FAQs

A: Every week I eagerly await the arrival of Science and Nature, two journals that cover a wide range of subjects. I can hardly wait to curl up in bed with those things. I rarely read fiction, mainly because I don’t know what to read, and I’m too finicky to pick up random novels in the bookstore. My book-aholic Dad used to leave bags of good books on my doorstep, but since I lost him I’m rudderless and readingless. Some of my all-time faves, however, are Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Sam Shepard’s early plays.

A: Obviously, I sometimes travel to gather information directly from a person or place. Those are the glamorous moments. Most of the time, though, I’m flogging the Internet for journal articles. Over the years, I’ve become semi-fluent in the language of scientific research, but it still gives me a thrill when I can plow into an article titled “Third molar agenesis in human prehistoric populations of the canary Islands,” and maintain traction right through a sentence like this: “The loss of the third molar could be produced by a heterochronic phenomenon of postdisplacement, as a consequence of the phylogenetic tendency toward delay of the onset of the third molar formation, and the genetic factors responsible for the absence of those teeth could be related to the general process of delay in tooth formation.” It’s not glamorous, but I enjoy translating this stuff into English so that people can see how cool the world really is.

A: Discipline. In college I worked for a newspaper, covering suburban meetings and politics. I had to send my stories in the night they happened. As my deadline approached, I’d sit down and write – in a hallway, in my car, or in the meeting itself. It was great practice. It was especially helpful when I began working for Discovery.com and had to turn in a daily story from the End of the Earth, where it might be 110 degrees and blowing sand and everyone else was prancing around the campfire and having a grand old time.

I do, however, have some preferences… I like to work by a window so I can check on the planet in between paragraphs. And I dearly love to have country music in the background: It’s predictable, and it features the human voice. Normally, the rotation might include Alison Krauss, Dwight Yoakam, K.D. Lang, and a local guy named Mark Farrington.

A: I mix it up. I tend to forget all about the “rapid turnover of hyphae of mycorrhizal fungi” if I read it too far in advance of when I write about it. So I’m learning to skim the research, to defer the gratification of devouring every word, until I’m actually ready to use it. I’m so easily distracted by marvelous stuff like the genetic basis of neuroticism, or the metabolism of Tierra del Fuegians, that I often do much more research than I should, given that the human life span is finite.

My great grandmother, Elizabeth Woodbridge Morris, was an essayist for the Atlantic Monthly, back in the day. I wouldn’t say she influenced my writing style, since hers had that tinkety-tunkety tidyness of the era. But I think her concern for Nature’s vulnerability – to the plow, to the motor car, to being overlooked – has influenced the values of her descendants ever since. Not that we’re a clan of, you know, neon-green environmentalists, ’cause this great grandmother also got a big thrill from shooting ducks.

I’m not one of those people who can spend a day at the beach. My brain is like a border collie. If it doesn’t have a job to do, it’s going to whirl in circles and eat the doormat. To unwind from work, I have to aim my brain at something that’s both absorbing and produces immediate results. Carpentry is good. Cooking, too. I’ve never tried driving a bunch of sheep into a pen, but I imagine it’s pretty satisfying.

A: There are different categories. For pure beauty, Iceland. The landscape is big, bold, and bizarre, and the midnight sun in summer makes everything surreal. For utter foreignness, it’s hard to beat Madagascar. Everything you look at is shocking – every plant and animal is strange, and the red land itself is weird. Walking through cattle pasture, I once stumbled on fossil corals the size of dinner plates. Then for the culture, I love Mongolia. Although the culture is in grave danger, the connection of the people and the land is still obvious – you can see how people built their lives in response to the huge, harsh land they live upon.