If you pick up a copy, this is what you’ll find on the inside jacket: Red wolves are shy, elusive, misunderstood predators. Until the 1800s, they were common in the longleaf pine savannas and deciduous forests of the southeastern United States. But red wolves were nearly annihilated by habitat degradation, persecution, and interbreeding with the coyote. Today, reintroduced red wolves are found only on peninsular northeastern North Carolina within less than one percent of their former historic range. In The Secret World of Red Wolves, nature writer T. DeLene Beeland shadows the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s pioneering program over the course of a year to craft an intimate portrait of the red wolf, its natural history, and its restoration. Her engaging portrait of this top-level predator traces the intense effort of conservation personnel to restore a species that has slipped to the verge of extinction. Beeland weaves together the voices of scientists, conservationists, and local landowners while posing larger questions about human coexistence with red wolves, our understanding of what defines this animal as a distinct species and how climate change may swamp the only place it is currently found in the wild.

This book was a journey in every sense of the word: physically, emotionally, and intellectually. The idea for a tome on red wolves was born at the intersection of my curiousity about native southeastern animals, my love for wild predators, and the plain fact that there was a gaping hole in the literature which was simply waiting to be filled . . . and the gravitational pull of that hole kept drawing me further and further in. (That may be the only good reason to ever write a book; if you absolutely can’t live with yourself otherwise!)

I wrote this book specifically for lay people — people who, like me, love wildlife and mammals in particular, and who want to know more about native species. People who are interested in why it is that some animals become endangered, what’s being done to help them, and what kinds of challenges conservation programs face. Although this book incorporates a great deal of research on red wolves, readers needn’t be wildlife specialists or biologists to understand the information discussed. They need only possess a good dose of curiosity and a hunger to learn.

To read a brief chapter excerpt, please visit my book website; or visit the book’s page at the University of North Carolina Press for more information.

You can order copies through your favorite your local bookstore (please support local stores as much as possible!), Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, or through UNC Press.

Cover of The Mindful Carnivore

Twenty-three years ago, I ceased eating meat. Over time, I’ve gone through incarnations of eating seafood and not eating seafood (currently it’s on the menu); but I freely admit that I’ve never given as much thought to the why of my pisco-lacto-vegetarianism as has the gifted writer, (and thoughtful eater), Tovar Cerulli.

In The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance (Pegasus Books, 2012), Cerulli beautifully chronicles his philosophical approach to eating and living. The book follows his journey from eschewing not only flesh but all animal products—such as milk and honey—to becoming, improbably, a hunter of deer in New England’s woods.

Rest assured, his journey is far from a navel-gazing or vain adventure. In his writing, Cerulli interweaves literary influences and meditations that span from Buddhism to animal-rights ethics to farming to hunting. It’s an approach that augments the threads of his personal life narrative with a broader connection to the link between the ethics of how animals (both wild and domestic) are treated in our normal channels of food production—even the organic farming of vegetables.

The vast array of sources Cerulli draws upon reveal his deep interest in pursuing “mindful” eating, and exposes his driving mission to seek out the “right” way to live. I interpreted this “right path,” in his view, to be one of minimal impact to the natural world, but also one that yields a healthy diet and a deep personal connection to food and how it is produced.

One of the things I most appreciated about Cerulli’s book is the honesty he demonstrates in anecdote after anecdote when explaining how his thoughts and attitudes toward food, and animals in particular, have changed over time. In the beginning he shares cherished memories of fishing as a child, and of eating his catch. We learn of his attempts later in life when he is vegan to create and maintain a vegetable garden with his wife, and the moral dilemma posed by raiding groundhogs, deer and even squash beetles. After coming to terms with the fact that animals are routinely killed for the production of his local organic vegetables from a co-op (the farmer he bought from shot deer and bombed out groundhog burrows), Cerulli decides that if animals had to die to produce his food, he might as well take part in eating them to reduce waste.

One of the best parts of the book is when Cerulli confronts his inner struggle over hunting. This one line is so brutally honest that it caught my breath: “My problem wasn’t with hunting. It was with hunters.” He then dissects various attitudes toward the act of taking an animal’s life, from those who view it as a reverent spiritual act, to those who do it for sustenance, to those who treat it carelessly and kill mainly for the trophy of a stuffed carcass. He concludes that he approves of hunting when it was down with respect and mindfulness, with reverence of the life being taken, and with the purpose of sustenance.

After conversing with an uncle Cerulli respects who is also an accomplished hunter, Cerulli takes a firearm safety course, learns to track and stalk deer, and then spends many hours sitting quietly in various woods waiting for a deer to wander by. What happens when he finally sees a deer? Will he pull the trigger? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

Cerulli is a gifted storyteller. While his anecdotes of fishing, gardening and hunting could easily become mundane events, with Cerulli’s voice they become infused with discovery, wonder, and an abiding appreciation for nature and life. With every anecdote he shares, with every literary reference he explores, the reader joins him on his path to seek a way of living and eating that minimizes harm and suffering to living things. It’s a path fraught with hard choices and imbued for various shades of morality.

Odd Couples, book cover

Since becoming a first-time mum last summer, I’ve become painfully more aware of the sexually-based differences between myself and my husband as we navigate the new-to-us territory of parenthood. (How can men listen to a baby wail for so long without doing anything?! And why do I feel I traded my career for motherhood, while his career is taking off and he gets to be an awesome dad?!) Yet, no matter how baffling these differences feel to me, they are negligible compared to the ones explored in Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences Between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Odd Couples is a refreshingly informative and passionate jaunt through the extreme differences found in the sexes of eight different animal species. Evolutionary biologist Daphne Fairbairn infuses her rigorously researched text with elegant and poised language, a pervasive sense of insatiable curiosity, first-hand experiential scenes and learned suppositions. The result is a feeling of listening, enthralled, to the best lecturer in far-and-away the best college biology course you ever experienced.

Fairbairn begins the book with a standard introduction revealing biographical information which exemplifies her expertise in evolutionary biology. She shares that the roots of her questions about sexual differences stretches back to her early-career field studies on wild deer mice. The main questions her book explores are “why sexual differences are such a pervasive and significant part of the fabric of animal variation and, in particular, why males and females have come to differ to truly extraordinary degrees in some animal lineages.”  

The author then explains why she chose the eight particular species profiled in the book: elephant seals, great bustards, shell-carrying cichlids, yellow garden spiders, blanket octopuses, giant seadevils, bone-eating worms, and shell-burrowing barnacles. Her choices span vertebrates and invertebrates; mammals, birds, fishes, mollusks, and worms; terrestrial and aquatic species. They span examples where males defend large harems of females which are closely aggregated in space for a short time of each year;  but also species where males must search out sparsely distributed and rare females; species where males weigh seven to eight times more than females, and species where females  are 40,000 times heavier than their dwarf male counterparts; even species where males appear to have been reduced to nothing more than sperm-producing parasites!

What makes this book work is that Fairbairn is never overbearing with her extensive encyclopedic knowledge. Rather, she skillfully dispenses it with such enthusiasm that the reader is infected with her curiosity to know why and how such extreme differences between sexes of the same species came to be.

My favorite chapter was the one on elephant seals. Fairbairn began by recounting a chance personal observance of a rookery during mating season. The sense of awe and wonder that she conveyed in this scene set the tone for the entire book, where she deftly examines the life cycles of each sex of species, foraging and reproductive strategies of the adults as well as  brooding strategies and dispersal of the young.

Odd Couples includes a glossary, seventeen color illustrations, numerous tables and figures and a concluding chapter summarizing the diversity of sexual selection. This is a book that professional biologists will find to be a valuable reference, while lay readers will find it to be a densely informative but highly engaging read. While at times the reading may be a little technical for a lay reader, Faribairn manages to fill her book with the perfect doses of knowledge and passion. Her love for the subject matter kept me turning the pages, all the way to the last.

Frankenstein’s Cat, by Emily Anthes

When I picked up a copy of Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts by Emily Anthes, I can honestly say I harbored few expectations—because I know exactly zilch about biotech. It’s one of those phrases I hear and think, “Ooooh, bio….” then the “tech” part crashes in my ear and my flicker of interest withers. But Anthes’ tour of how humans are modifying both domesticated and wild animals’ bodies hooked me from the starting gate.

Frankenstein’s Cat is written in an entirely accessible manner. It’s sometimes whimsical, sometimes humorous, deepy informing—and always understandable. Anthes’ love of alliteration is sprinkled throughout the text with cheeky phrases such as “creature copies, cloned kittens, feathered fowl, and robo rats.” She clearly explains scientific and technical processes while also probing what biotech experiments and applications mean in philosophical, moral, ethical and ecological frameworks.

Near the beginning, Anthes refers to a book called The Frankenstein Syndrome, in which the author posits that not all genetic engineering harms animals. I can only assume her own book’s title is loosely pulled from this idea. Though this review on Forbes.com offers an alternative explanation, that it’s a reference to a previous work of the same title.

Anthes explores using genetic engineering for seemingly harmless and frivolous applications, such as creating glow-in-the-dark fish whose luminescent chroma exist thanks to splicing jellyfish genes into zebrafish; and the use of biotech for things like inserting fake gonads into recently neutered dogs to make them (or their owners) feel less traumatized. But she also contemplates more productive applications of biotech, such as the genetic manipulation of goats to produce lysozyme, a component of human breast milk which has anti-diarrheal compounds; and the use of orthapedic prostheses to aid injured wildlife and pets with both “slip on” types as well as ones that are surgically implanted and fully integrated with the animal’s skeleton and tissues. She also delves into the use of remote-controlled insects as military robo-voyeuristic spies, as well as educational applications that use robo-cockroaches to bring neuroscience into any classroom or home in the world.

Anthes tackles thorny issues such as applications where livestock producers might one day be able to clone their best sheep or steer, and also explores the emotional expectations and practicalities of cloning a family pet so that Mittens can “live” on forever.

She manages to strike the appropriate notes of curiosity, awe, and skepticism exactly where they ought to be. She also doesn’t shy away from perplexing and complicated questions. I was taken with the honesty in which she communicated her own coming to terms with stances on certain biotech issues.

Anthes doesn’t push the reader to adopt her philosophies; rather, she lays bare in page-after-page a thoughtful consideration of each case-by-case scenario. She deconstructs each biotechnology application and its potential to help people or animals, and the potential for physical or emotional trauma or benefit to the animals and species involved. By asking so many questions about how biotech is used, and to what end, Anthes walks the reader through the right set of questions but ultimately leaves it up to them to decide where they stand.

Not far down the road from my home in Asheville is a shortcut through a sparse tree line that edges Bull Mountain Road. The humble dirt trail is a bit like the magical armoire in Narnia—when I pass through it I’m transported to a different world, the otherness of the Blue Ridge Parkway’s rolling black pavement, which snakes through the Appalachian mountains. I pick it up is southwest of Mt. Mitchell, elevation 6,683 feet, and the highest point in the East.

Five summers ago, my husband and I rode the entire Blue Ridge Parkway from north to south, all 469 miles in five days. We rode for three days, took a rest day in Asheville, and then finished in Cherokee two days later. I found the descent into Asheville thrilling — the road kept unfurling down, down, down. We lost elevation by the minute. I had no idea, then, that I would one day live a few minutes from that same stretch of parkway, and that I would be blessed enough to be able to ride it everyday of the week, if I so wished.

But that’s just what happened, and after we moved to western N.C. in January of 2011, I fell into the habit  of rolling my bike out the back door by eight a.m., then winding through a series of streets for a mile and a half to the end of Bull Mountain Road where the twenty-foot-long dirt trail lies off the shoulder. The trail pops me out near mile-marker 382, which is fondly associated in these parts with the Folk Arts Center and Big Boy, an amiable, often-seen local black bear. As the skinny tires of my Orbea road bike pinball through the obstacle course of roots, I peer through the trees both ways for cars and then dart out onto the parkway. I turn north and begin to climb up to Craven Gap, then past Bull Gap, through the unlit Tanbark Ridge tunnel (forever uneasy for passing cars), past the Bull Creek overlook and up to the Lane Pinnacle overlook.

Lane Pinnacle overlook is only ten miles on the parkway, but it’s ten miles of sheer climbing out of the Haw Creek Valley. It usually takes close to an hour to ascend from my home (elevation 2300 feet) to the overlook (elevation 3850 feet). My mind knows it’s not much of a vertical gain, on weekends my husband and I would sometimes do rides that rack up 5,000 cumulative feet of climbing, but riding the parkway every day, my muscles tell me otherwise. Spinning up to Lane Pinnacle, and then careening back down, quickly became an almost a daily excursion.

The short-cut through the tree line enables me to visit the Blue Ridge Mountains daily; and it grants me entry to witness the Blue Ridge Mountains in their many  and varied moods.

When my husband and I first arrived to Asheville, the daily highs rarely reached more than the mid-30s. The parkway was closed to cars and we would wander all over the black pavement without a care in the world, except for keeping a vigilant eye out for  black ice masquerading as road. Our first few exploratory rides took us north up to Craven Gap, where I noticed that passing even higher brought us above a predictable cline where it was noticeably cooler. The elevation there is above 3,500 feet and it seemed to coincide with some sort of upper limit above which my winter cycling gear was feeble and permeable. Snow coated the parkway ditches and crept like air-brushed frosting onto the road.

By the time we climbed up to the Tanbark Ridge tunnel mouth, my fingers were frozen claws clutching my handlebars through wind-battered neoprene gloves. I was aware of every stitch in the gloves, for cold air seeped through them. Cold air bit through Lycra into my thighs too. Descending from the tunnel was the worst. Tears were pulled from eyes and whipped off my face. Even pedaling, I froze. I learned that parts of the parkway were inhospitable in winter. Humans were not necessarily supposed to be visiting here in bike tights. The mountains, it seemed, scoffed at my cold weather gear, labeled by clever marketers as “wind proof.”

One day in early February we decided to see how far we could climb north. At the mouth of the Tanbark Ridge tunnel, I got my first taste of how fast black ice can wrestle you from your saddle. In a snap, I was on the ground, my hip smashed into the thin layer of invisible frozen water. We walked our bikes gingerly across the ice- and snow-covered patch to where it dissipated at the tunnel’s mouth and then rode in silence through the ghostly cold artery shooting beneath Tanbark ridge until we emerged on the other side. Within 200 yards, the parkway showed us its wintry wardrobe: a river of ice  snaked down from a curve between two rock clefts and claimed the road. Frozen rivulets raked across the pavement, daring us to pass. There was no point, unless we wished to continue on foot, and I think we’d have needed crampons to do even that. We turned around.

Riding the parkway in winter had its hardships for sure, the ice and snow and cold being a few. But it also had its plusses. The absence of cars allowed my eye to wander over the views, soaking in the repetitive ridge lines stretching out and out and out. The views were mind boggling. We saw frost- and snow-tipped peaks smothered in the coniferous skeletons of evergreen pines and firs. The forest was laid bare, the trees like bones, not a deciduous leaf to be found, except the dried-out, tired hangers-on quivering from hornbeam branches.  Snow carpeted the forest floor, and peaked through trees that appeared in summer as a monolithic  swath of variegated green. The mountains seemed to be slumbering, reserved and dormant. Only dark-eyed juncos and squirrels moved. The lack of cars seemed a reminder that this place was not meant to be entered lightly. It harbored an austere beauty.

In spring, willow leaves burst back first, then the cherries and dogwoods bloomed. The river of ice north of the Tanbark Ridge tunnel melted into Bull Creek and we rode with less ice wariness. Next, the maple, elm and hickory leaves flushed in. The trilliums bloomed in carpets on the forest floor, and then rhododendron unfolded furls of pinks, whites and purples. Flame azaleas exploded in fiery bursts of burnt orange and amber red and I finally understood William Bartram’s observation that he mistook these hillsides as consumed in a wildfire, because mountain azaleas used to cloak the slopes.

After the last frost, some time after the dogwoods bloomed, the parkway was opened to cars again.

Last of all, the mountain laurels blossomed. Hard, tiny, pinkish packets of petals uncurled and formed perfect geometric clusters of pale white flowers with dark pink accents slashed deep inside. Riding up the parkway in May, I was shocked to see an entire side of the mountain that I thought I knew, abloom in a fog of white mountain laurels that had previously escaped my notice.

A few weeks later it was full-blown summer, the parkway pavement was hammered by car, truck and RV tires that rolled tirelessly north and south. For the hikers and cyclists like me that used the parkway and its trails throughout the quietude of winter, summer tourists felt like unwelcome relatives who barged in and overstayed their welcome. The cars cruised into infinity, an army-like drone of engines eating up the mountains and the solitude of the forests, oblivious to their intrusive nature.

For the first time since moving to the mountains, I pedaled past roadkill. A nursing groundhog, her teats filled to bursting, found belly-side-up, freshly deceased. Her young scampered away from her body as we approached. Two sad opossums in pools of fresh blood, no doubt returning to their hideaways at dawn, flattened by early morning commuters. A humming bird ravaged and crushed in the northbound lane, his greenish iridescent mermaid-like plumage fluttered from a moosh of meager flesh. A bright auburn red spring salamander smashed flat by a passing tire, too small to leave a blood smear.

In mornings, a fog sometimes rolls over the mountains and settles in the valleys. From my home, I often can”” not see Bear Mountain out the front window, a mere mile away. But I’ still roll my bike out the back door by eight a.m., pinball through the short-cut and start climbing. As I ascend, my tires roll through the fog in turn. The spokes on my wheels churn the moist air, and it’’s hard to see more than a few dozen feet ahead. Then, suddenly, I rise out of the cloud and turning back around I look down upon the Haw Creek Valley, below me now, smothered beneath a  a rippling white surface of moisture, like flounced satin. The creamy white clouds stand out against the forest green backdrop of the valley walls.

Sometimes clear skies greet me when  I emerge from the valley fog, but sometimes there is only a band of clarity before another cloud awaits higher up, cutting off my view of the ridges above me. I’m reminded of a passage, uttered by an old bear  hunter named B.B. Walker who lived on a mountainside in Tuckaleechee Cove, Tennessee on the other side of the Great Smokies from me. Describing his home, he said, “I live betwixt two fogs.”  The lower fog shielded him from the unruly valley towns below his house, and the upper fog was not so thick, he said, as to cut him off from the Almighty.

There are days too when, if I were to anthropomorphize things, the mountains are in a cheery mood. The sunlight drifts down on them from bright, clear, Carolina blue skies and the eastern towhees and wood thrushes sing exuberantly from the forest’s edge. When I climb high enough to have passed through some of the ridges and rocky crenulations, the bird songs ricochet off rock faces and within the drainage walls, resulting in an almost cathedral-like acoustic quality that amplifies and accentuates their calls.

The rock faces also ricochet the steady whir of my gears, and sometimes they trick me into picking up the pace, convinced a phantom rider has caught my wheel and is drafting off me as I climb.

When the fullness of summer strolls into autumn, the “leaf peepers” arrive en masse. The road becomes so packed with vehicles, that I almost don’t want to ride it. But I do. The photographers, too, can”t keep away. Sourwood trees lining the parkway erupt in the deepest shades of fuchsia, and sugar maples turn from red to green seemingly overnight. Sometimes I spot she-bears with their cubs, gobbling up fallen acorns beneath oak trees, trying to pack on a few more pounds before the cold comes. Although sometimes I’m too tired to roll out of bed and ride, I remind myself that there aren’t many warm days left, and that I should enjoy them while they linger.

When fall dissolves into winter’s grip, and I roll my bike out the back door by eight a.m., I’m surprised once more at how the loss of a forest full of leaves can alter a view so dramatically. I can gaze farther into the deep woods from the parkway, and I’ve learned to recognize the rhododendron and mountain laurel without their blooms. Rocks that glistened warmly with a sheen of water seeping over their face in the summer have now frozen. Ice sheets and icicles glint from their faces.

In many ways, when I’m going about my daily life, Asheville still doesn’t feel like my home. I’m a newcomer. An over-stayed visitor. A Floridian transplanted too far inland. But when I ride this section of parkway near town, this section I’ve come to know so well, the woods and mountains seem to speak to me. Sometimes I fancy they are encouraging me to stay a little longer, to ride a little further, and to wait, wait for the next season.

One of my favorite narrative books: Monster of God, by David Quammen. And look who signed it!

Narrative writing is as hard to define as porn: you know it when you see it. (Or in this case, read it.) I was lucky enough to co-moderate a session at ScienceOnline2013 with the amazing David Dobbs, a veteran writer and author, and a talented public speaker. The session grew out of last year’s ScienceOnline when I noticed people using the term “narrative” at several different discussions, but they used it in different ways. Some people referred to short news articles as narratives (can narratives really be a few hundred words?), while others used “story” and “narrative” almost interchangeably (what differentiates them?), and others treated the term “narrative” like tofu: letting it soak up whatever flavor of meaning they wanted it to.

David and I offered a working definition of sorts for the session, in which we defined narratives as an account of connected events. I think he got this straight out of the dictionary. But I liked it because it was simple and concise and broad enough to encompass many different things. A while ago, I read Jon Franklin’s Writing for Story, in which he defined narratives using classic story-telling techniques borrowed from fiction: characters, plots, conflicts and resolutions. In this narrow definition, narratives must have a central character who encounters a problem, and the problem is somehow resolved. While I truly enjoyed Franklin’s book, I find the definition a little to narrow and exclusive. Not all of the wonderful things that can be made into science narratives may have all of these elements, but they may still make wonderful and entertaining narrative stories. This is why I liked David’s broader and all-encompassing definition. (Or maybe there are two genres of narrative: the Classic Narrative Story as defined by Franklin, and the Malleable Narrative as defined by David and I.)

When David and I were preparing for the session, he said something along these lines: “If you accept that narratives are a series of connected events, then the next logical question is connected by what?” I found this to be a riveting question. It brought to mind a series of stepping stones leading across a shallow stream or brook. The stones are individual, like the events of a narrative, but they form a path and it’s up to you, the writer, to figure out how to carry the reader across the stones.

David’s definition also struck at the heart of what I struggled with for several years while writing my book on red wolves. When I first began mapping the book out, I had a gut instinct about certain landing spots along the red wolf’s story that I wanted to bring the reader to, but I grappled with how to get the story from one of these landing spots to the other. Sometimes the connections were not always apparent and took a lot of thought. Jennifer Ouellette opined that narratives could be fabricated mostly out of ideas, with the satisfactory explanation of an idea being the “event” that David and I were referring to. While I agree somewhat, I think this type of writing is very difficult to do well. Or at least to do in an engaging enough way as to compel the reader to keep going and be excited about it. This is completely subjective on my part, but adding the people who conceived the ideas or worked with them might help to make the narrative more engaging in this case. David also took time in the session to talk about other modes of writing, namely argumentation, description and exposition. He pointed out that narratives can have these other modes woven into them, but that narratives usually have their main framework constructed around one or more narratives (think: braided narratives, or parallels ones where they may not intersect but once, if at all).

We then posed a question to the audience, in true ScienceOnline un-conferencey format, and asked them to share how they go about identifying that they want to write a narrative versus an explanatory or newsy piece. The room was packed with an amazing set of writers and editors. David Quammen spoke and described how his recent piece in National Geographic on the second largest sequoia tree in the world was originally going to be an explanatory piece. But then in the process of reporting it, he was lured by the photographer Nick Nichols to climb the tree, and in the process of doing so he came to realize that it was the most “fascinating creature” he’d ever met. So he decided to make the tree a character in the story, and the story became a narrative. (If you want to watch David Dobbs interview David Quammen about his most recent book, Spillover, then go here. Quammen talks at length about the writing and reporting process.)

Scott Huler, a poet, writer, and author, had a different idea. He said that he approaches most of his writing projects as if they will be narratives unless the reporting proves otherwise. I thought this was an interesting approach. In my own case, I had chosen to use narrative in my book because at some gut level I recognized that narratives are the types of stories that I, as a reader, am most drawn to. I wanted to create that same kind of experience for readers of my red wolf book.

Next we asked the audience to talk about how they go about reporting a narrative, and how it may differ from other types of writing. Carl Zimmer spoke about doing field visits and “vacuuming up” as much detail as possible. He said he often took pictures of places—a technique Maryn McKenna seconded—because there is no way you will ever remember every detail and it’s impossible to write it all down. I think it was Charles Choi who mentioned that one of his memorably productive interviews was when he simply handed his recording mic to the source who then spoke into while Choi walked around taking pictures. (Efficient use of time and equipment.) Maggie Koerth-Baker said that she recommended renting a car (or driving your own if you own one) when you are in the field because she uses the driving time to compose and ruminate in her head. Brendan Maher mentioned always having a set of questions in his back pocket for when the conversation slows down, such as “What keeps you up at night?” and which help to get at the more human side of a source. Choi also mentioned looking at maps of wherever your story leads you, because you can find intriguing names of local roads and landmarks. (Alligator Alley in Florida comes to mind.) He once discovered a street named Blood Alley, for example. And I once found the name Frying Pan on a map, labeling a hot piece of coastal marsh right next to where I had spent a sweltering day in heavy canvas field clothes searching through brush looking for red wolf dens in early summer.

One of the common themes I picked up on at this point was that so many of the pros in the room mentioned taking down as much detail as they could see, hear, feel, smell and touch. They spoke of the need for gathering as much detail as possible because they never know what may turn out to be useful. I found this validating because when I was shadowing the red wolf biologists, I found myself writing down so much about the landscapes where we were, the flora and fauna, what people were wearing, dialogue, and so forth that I felt horribly inefficient. I would come home from trips with pages and pages and pages of observations and notes, and barely a clue as to what was useful. (After the session, Quammen told me [when I approached him to sign my beloved copy of Monster of God]  that “you’re not doing your job unless you throw out 98 percent of what you accumulated.”)

Last, we asked the audience how they go about writing a narrative. Many people spoke about filtering through all the notes they’d made during their reporting, in a process of constant sifting. It seems most people tackle the writing differently. In my case, I began writing parts of the book before all the research was completed but after I’d done enough to see the trajectory of the chapter. People spoke of how finding the structure was key to begining writing. (I was reminded of this excellent piece in The New Yorker by John McPhee which describes how he figures out the structure and then deals with the “slivers” of information that fit into different parts of his stories.)  John Timmer asked about length constraints and what the shortest approximate word count might be to take a stab of doing a narrative; Jamie Shreeve replied that 2,000 was about the shortest length considered useful by National Geographic for doing narratives.

With just a few minutes till the close of the session, David asked people to say, in five words or less how they conceive of the structure of their narratives. I conceived of my book as an arc with many different nodes on it (where the nodes were landing points for big events, or ideas, or key people). David conceives of many of his stories as sonatas. People said all sorts of things, but the one that sticks in my mind is a man who said he envisions a Jenga tower. He’s always searching for the blocks, the words and details and sentences, that he can take out yet still have the tower of his story stand. What a powerful visual. Maybe I’ll get a photo of Jenga tower and tape it above my desk—a daily reminder that what we take out of our writing is just as important to the integrity and strength of a piece as what we keep in.

Author William Souder pieced together major portions of Carson’s personal and professional life from collections of her extensive correspondence, journals and other papers, and interviews with family members of her friends. The result is an almost cinematic narrative of her life meshed with major cultural, political and environmental events—such as radiation fallout from nuclear bomb tests, insecticide vaporizers used within homes, and campaigns to eradicate gypsy moths—which defined her time. Souder’s approach yields a rich context for the issues and influences that surely helped to shape Carson’s thinking.

I wrote to Souder and asked him to participate in a Question and Answer about his newest book and the research for it. He graciously agreed, and I hope you enjoy reading his responses:

Q: What inspired you to write about the life of Rachel Carson?

A: My interests include science, the environment, and history. Carson was the embodiment of all three, so I felt a kinship with her, a sense that I saw the world at least somewhat as she did. I was also wanted to explore the question of why we have this bitter, partisan divide over environmental issues. Why should republicans and democrats have different views on the environment when it is of equal importance to both? And it turns out the answer can be found in Silent Spring and maybe more importantly, in the reaction to Silent Spring. There was one more thing: Rachel Carson, despite being one of the most consequential figures of the 20^th Century, is unknown to many people nowadays. Baby boomers—people in their fifties and older—tend to remember her. And Millennials know Carson because they study her now in high school and college. But in between those ages a lot of people don’t know who she was. So I thought there was an opportunity to correct that on the 50^th anniversary of Silent Spring.

Q: Your reporting ranges widely from events that occurred in her life to events that were occurring in the time period in which she was living. The result is a rich sense of context for the current events and circumstances that must have influenced her thinking. When you started the project, did you have this approach in mind, or was it something that developed along the way?

A: Context was always an important part of the plan. The great thing about biography is that you start with a story. You have a main character. You have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And when the material is strong—when there is a rich paper trail—you can reconstruct the events of someone’s life in astonishing detail. But I always want more. I want to know not just what a person did and thought, but why that person did what he or she did, and how those thoughts were formed. This is especially important when you’re dealing with someone who had the kind of profound influence on history that Rachel Carson had. Everyone is a product of the times in which they live, but for some people who do lasting work the person and the times become inseparable. You cannot, for example, understand Silent Spring and the impact it had without understanding the Cold War and the nuclear arms race of the 1950s and early 1960s. There is also a practical consideration when you write about someone who has been written about before: You can only make the story fresh by bringing in new material.

Q: A significant portion of your reporting appears to have been based on her personal correspondence. She had a life-long habit of writing letters to friends, colleagues and sources via mail. What was it like to piece a person together based on their letters, instead of interviewing them firsthand? And to what extent did interviews with surviving friends and family members augment your research?

A: I don’t think you can overstate how valuable correspondence is to a biographer. Letters are a timeline and a locator for someone’s life. Letters help you reconstruct the narrative of a life. They allow you to go where your subject went and see and hear what happened. Letters help you to understand a person’s working life, their business arrangements and entanglements, and often their aspirations and defeats. And letters often reveal much more—what that person was thinking and feeling. Letters are the gateway to the subject’s inner life. For Rachel Carson, the paper trail was unbelievably rich. Carson was one of those people who never threw away anything written by or to her. Her correspondence with Dorothy Freeman is archived at Bates College in Maine—a charming place to spend a week. But the majority of her papers are at the Beinecke library at Yale. I spent many weeks there, reading, making notes, and having things copied. I ended up with 100-plus single-spaced pages of notes and more than 3,000 documents, most of them letters. Because  all of the people who knew Carson well are dead, most of my research was this sort of archival digging. I did have continuing conversations with Dorothy Freeman’s son and her granddaughter that were enormously helpful about Carson’s intense friendship with Dorothy, which was the most important relationship in Carson’s life other than the one with her mother.

Q: Your portrayal of her personna is very convincing. Was it difficult to get your own mind so deeply into the mindset of a woman?

A: I really don’t think so. Carson, even though she trained as a scientist, was first and foremost a writer—and that’s something I get. Every phase of her life as a writer—getting started, finding her voice, struggling with ideas and editors and deadlines, publishing that first piece, that first book, reading those first reviews—these all felt familiar to me because I’ve been there. I had to imagine what it would be like to enjoy a huge commercial success, as Carson did with The Sea Around Us in 1951. It was on top of the bestseller lists for months and won the National Book Award. So that was something that was outside of my direct experience. But all writers dream about these things, so in a way Carson’s success didn’t feel completely foreign to me. The one place where I felt at some disadvantage in terms of gender was on the matter of Carson’s relationship with Dorothy Freeman. And I got a lot of insight on this from Dorothy’s granddaughter, Martha. Martha helped me to see that women can form affectionate, even intimate friendships that don’t necessarily involve sex, or at least do not depend on sex. Whether Rachel and Dorothy had sex is an open question, but I lean against it. And I didn’t start out thinking that way. So I had to learn to think differently—not “as” a woman might, because I doubt that is possible, but rather by being open to the idea that I could never completely understand every nuance or consideration in Carson’s life that was a result of her gender. I had to accept a little bit of mystery that I would never solve. And I think that’s good. I think that’s inevitable.

Q: I did not know much about Carson before reading your book. I knew of her book Silent Spring and its massive influence on environmentalism, but that was about the extent of my knowledge. I was very surprised to learn about her prior writing accomplishments and the fact that she was more of a writer with expert working knowledge rather than a scientist who happened to write well (which is who I thought she was!) Misperceptions about her so long after her death seem inevitable, in a way; but there were misperceptions about her and what she stood for even during her own time. (The idea that she was categorically against pesticides for example; that she dove frequently.) Why do you think that was? 

A: It’s interesting, because in her lifetime Carson was among the most famous and beloved writers in American—it’s really who she was. Her first three books were all about the oceans. People found them beautiful and inspiring. And they were. This meant that not only was she bound to have a big readership for Silent Spring, but also that those readers were going to be shocked and alarmed by what was in it. Silent Spring was a dismal, frightening polemic about the hazards of the widespread and heedless use of chemical pesticides. It wasn’t like anything Carson had written before. And it was seen by the chemicals industry, and by its allies in government, as a threat. Her detractors attacked the book, claiming it was inaccurate and one-sided—a deeply flawed work by a woman who seemed hysterical on the subject. And part of that attack involved the false claim that Carson wanted to ban all pesticides. This wasn’t true, but it proved to be such a durable lie that it persists even today. As for that business about her diving exploits, what happened is this: While she was researching The Sea Around Us Carson was persuaded to try “helmet diving” in the Florida Keys. She made several attempts that were thwarted by bad weather until she finally managed few minutes on the bottom of Biscayne Bay in about eight feet of water. She never let go of the boat’s ladder. But with the enormous success of the book a myth grew up that she was an intrepid diver who had often walked across reefs and communed with fishes. This didn’t hurt her reputation and, not surprisingly, she did nothing to discourage these rumors. And to be fair, even her one short dive took considerable courage. Carson was a weak swimmer and was never fond of boats or being in water much deeper than her knees.

Q: I was unaware of her relationship with Dorothy Freeman. You deal with it very delicately. You downplay a sexual relationship and instead interpret their interactions as the highest form of platonic love. How did you reach this interpretation? (Discussions with their surviving family members, their letters alone?) 

A: We touched on this already but to broaden it out a little, I think the key for me was realizing that Dorothy and Rachel each got something different from their relationship. For Dorothy, it awakened in her a deep and abiding appreciation for the natural world, for books and music, and for what it means to be a friend to someone who needs you as no one else—even when that person happens to be one of the most famous people in the country. For Rachel, Dorothy was the one great love of her life. This is what I came to believe after closely reading and re-reading the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the course of a decade. I’m not sure I was intentionally going for “delicate” in describing their relationship, but I certainly did my best to be direct. I think anything less would have been seen as ducking the issue. A few reviewers have complained politely that I failed to report what was obviously a sexual relationship. They’re wrong. We’re bound by the evidence we have, and the truth is that we can never know for sure.

Q: You were fortunate enough to be able to stay and work, for a short time, in Carson’s seaside cottage in Southport Island, Maine. Did this interlude influence your understanding of her in any way? Or perhaps give you insights into what she loved about this particular place?

A: All of the places I visited that were important to Carson—from her childhood home in Springfield, Pennsylvania to the cottage in Maine—influenced my understanding of her. The great thing for me about the cottage, where I stayed for a week while I was working in the archives at Bates, is that while it has been well-maintained, it hasn’t really been altered since Carson was last there a half century ago. As I sat at her desk and wrote parts of my book I felt Carson’s presence—not like a ghost but rather a memory. It was as if I wasn’t so much researching Carson as recalling her. It’s hard to describe. I had the same feeling in Edinburgh when I was writing about John James Audubon for my previous book. Parts of that city haven’t really changed since Audubon’s time, and I felt certain that I was walking on the same cobblestones he had. I guess what happens is that something from the past suddenly seems like part of your own experience. And as wonderful and touching as it was to be able to work in Carson’s cottage, I have to say that I felt an even stronger sense of connection with her not there, but at Shackleford Banks, the narrow barrier island at the foot of the Outer Banks near Beaufort, North Carolina. The island is deserted, except for a herd of wild horses, and accessible only by boat. The boat lands you on the inner side, facing the sound and the mainland. But when you walk around to the ocean side you come to a long, blindingly white beach. The surf is loud and chaotic. The sea breeze is stiff. You feel the world open up and show itself to you as mostly water and air. Rachel Carson called the sea “the great mother of life” and on that windswept shore you can imagine all the ages of the earth and the vastness of time. The blueness of the sky and the ocean, the whiteness and warmth of the sand—it all looks and feels exactly as it must have when Carson first saw it in the summer of 1938 when she went there to gather material for her first book, Under the Sea-Wind. In that book she described ripples in the sand as the tide retreated as looking like they’d been left by the shadows of the ripples in the receding water. And when I looked for them, sure enough, they were still there.

Q: Your book was published on the 50th anniversary of Silent Spring’s publication. A lot has changed since then in terms of environmental challenges and our society’s response to them. If Carson were alive today, what environmental issues do you think would most concern her?

A: Climate change. No question. Carson already knew that the oceans were warming in her time, and near the end of her life she became aware that scientists were starting to worry about the “greenhouse effect” of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. So I think she would be alarmed that we’ve made virtually no meaningful progress on slowing down the warming of the planet. And I think she’d be appalled by a closely related problem—the deepening public resistance to science. I think Carson, if she were somehow with us today, would find it almost unbelievable that a significant percentage of Americans deny realities like evolution and climate change.

Q: Time and again I was impressed with the narrative you created seemingly based solely on Carson’s letter writing. The level of detail you were able to achieve resulted in an almost cinematic quality that let me envision events in her life. This sort of research may not be possible in the future given people’s adoption of email, which has less of a physical shelf life than old-fashioned hardcopy letter writing. Does this concern you, for the insights that future writers might glean from their research into historical figures? 

A: What a great question. And an important one. Rachel Carson lived in the golden age of print. Every city had several daily newspapers, and great national magazines like Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Coronet, and many others commanded large readerships. Letter writing was how most people communicated across any distance—the telephone was for special occasions—and for a writer like Carson, who did much of her research through correspondence with scientists, the residue of her working life has permanence. Letters, thousands of them on paper, are put away in the archives at Yale and at Bates. I presume they’ll stay there forever, even after they’ve been digitized so that anybody can read them from any computer anywhere in the world—a thought that makes me wonder what the future holds for biographers. It could be that our every digital utterance now—everything we say via email and on Twitter and Facebook—and in media yet to be invented—will someday after we’re long gone be retrievable from the cloud. I’m sure we’ll find new ways to tell the stories of people’s lives. I’m sixty-three and I expect to write three or four more books. I’m fairly confident they’ll be actual books, printed and bound. But they’ll be published digitally, too. We live in a fluid time. I can’t see far enough into the future to say anything more intelligent about it than that.

Q: Is there anything I have not asked you that you think would be important for potential readers to know, or that you would like to share about her life, or what you learned through the process of writing this book? 

A: Everyone who watched Carson stand up to her critics in the firestorm that surrounded Silent Spring was impressed by her calmness and her courage. She faced her death from breast cancer—she was diagnosed while she was writing Silent Spring and died at the age of fifty-six—with the same equanimity. There’s less uplift in facing death than in facing an enemy on the wrong side of an argument, but it is a moving thing just the same. It’s a biographer’s lot to kill off his main character in the end. Rachel Carson died far too young. But she died well. And that’s not nothing.

Captive male red wolf. Photo courtesy of Ryan Nordsven/USFWS

After completing my recent book on red wolves, I began to set up a Friends of the Red Wolf  group to support the conservation of Canis rufus in the wild. Working in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program, the Friends group will focus on augmenting conservation efforts in the Red Wolf Recovery Area in North Carolina. Our main function is to raise funds which will be used to execute projects and purchase field supplies needed by the red wolf recovery program.

Red wolves are critically endagered, and some consider them to be among the most endangered canids on the planet. A network of forty-one captive breeding facilities across the U.S. work to safeguard the species from extinction while the FWS works to restore a population of about 100 wild red wolves in northeastern North Carolina. My book on red wolves traces their modern reintroduction and management as well as what is known of their past history in the eastern United States. Some of the modern reintroduction challenges include managing them to prevent hybridization with wild coyotes, mitigating disruptions to packs due to human-caused red wolf deaths, and changes to their habitat cause by sea level rise due to climate change. (All of these issues are explored in depth in my book.)

Another recent threat to red wolves came about last year when the state of North Carolina allowed open-season daylight hunting of coyotes to be extended to night. Red wolves are mostly nocturnal, and they appear visually similar to coyotes (although adults are larger), so by allowing the night hunting of coyotes the state’s newly proposed hunting regulation potentially places red wolves at risk of being shot in cases of mistaken identity. An injunction was placed on the night hunting rule, although a permanent change to the hunting regulations remains a possibility.

You can visit the website for the new Friends of the Red Wolf group and find photos of red wolves and a blog post explaining a little bit more background about the formation of the Friends group. If you feel so inclined, there is also a page explaining how to make a donation.

David Winter’s “The Origin and Extinction of Species.” This is a tidy little synopsis of the study of speciation, variation and diversity with a modern twist regarding the (too common) negative effect of invasive species upon native populations. Winter turns an example of land snails found on Pacific Islands into a wildly interesting case study of speciation and extinction.

Steve Silberman’s “Woof! living Boldly as a ‘Free Rage Aspergian.’ “ Silberman is working on a book about autism, and I’m not sure if this post was an outgrowth of his research, but I suspect that it was. It’s an insightful profile of a man named John Elder Robison who was not diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome until mid-life. Silberman has a deft way of revealing how a person on the Autism spectrum perceives the world, and his narrative style is instantly engrossing.

Deborah Blum’s “A View to a Kill in the Morning.” This post dissects carbon dioxide as both a common element and an uncommon killer. Blum writes of the perfect murder using dry ice (which is carbon dioxide in its solid state) to asphyxiate a victim, but she also dials out beyond this gas’s immediate effect upon humans to its effect upon the larger environment as a greenhouse gas contributing to global warming.

Rob Dunn’s “Man Discovers a New Life-Form at a South African Truck Stop.” This piece is a wonderful little vignette that recounts how a German biologist, Oliver Zompro, discovered an entirely new genera of insect that turned out to be fairly common–common enough to be found in back yards and truck stops–but undescribed. I enjoyed this one for its implicit message that we can all be discoverers and pioneers of the natural world, if we’re so inclined.

Greg Gbur’s “Mpemba’s Baffling Discovery.” Gbur recounts a wonderful little story of an African student named Erasto Mpemba who dared to ask a simple question, why does boiling water freeze faster than room-temperature tap water? The student had observed this phenomena with both water and milk, and it seemed to violate basic physics. What I like about this piece is the way Gbur places the anecdote in a very human context, exploring how Mpemba made his observations while making ice cream, and pointing out examples of good and bad science educators in Mpemba’s life. In this case, the story isn’t just about how a student from Tanzania challenged establishment scientists, it’s also about how to foster scientific inquiry and critical thinking.

Miriam Goldstein’s “Don’t Panic: Sustainable Seafood and the American Outlaw.” I love the hook in this piece, because Goldstein’s dialogue with herself about whether or not to eat a shrimp burrito is pretty much a mirror of what I go through twice a month at the seafood counter of my grocery store. Anyone who enjoys eating seafood, but who is concerned about buying from sustainable sources, will appreciate this post.

Rebecca Kreston’s “This Ain’t Yo Momma’s Muktuk.” This quirky piece about botulism explores the role of culture in traditional food preparation in Alaska, despite the high risk of contracting botulism. It’s an insightful post into the history of fermented meat, the role of culture in traditional foods, and how the loss of traditional knowledge in some people groups is affecting not only the preservation of their culture but the proper preservation of their meat.

You can order your copy of The Best Science Writing Online 2012 here. (Full disclosure, one of my blog pieces was published in this edition; however, contributors are not financially compensated for their work so I have no financial conflict of interest in promoting this book.)

I am thrilled the press chose a photo from my book to put on the cover of their catalog! It is a wonderful gesture to their faith in the importance of this book, and it is also a welcome bit of positive news for the red wolf which is currently plagued by the fallout of a decision by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission to allow the night spotlighting of coyotes throughout the state, even within the endangered red wolf’s five-county recovery area. For this, they are being sued. (I first wrote about the threat of this change to the state hunting regulations for the Scientific American Guest Blog, and for the Charlotte Observer, and I’ll be writing more about it elsewhere in the coming month.)

The photo on the catalog cover is also the photo for my book cover, which will look like this:

Now, is that a nice cover or what? I love the way they framed the wolf’s gaze with the title.

But back to the catalog. This is the first step in marketing my book, and that makes me very excited because I actually finished writing the book in November of 2011. At the time, I had no idea that it would take more than a year for the project to transform into a saleable hardback form! (In fact, the process took so long, I actually went through pregnancy and birth and now have a beautiful baby boy! Some people have commented that it must feel pretty good to have a book and a baby both “born” within the same year. It does feel good, though also a tad overwhelming as I try to regain my foothold with writing now that my life is re-centering around another human being.) Because of my recent inauguration into motherhood, I’ve not been blogging much the past few months, but I hope to rectify that situation in the months to come. Goodness knows there is so much to write about with recent developments for the worse for red wolves.