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Rhode Island Author Expo Spotlight – Kimberly Kowal Arcand #riauthors

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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.

Rhode Island Author Expo Spotlight – Deborah Halliday #riauthors

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Rhode Island Author Expo Spotlight – Deborah Halliday

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

Oh, to be a writer!

I belong to an authors’ group, and I love it. There I am, surrounded by creative people talking about their latest book or short story, and it is fun. Many of my fellow authors mistake me for a writer, which makes sense since it is an authors’ group, but a writer I am not, at least not of the fiction or poetry variety. When it comes to creativity in writing I remain awestruck and stumped as to where my fellow authors get all of those great ideas. No, I am an appreciative audience member. I admire the perfect turn of phrase, the well-chosen word (if it is almost obsolete I love it even more) and the plot twists I can’t see coming. I have also discovered, in my later years, that I enjoy poetry. Maybe it’s only now that I’ve allowed myself to slow down enough to read it, and allowed myself to read it out loud without fear of seeming foolish.

Because I admire creativity so much, and because I’m a bit of a pack-rat in general, I felt a need to preserve literature from the past that could otherwise be lost and forgotten. I became an anthologist, a poetry rescuer. I get a real thrill from turning a century-and-a-half old page in a deteriorating book, seeing a poem that makes me go “oooh,” and thinking I might be the first person in over a hundred years to have read it. I call it being a literary archeologist. I dig up lost things, things that tell us about a culture of not so long ago. Who were these authors? How were they like us? How were they different? Can they express emotions in a way that resonates with us? As a pack-rat who loves to bring order from chaos and find beauty in the overlooked, what more could I ask for than to discover and preserve old poetry.

When I go to book events where I’m selling my anthologies, I have a small plastic box with snippets of poetry in it. I call it “pick-a-poem,” and I invite passers-by to choose one – like choosing a fortune cookie. Often people will shake their heads and say “Oh, I don’t really like poetry.” But then they take one, and as they walk away reading, more often than not a smile will slowly spread across their face, and they will turn to me and say “thank you. You have no idea how much that fits.” And they’ll pocket their snippet for safekeeping. So while I don’t write poetry myself, I do feel that I’m helping to give a gift not only to authors long dead, but to people today; especially to those who maybe thought they didn’t like poetry.

Deborah L. Halliday curates and anthologizes poetry from Godey’s Lady’s Books, one of the most popular magazines of the nineteenth century. Her books can be found at on-line retailers with a search for “Godey’s poetry.”  Discover her on Facebook here.