So when I was a young child, I was a science kid. I really loved science and nature, and I really traced that back to my parents and the way that I was raised. We grew up on a 10-acre plot and my father was always taking us for walks in the woods. And one day he took me to a place where we had never been before and he said, do you notice anything unusual about this area of the forest? And I wasn’t sure. My brother wasn’t sure, but then I said, all the trees are kind of small. And he said, that’s exactly right. It’s because there was a forest fire here about 25 years ago, and now the forest is beginning to regenerate itself. And that was really a critical, magical moment in my life, kind of an aha moment because I realized number one, that nature is so powerful that it can regenerate itself, but also that you can read the history of a natural area just by looking around.
And that’s what turned me on to all the topics that I write about now. But it wasn’t later actually until I was in college that I started to think about writing as a job. I was a biology major and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do afterwards, but I had a teacher, a professor who came to me with an article in Discover Magazine, and it was about a topic that I was doing a research project on, and she said, you could have written this article, I think you’re a really good writer and maybe that’s the job for you. And again, it was sort of an aha moment because she saw a talent in me that I didn’t even know I had, and she pointed it out. And that really led me on the path. I ended up going and getting a master’s degree in science journalism afterward, and I started editing science textbooks and then I turned into an editor of the kinds of textbooks or kind of books that I now write, and then eventually I started writing them as well. So it was a bit of an unusual path, but I’m lucky that I started writing for children when I was pretty young. A lot of children’s writers don’t really begin until they have children of their own. So I’ve been able to make this a lifelong career.
