Interview: Alison Pearce Stevens

       Time to catch up! I'm jet-lagged from a trip to Costa Rica, and headachy from switching back to black tea after a week of excellent Costa Rican coffee. Today's post is an interview with the writer Alison Pearce Stevens, a person I admire because she is a scientist and a writer who writes fiction as well as non-fiction, is a mom to two energetic boys, has made the leap to living abroad (Berlin) and knows what it's like to be a stranger in a strange land. Also, I like her work for the Nature Education Knowledge Project.


Q: How did you become interested in writing again after studying science for 18 years?

A.P. Stevens: By chance, really. We try to come up with personal, hand-made gifts for family  members, and my son and I decided to write a story for his grandparents. I got completely swept up in it. It was the first time in ages that I had let my creative side completely take over, and it was cathartic.

Q: Is it very different to write non-fiction vs fiction or do you think there is not that much difference?

A.P. Stevens: There are certainly differences, but I think that good, engaging non-fiction is narrative. It pulls the reader into the story, just as good fiction does. I also think it's important, even in fiction, to ensure that the story is factually accurate (unless, of course, it's fantasy). Readers retain information from engaging stories and they assume the information to be true, unless it was obviously fabricated.

Q: What brought you to Berlin?

A.P. Stevens: My husband was offered a job there. But we're about to move back to the U.S. (for the same reason). :)

Q: Has living abroad helped or hindered your writing?

A.P. Stevens: Definitely helped. It completely broadened my horizons and exposed me to new and different places and ideas. In addition, I stopped working full-time after we moved, so I had more time to spend on creative pursuits. It wasn't long before story lines and characters started appearing in my head, and I had to find a way to let them out.

Q: Do you have a writing routine?

A.P. Stevens: Nothing rigorous. I generally walk home after taking the kids to school. I find that walking helps stimulate ideas. By the time I'm home, I'm ready to sit down and work. But that means I might be writing a non-fiction article even though I'm in the middle of a chapter of a novel. I can't force myself to work on one particular story until it's done. The prominent idea from my morning walk gets my attention for the day, even if I'm in the middle of something else. By allowing myself to work on my top idea of the day, I find that my writing time is more productive, and the quality of my writing is much better.

Q: Do you have a favorite book or author?

A.P. Stevens: I can't possibly choose one! I adore Joseph Heller's work. More recently, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and Christopher Moore's books are great for a bit of levity.

Q: (If you are willing to say...) What is your current project?

A.P. Stevens: Which one? ;) I usually have at least three. I'm revising a middle-grade novel titled Thunderstruck, but I won't share the details (sorry!). I'm revising a couple of non-fiction picture books, one about how forests migrate with climate change and another about artificial reefs. My main focus in recent weeks has been non-fiction articles about scientists studying animals in the wild.

Thank you Alison!

Woodworking: A Jig for Tapered Legs

        I'd like to make tapered legs on two small side tables, and I hope they will be similar to these stylish legs:

Shaker table, by Rolf Sonnerup, oceanographer, salmon fisherman and woodworker. 

Here's a close-up of one of Rolf's legs, turned sideways. You can see that the bottom edge is straight, whereas the top edge is slanted:

Jack, my woodworking teacher, suggested making a jig, which is a template or guide, so that all eight legs could be planed to the desired angle at the same time.

Here is what the finished jig, made out of scrap wood, looks like:

Bird's eye view of the jig. The leg will fit in the space in the middle.

The jig is made to the exact dimensions of one squared, planed leg so that it fits snugly in the space in the middle. Now the jig is loaded:

Jig with squared, planed leg in middle.

The key is to elevate the leg at one end by having it sit on a small block of wood:

Close-up of jig.
One end of the leg sits elevated on the tiny ledge to the left of the two screws.

You can see this difference in elevation clearly in a side view of the loaded jig:

The leg (lighter wood) is elevated to the right.
The loaded jig is sitting on top of the thickness planer machine.

    

        The loaded jig is then put into the thickness planer machine, which has an overhead rotating blade that will slice off thin layers of wood from the top. Because the leg is elevated at only one end, the planer preferentially cuts off wood at only that end. This results in a tapered leg with one slanted surface. The bottom surface stays straight.

Jig and leg go into the thickness planer, which shaves off wood from the top.

The jig can be re-used for all eight legs. Stayed tuned to see what they look like next!

The Sand Quarry: Portrait of the Architect as a Young Man

       On the bus to the abandoned quarry, I sat next to V., who has some of the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They were green and brown and blue, with specks and splodges of colour like a shimmering tidal pool or a piece of lovely marble. I could have gazed into his eyes all day. Too bad he's only twelve years old. Too bad I'm a frumpy middle-aged parent accompanying a school science trip.

       Someone passed out Carambars, a kind of caramel that comes in different flavours. V. took one. He unwrapped it, examined the yellow baton from all sides, sniffed it, picked up the discarded wrapper and read the writing, sniffed the candy again, then turned to me.

       "Do you want this?" he asked, offering me the Carambar. "I don't like lemon flavour."

Carambars, wrapped, from Wikipedia.

Lemon Carambar, unwrapped, from V.

       Twelve years old is a funny in-between age. Too old to indiscriminately chomp down on any old candy just because it happens to be sweet. And yet, too young to even suspect that an unwrapped, pawed over, pre-sniffed candy might not be so enticing to his adult seatmate.

       "Sure, thanks," I said, taking the Carambar to be polite. I tucked it discreetly into my handbag. At least it wasn't gooey.

The abandoned sand quarry, now used for 4x4 adventures and occasional school trips.

       The quarry was a big sand pit. The sun shone down through birch trees just starting to put out soft green leaves. Great tits (Parus major), a common European songbird, sang out. There were sedimentary rocks, where you could see wave and ripple marks on the sand before it hardened into rock.

Sedimentary rock with ripple marks.

Shells in the sand.

       There were lots of little shells in the sand.

       The kids were divided up into groups. My group had to lay out a 10m long measuring tape. Every metre, they had to set down a 10 cm by 10 cm red wire square, count and note the appearance of the shells in the red square, then dig up and collect 1-2 cm worth of sand from within the red square to bring back to school for further analyses.

Counting shells.

       The group started out fine, so I wandered off to look at the other groups. When I came back, everyone was busy, but the group had splintered into two:

Girls, counting and noting physical appearances of shells, collecting sand samples.

Boys, digging a hole, playing with bits of rock and shell.

       I am making no judgements. After all, I firmly believe that play, and the idea of "playfulness," is seriously undervalued in general.

       There was a great podcast this week, about the Dawn of the Iron Age. Apparently it was not at all obvious how humans discovered how to smelt iron ore around 3000 BC in Europe. Unlike copper, a light coloured malleable metal, iron is dark and thus difficult to distinguish from impurities, and difficult to work. It has to first be heated to melt out impurities, and the remaining ugly, irregular lump of iron has to be hammered repeatedly to make anything interesting. If I could travel back in time to the Dawn of the Iron Age, I'm sure I would see some humans hanging around a fire with some chunks of iron ore, wondering what would happen if they played around a bit and heated them up, or smashed them up, or both. Civilization has evolved not only because of hard work and discipline, but also because of play and serendipity.

       Back in the bus on the way back to school, I asked V. what his favorite subject was (Math) and what he wanted to be when he grew up (Architect). Someone passed him a piece of red string licorice. He didn't eat it right away. He dangled it from his fingers, studying it. Then he tied one end of the licorice to the seat in front of him, and put the other end in his mouth.

A new way to eat licorice

       "This is good," he said, chewing away. "I still have two hands free." I have no doubt he will be a fine architect some day.