swaths of the population. The title (which, with a vowel change, could have been One Beatle Too Many: The Story of Pete Best) refers to the famous incident in which young Charles found himself with three rare beetles and only two hands. Showing his dedication early on, he popped one bug in his mouth until he could get to his collecting bottle. The text goes on to shape Darwin into a flesh-and-blood being, and explains the “evolution” of his theories in ways that go down easily. Despite an abrupt ending (without even an author's note to provide more context), this scores points for addressing head-on how evolution fit in with Darwin’s religious beliefs, what creationism is, and the controversy hinted at by Lasky’s dedication: “In celebration of children, whose boundless curiosity gives them a right to know their history on Earth.” Matthew Trueman’s illustrations in mixed-media (the media including weeds and wildflowers) are to drool over (Candlewick, ages 9-12).

Among the millions and billions of Lincoln titles (of which I will have one, Abraham Lincoln Tells a Joke, in 2010), one of the most un-put-down-able is Chasing Lincoln's Killer. James L. Swanson has taken his adult bestseller Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer and refashioned it with verve for young adults. “Chase” is the operative word—this search for John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators moves at a rip-snorting clip, aided by lots of just-what-you'd-want-to-know details and an energetic design in sepia printed on creamy stock (Scholastic, ages 12 and up).

A big “wow” goes to How Weird Is It? A Freaky Book All About Strangeness by Ben Hillman. With alluring chapters like “Fungus Is Family” and photos cleverly Photo-shopped for maximum drama, this looks like a tabloid-y item you might hand to the most reluctant of reluctant readers. Surprise—it’s a science book. A real one, with unsourced but fascinating information about neutron stars, the Big Bang, dark energy, plagues, ghost particles, bizarre animals, what Martians might look us (us), all the latest hot topics in science. For any reader, reluctant or otherwise (Scholastic, ages 8-12).

Finally, we say farewell to 2008 titles (while wondering if the ALA committees will reward any of them come January 26). My apologies to the ones I didn’t get to, like Brenda Z. Guiberson's purely poetic Ice Bears… the dreamy All About Sleep From A to Zzzz by Elaine Scott (drawings by John O'Brien!!)… the truly niche-filling Sing My Song: A Kid's Guide to Songwriting by Steve Seskin... Sandra Markle's innovative Animals Christopher Columbus Saw: An Adventure in the New World…. what else did I miss???

No Rocks in Her Head

In my last blog entry, I asked what nonfiction kids books should be stocked in any self-respecting bookstore. Among the comments from readers (which were disappointingly few, I might add) was Marcia Calhoun Forecki’s suggestion of The School Children’s Blizzard by Marty Rhodes Figley and Shelly O. Haas and Blizzard: The 1888 Whiteout by Jacqueline Ball. Because every self-respecting bookstore should have at least 4 books on the 1888 storm, I added two more on the subject, Blizzard: The Storm that Changed America by Jim Murphy and a picture book by the author I’m writing about today, Terrible Storm by Carol Otis Hurst.

Carol was a friend of mine who, sadly, died two years ago. She was a teacher, professional storyteller, and language-arts consultant who, again sadly, did not start writing kids books until she was 70. She published several worthy novels. But I thought her strongest work was her nonfiction—the delightful Terrible Storm and the extraordinary Rocks in His Head, an ALA Notable and a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor Book.

Both of these books combined everything Carol was good at. She had a wry but hearty sense of humor. She told the best story you ever heard with the right cadence and buildup that took you to a satisfying finish. And she had an amazing sense of place—both in her soul and in her writing.

I’m Jewish. Like most Jewish Americans my age, I had grandparents with accents and a family history that disappears into a genealogical black hole more than three generations back. Do I know what my great-grandfather’s life in the shtetl was like? No. And what were those priceless punchlines I missed when Bubbe made cracks in Yiddish?

Carol’s family wasn’t very fancy, but they had lived in Massachusetts since dirt—and I almost mean that literally. Let’s just say the DAR had nothing on her. Generation after generation living in the same place, knowing the land, knowing the culture and history, knowing each other. There was a lot of porch sitting in New England before TV and videogames so there were a lot of stories told.

Terrible Storm and Rocks in His Head are both grounded in all of this. The first is the story of her two grandfathers, how these very different men thought of and rode out the Blizzard of 1888. Rocks is the story of Carol’s father and what can sometimes happen when a dreamer follows his or heart and passion.

They are fine nonfiction. They are simple portraits of complicated people. They take place in important times of our history, their settings drawn with vivid detail. And they are wry but hearty stories with the right cadence and buildup that takes you to two satisfying ends.

Good Teaching--Bottled and Preserved

I’ve just finished reading Rafe Esquith’s Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire. He teaches fifth grade in Los Angeles at a huge inner city school with remarkable results; his students routinely test in the top 5-10% while the average third-grader in his school tests in the bottom 20%. Rafe claims the difference is simply lots of extra time doing hard work. He and his kids are in his classroom from 6:30 am to dinner time every day, in a year round school, on weekends and during vacations. Everything they do, from performing Shakespeare, to class trips, to life in the classroom, is a teachable moment. Rafe’s students are, for the most part, the children of immigrants and his classroom is their escape route from poverty to the American dream. If all teachers were as dedicated as Rafe Esquith, education in this country wouldn’t be in trouble. If only there were a way to capture his essence, bottle it, bring it up to scale so that it was accessible to all teachers. But unfortunately, according to Rafe, there are no shortcuts. He can impact only about 30 students a year.

Like many other nonfiction authors, I started out as a teacher who wanted to share my enthusiasm for my subject with my students. As a young junior high science teacher, I had 150 students, 5 classes and 3 preparations a day. Teaching was a whirlwind job. There was never any time to stop and think how to present material so that my students would be blown away by the audacity of the ideas and concepts that scientists had labored so long and hard to produce. In fact, stopping and thinking doesn’t seem to be a part of the job description for most active teachers, Rafe Esquith excepted. And that explains why I became a writer.

It is our job to stop and think. We dwell on the big ideas. Just as there are no shortcuts to good teaching, good writing takes insightfulness, craft, knowledge of one’s readers, and above all time. It always amazes me that even when I write in white heat, when the words pour forth effortlessly, cooler reflection the next day shows me how to restate things with more clarity and power. And when words come like blood from a stone, when I’m just going through the motions to get something, anything down, I’m just as amazed upon rereading my efforts the next day to find that my words don’t seem labored.

Communication depends on shared humanity—the single passionate voice—of the dedicated teacher or the accomplished author. Who Rafe Esquith is as a human being is as important as the skills he teaches. Connecting with other people depends on a subtext of human emotion, where it’s clear that the teacher/author cares about both the subject and the student/ reader. No textbook, written by a committee to fulfill specific curriculum objectives will excite students any more than a fearful, limited and repressed personality can inspire a class. In fact, I think textbooks kill two birds with one stone: the desire to read and the desire to learn.

So, my friends, let’s keep up the good work. Our books are the essence of good teaching already bottled and preserved, ready to be consumed.

"Meeting" the Author

School visits are a great way for kids to connect with the authors and illustrators behind their favorite books. Author/illustrator presentations can inspire young writers and artists and enrich the curriculum.

But not every school is able to host book creators on a regular basis. And not all authors and illustrators are able to travel far from home to visit students. What’s the solution? Videos.

Seeing someone on screen isn’t quite as powerful as a live visit, but videos are a great option for schools that lack the time, resources, or funding to bring in authors and illustrators. They’re also a great way for any school to increase their students’ exposure to book creators. And because teachers can watch the video clips in advance, they can easily build lesson plans around the footage.

Inspired by the wonderful videos I saw on TeachingBooks.net, I hatched a plan to create a series of short videos that had a professional look without a professional price tag.

First, I organized a group signing event for seven authors and author-illustrators in my area. All of them had new picture books coming out around the same time as my title When Rain Falls.

On the morning of the event, I arranged for the local cable access channel to film 20-minute interviews with each participant. The interviewer was Sue Burgess, a children’s literature educator who taught at a local college for many years and is a former Regional Coordinator for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

The cable people were happy because they used the interviews and footage from the signing event to create three separate one-hour programs. The authors were happy because they got some great local publicity, and each one received copy of his or her interview to use for promotional purposes.

Working with the clever folks at Winding Oak, who designed and maintain my website, I isolated about 6 minutes of the interview and converted the footage into three short segments and posted them on my website in a sort of jukebox format. The segments answer the questions students and teachers ask me most frequently.

I’m very pleased with the result. What do you think?

Twelfth Night

For most people, the holidays have staggered off into storage until next Christmas.  However, may I remind you that today, January 5, is actually Twelfth Night?  The twelve days of Christmas (so tediously!) recounted each December conclude today with the twelve drummers drumming in the feast of the Epiphany with a loud bang.  So don't put away the wrapping paper yet, folks, it's Three Kings Day!  

I have selected three books for the occasion:  

1. Shakespeare's Globe: An Interactive Pop-up Theatre, published by Candlewick.  Okay, it's not so much a book, but it is book-like.  For those who wish to carry the "Twelfth Night" theme in dramatic fashion.

2. Three Kings Day: A Celebration at Christmastime by Diane Hoyt-Goldsmith and Lawrence Migdale, for those who want to note the day in an ecclesiastical fashion.

and lastly

3. Martin's Big Words, by Doreen Rappaport, illustrated by Bryan Collier, for those who want to celebrate the whole month, and not just today!  

 

Children's Nonfiction Book Lists

The last day of the year seems like a good time for lists. So I hope you will join me by posting lists of recommended nonfiction books.

Great nonfiction lists also make me think of the wonderful Coleen Salley, who passed away this year. She and Terry Young were among the first and most dedicated advocates of read aloud nonfiction. Coleen Salley was a great light in children's literature. Her joy was infectious and she had a gusto for life and literature that connected people in many parts of the children's book community. We just loved her in all her glory. Look up her name and "blog posts" and you will find a slew of great memories of her. Here's one that expresses her spirit, on Planet Esme.

Below is a link to some of those read aloud nonfiction lists Coleen and Terry compiled. I hope Terry will keep doing that work. He knows the field of science literature like no one else. He and Coleen put on some terrific "introducing science through literature" workshops at state and national conferences. Be sure to click the links on Coleen's site to find out more about her life and her books.

http://www.coleensalley.com/articles.htm

Below are some nonfiction-specific awards. Lists of their current and past winners can give anyone a great start on reading.

Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal
(Also check ALA's other awards for nonfiction as nonfiction is doing well in many categories these days!)
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/sibertmedal/index.cfm

John Burroughs Award List of Nature Books for Young Readers
http://research.amnh.org/burroughs/young_readers_list.html

AAAS/Subaru/Science Books & Films Prizes for Best Science Books
http://www.sbfonline.com/prizes.htm

Horn Book List of Recommended Books
This divides nonfiction in the to following topics:
• American History and Biography
 • Astronomy, Chemistry, and Physics 
 • Human Body 
 • International History (includes some fiction)
 • Plants, Animals, and the Natural World
 • Prehistoric Life
http://www.hbook.com/resources/books/default.asp

I am sure there are many more lists that I have forgotten this morning. So feel free to speak up and add them.

Happy New Year to all!
April Pulley Sayre
http://www.aprilsayre.com/

Books I Gave for Christmas and Hanukkah

This year, as every year, I gave lots of books for holiday presents. I did buy other stuff too, but few people escaped without at least one book. This year, I’ve noticed that my list includes nearly all nonfiction, for children and adults.

My two- and five-year-old adorable great-nephews got a delicious new book, Jewish Holidays Cookbook: 50 festive meals for celebrating the year (DK Publishing) by Jill Bloomfield. This has the old standards as well as some new dishes, along with dollops of Jewish history. The book has lots of pictures and a handy spiral binding. (It reminds me of the old UNICEF children’s cookbook that was well spilled-upon by my children.)

My niece’s younger boy also got Susan Goldman Rubin’s beautiful art-board books, Counting with Wayne Thiebaud and Matisse: Dance for Joy (Chronicle.) These combine spare poetic text with gorgeous design and, of course, exquisite artwork. I gave the older boy a subscription to Ask magazine that delivers all sorts of nonfiction goodies with photos, drawings, and comic strips. The younger one got Ladybug, which mixes fiction and nonfiction.



Their parents, my niece and her husband, received two new books, I Love Dirt! 52 activities to help you and your kids discover the wonders of nature by Jennifer Ward, and The Creative Family by Amanda Blake Soule, full of indoor and outdoor arts, crafts, explorations, and family rituals. Both are from Trumpeter/Shambala.

My son, a Montanan and superb cook, got Montana Cooking: A Taste of the Big Sky Country (Glove Pequot/Three Fork) by Greg Patten, gourmet chef, and husband of INK guest blogger Dorothy Hinshaw Patent. Elk steak and huckleberry muffins, anyone? One more cookbook (and wine guide) made its way to Canada to my brother-in-law, another superb cook: Anything but Chardonnay: a guide to the other grapes (Stewart, Tabori, and Chang) by Laura Holmes Haddad.

My daughter, a Londoner, got a new book from the UK, written by a friend of mine: More Than Just A Game: Football v Apartheid (HarperCollins UK) by Chuck Korr and Marvin Close. This tells the thrilling story of a soccer league established by political prisoners at the notorious Robben Island prison in South Africa. I hope HC brings out a U.S. edition soon. Marvin tells me they are considering writing a YA version, though any soccer and/or politico teen could handle the adult book. Derelict London (Random House UK) by Paul Talling provides a funky alternative tourist guide to London history and architecture for the whole family – including me, in London as you read this.

My writer’s group exchanges already-read books at our December meeting. This year I offered the classic and classy Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss – not my own copy which I refuse to relinquish, but a copy bought at my library’s book sale. There’s a children’s version meant for younger readers.

Regular shipments of library sale books cross the country during the year for my 97-year-old mother in law, an intrepid reader. She, the dedicatee of my biography of Jeannette Rankin, loves women’s history and so received not-so-current biographies of Abigail Adams and the wives of Henry VIII, along with a last-minute fictional find, Restoration, a delectable novel of 17th century England by Rose Tremain.

It says something about our times – or perhaps just my family – that men (and boys) got the cookbooks and women got history and sports. As for me, I read them all.

Happy New Year to nonfiction lovers everywhere!

How Much Is 700 Billion?

After How Much Is a Million?, my book about big numbers, appeared in 1985, I quickly discovered what everyone really wanted to know: “How much is a million dollars?” It gave me the idea for my second book, If You Made a Million.

Now everyone is thinking about the federal bailout of 700 billion dollars, aka $700,000,000,000 – with an extra 30 billion thrown in, or not, for good measure. So, how much is 700 billion dollars?

Let’s start by counting the way the characters count in On Beyond a Million (yet another book I wrote with “million” in the title). In that book, the characters count not by ones the whole way (or they’d never get beyond a million) but by ones to ten, by tens to a hundred, by hundreds to a thousand, and so on. Mathematicians would say they are counting by “powers of ten,” but in the book I call it “Power Counting.” Let’s just quickly “power-count” our way from one to one million:

1 (one)

10 (ten)
100 (one hundred)
1,000 (one thousand)
10,000 (ten thousand)
100,000 (one hundred thousand)

1,000,000 (one million)

Did you notice that one million is three steps of power-counting past one thousand? Each step multiplies by 10, so one million is three of those, or 10 X 10 X 10, or one thousand times bigger than one thousand. One million is one thousand thousand. Let’s go on:

10,000,000 (ten million)
100,000,000 (one hundred million)
1,000,000,000 (one billion)

One billion is three steps past one million, or one thousand times one million. Just as one million is a thousand thousand, one billion is a thousand million. (In some countries, including Great Britain, they call it “one thousand million” instead of a “billion.”) Let’s do one more round:

10,000,000,000 (ten billion)
100,000,000,000 (one hundred billion)
1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion)

One trillion is one thousand billion. Did you notice one hundred billion in bold? We’re going back to it. Take seven of those and what have you got? Seven hundred billion. In dollars, it’s the bail-out. One heck of a lot of money. Oh, we could figure out how high 700 billion kids or 700 billion one-dollar bills would stack if we were inclined to stack them, or how many homes it could build or heat, and so forth. . . but let’s not. Instead, let’s try to understand the magnitude of this giant pot of cash by taking a step back from big money to very small money: one cent.

Would you rather have a penny that gets doubled every day for a month (let’s say a 30 day month)… or would you rather have a million dollars in cash today, but not another cent for the rest of the month? Maybe you’ve heard this one before but no matter. I’ve told it dozens of times, and it still amazes me that doubling the pennies gives a pay-off of over $5 million in pennies on the 30th day (not to mention all the pennies accumulated from the other days)! Don’t just believe me -- do the math. It’s not hard, especially if you round off along the way.

So, when you put one cent through 29 rounds of doubling it gets really big, really fast. That’s the power of doubling. (There have been some fine picture books based on this mathematical principle, including One Grain of Rice and The King’s Chessboard.) But what happens every step of the way when we put a zero after a number, when we “power count”? We aren’t doubling; we’re multiplying by ten. I don’t know of any verb for that, so I have invented one: decktuple. (Please use it widely.) If you thought doubling was powerful, think of decktupling – power to the max!

My favorite way to see the difference between big numbers and appreciate their magnitude is to think of seconds. One million seconds is about eleven and a half days. One billion seconds is -- take a guess before you read on – about 32 years. And one trillion seconds is about 32,000 years. So the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion is like the difference between 11.5 days, 32 years and 32,000 years! I like to say that I have a pretty good idea of what I’ll be doing a million seconds from now. . . I have no idea of what I’ll be doing a billion seconds from now. . . but I have an excellent idea of what I will be doing a trillion seconds from now.

And what about 700 billion? That’s seven-tenths, or 70%, of the way to a trillion. In seconds it would be 22,400 years. I am writing this on December 28, 2008 at about 9pm. If instead of dollars we talked about seconds and I started clocking them right now, I would get to a million on Jan. 9th at about 9am . . . I would get to a billion early in the year 2040 . . . and I (or someone, I hope) would get to 700 billion in the year 24000 (not 2400 but 24000!), give or take a few hundred years.

Does this help explain the size of the bailout. Or does it just boggle your mind? Both are good.

I.N.K. blog on Holiday

The I.N.K. blog will be on vacation from December 22nd to December 26th and January 1st-2nd.

New posts Dec. 29th-Dec.31st!

We'll be spiffing up our sidebars and hoping to look nice and pretty when we see you again on a regular basis in 2009.

Nonfiction Report from the Field

Well, finally back home after a busy fall of school and conference visits. Though these visits are tiring, nothing beats talking to kids about science and books in person. It also gives a great on-the-ground feel for what kids are interested in. To wit, I’ve never seen greater kid interest in nonfiction. Science, biography, sports, history—kids are gobbling it all up, a fact confirmed by almost every librarian I talk to. That doesn’t mean that their parents are buying nonfiction books, but it’s nice to know they are at least flying off of library shelves.

Environmental literature especially seems to be in great demand these days. Recently, I’ve had several librarians ask me to write books about global warming, for instance. I probably won’t, since there are some excellent books already out by Laurence Pringle, Lynne Cherry, and others. But I am glad people are at last realizing what dire straits the planet is in.

My last gig of the fall, in fact, was a panel on environmental literature at the NCTE convention in San Antonio. Since I write both nonfiction and fiction, I thought I would compare the two. Thinking about it, I realized that nonfiction and fiction can complement each other in wonderful ways. While nonfiction might be better at educating a person about how the environment works or is being damaged, fiction has a greater potential to reach a reader’s emotions—and perhaps spur action.

A wonderful award that honors both nonfiction and fiction environmental literature is the Green Earth Book Award, given by the Newton-Marasco Foundation:
http://www.newtonmarascofoundation.org/programs/a_ge.cfm
Looking at their list of past winners is a great starting point for becoming familiar with the best environmental literature of recent years. And with that…back to work.

Have a great, low-emissions holidays!

Sneed