I received some nice news this week. Whales to the Rescue has been short-listed for the Land of Enchantment Book Award. Organized by the New Mexico Library Association and the New Mexico Literacy Association, this is an award in which children read from a list of books and vote for their favourite. The results won’t be out until 2024, but it’s nice to know my book will be on the bookshelves and bedside tables of some young people this year.
Tag Archives: writing for children
Fake Whale Poop to the Rescue?
The “poop pump” spread from Whales to the Rescue. Art by Kim Smith.
A few days ago there was an interesting program on the CBC show, The Current, on which the host Matt Galloway interviewed a few scientists with some ideas about how we might buy a bit of time in our race against a warming ocean and atmosphere. (You can see the full transcript here. Just scroll down to “The ambitious science of climate repair.”) I was listening while doing a bit of busy work, but my ears perked up when Galloway introduced Sir David King, director of the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge, who discussed seeding the ocean with artificial whale poo. If you’ve read Whales to the Rescue, you’ll know that the role of whale poo and how it can help pull carbon out of the atmosphere is a big part of the book, and a big part of whale baleen whales have a role to play in helping to slow the effects of climate change. Adding artificial whale feces to the ocean is all still experimental, but I’ll follow this with interest. (If you want to read more, here is the link to the “biomass regeneration project“—aka replicating the pooping prowess of the world’s large baleen whales—at the Climate Repair site.)
Here is an article about then project from last spring and here’s a video of an fake whale poo experiment off the Australian coast, called WhaleX.
What do you think? I can’t find much recent news, so things still seem pretty experimental, but I’ll keep following this one.
Vancouver Writers Fest
Rochelle, Johanna, and me on stage with our books.
Over the years I’ve attended the Vancouver Writers Festival (even back when I’m pretty sure it was called the Vancouver Writers and Readers Festival), but this year was the first time I’ve been invited to be on stage. I joined fellow writers Rochelle Strauss (with her new book, The Global Ocean) and Johanna Wagstaffe (with her new book, Little Pine Cone) for the event, Oceans and Forests. We chatted to a very excited and energetic audience of young readers—Rochelle and I chatted about the ocean, with my talk being more focussed on the wonders of whale poo and all. Johanna, who is also a meteorologist (you may have seen her on CBC?) had the forest covered and talked about how wildfires affect the natural world in good ways (when we get out of the way) and not so (when we don’t).
Jude Isabella and me showing off our hard work.
It was a very fun event and we were all buoyed by the enthusiasm of the kids. I only wished we’d stopped talking earlier so we could have answered more of the students’ questions. As it was I think we went over our time by about 30 minutes. Although the audience was mostly students and their teachers, I did have my own little cheering squad of my sister, husband, and two dear friends, including Jude Isabella, author of Bringing Back the Wolves, the first title in Kids Can Press’s Ecosystem Guardians series. (Whales to the Rescue is the second.) We took a moment to show off our books in front of the VWF poster.