Rhode Island Author Expo Spotlight – Becky MacDonell-Yilmaz

This post was originally posted on Martha Reynold’s blog and has been reposted here with author permission, minor revisions have been made.

I wasn’t quite sure how to dress up for my fourth-grade Career Day. I had borrowed multiple books from my elementary school’s library in an attempt to research exactly how one goes about becoming an author, but most of the information I uncovered related to finding work as a freelance writer and lacked the step-by-step instructions and list of appropriate tools and attire that I had hoped to find. So I settled on an outfit that made me happy: my favorite pink shirt, a pair of comfortable pants, and my white Keds, with a cloth-covered journal – one of several from my collection – and pen my only real props.

Years later, after drastically altering my career path and enrolling in medical school, it was that same principle, doing what made me happy, that brought me back to writing. As fascinated as I was by my studies in anatomy and physiology, by the end of my first year I full of facts but empty as a person. When I learned of an opportunity to incorporate an independent writing project into my medical curriculum, I felt a surge of excitement, which was quickly washed away by abiding apprehension. I waited until the night before the deadline to submit my application. In truth, I spent half of that night trying to convince myself that I might actually have something to say.

When I was accepted to the program and awarded a fellowship to help support my efforts, words began to flow from my fingers into my journal, onto my laptop, onto any scrap of paper within my reach. What I had dismissed during my pre-medical studies as a childhood hobby suddenly emerged as an integral ingredient in my efforts to survive medical school and eventually to thrive as a physician. I filled the blank pages of journals that had sat on my bedroom shelves for so long, untouched yet unable to be parted with. And I finally recalled the sentiment that had first sparked my interest in medicine: the desire to understand, to bear witness to, and to offer a hand to hold throughout patients’ stories as they unfold.

Becky MacDonell-Yilmaz earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Public Health from Dartmouth College and her Doctor of Medicine from Stony Brook University School of Medicine. She completed a residency in pediatrics at Brown University/Hasbro Children’s Hospital. Her work has been published in Pediatrics, Annals of Internal Medicine, The New Physician, The Writers Circle, and Paumanok II, an anthology of poetry and photography by Long Islanders. Her first chapbook of poetry, Tools for Survival, was published in 2015 by Finishing Line Press. You can explore more of her writing at  The Growth Curve: ruminations of a pediatrician in training. She lives in Providence, RI, with her husband and son.

Rhode Island Author Expo Spotlight – Kimberly Kowal Arcand

This post was originally posted on Martha Reynold’s blog and has been reposted here with author permission, minor revisions have been made.

At seven years old, I proudly announced to my parents that I was going to be an astronaut when I grew up. Even though they could not drag me on an amusement park ride more adventurous than a bumper car, my parents apparently thought it best not to discourage me. I had one of those little white plastic Space Shuttle models with a working cargo bay, and I would fly it around my room and make up pretend missions with pink and blue Care Bears serving as the crew.

Alas, it was not the career for me. Neither was being a doctor, which came later (I realized I didn’t like needles), nor a veterinarian (this was quickly squashed by a stint volunteering in an animal hospital). I knew that I wanted to do something in science — I just wasn’t sure what form it would take.

Fast forward a few decades and you find me happily working for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, a mission that studies the high-energy phenomena of the Universe such as exploding stars, black holes, and colliding galaxies. My feet are planted firmly on the ground, but as Visualization Lead for Chandra, I get to use data to tell exciting stories about objects that are far, far away. These stories can be in the form of a tweet about distant colliding galaxies to a 3D-printed model of an exploded star in our Milky Way (http://3d.si.edu/explorer?modelid=45) and lots of things in between.

Beyond my day job using data to tell stories of the high-energy Universe, I found a path to telling stories in writing science books. I have always enjoyed reading and writing, since I was young enough to understand the words. I fondly recall a mythology-writing exercise in my 6th grade English class, where I used leftover silver brocade wallpaper to cover the cardboard binding of my original story — complete with painstakingly hand-colored illustrations — about where rain came from.

Today, I am happy that the binding techniques of my current books are a bit more sophisticated, and the visuals I curate come from artists, photographers and scientists around the world.

In essence, the storytelling truly matters. Science can be complex, so how the story is told is incredibly important. For me, coming up with the best visuals, metaphors, tone of the book is a key part to making scientific topics accessible. I love the process of figuring out all the details to create a book that can be entertaining as well as informative.

Kimberly Kowal Arcand is the co-author of three popular science books including the new release “Light: The Visible Spectrum and Beyond” with Megan Watzke, published by Black Dog & Leventhal/Hachette Book Group.  Find the book on Amazon or visit her website  here.