Today is the birthday of my newest book, We, the Curious Ones, a picture book with Candlewick Press.  It is part of what is developing into a whole new way of writing for me, a whole new way of seeing the world. 

My career began with novels.  Actually, I tried picture book texts first, but despite having spent years reading picture books to my children—they look so easy, don’t they?—I found I didn’t have a clue about how they were made.  Having no one to teach me, I moved on quickly to novels.  The inner workings of a novel are so much easier to parse. 

My children were young when I began writing those novels, the youngest just settled into first grade, and I didn’t return to picture books until grandchildren appeared on the scene.  When I finally did learn how picture books were made, I began writing for the very young.  But novels were still my mainstay.

I have been a voracious reader all my life.  What writer isn’t?  And mostly I have read fiction.  I love the way story works.  It doesn’t analyze.  It doesn’t explain.  It just pulls us inside a world and allows us to live that world, to be changed by it.  And what more could my reading offer me—or what more could I offer others through my writing?

Then came the day that I picked up a novel, began to read, and quickly put it down.  Then another.  And then another. 

I could see what those writers were doing.  Exactly.  I could even see that they were doing it well.  But . . .

I didn’t care.  I truly did not care! 

And at the same time, I found I wasn’t caring so much about my own stories, either.

Could it possibly be time to retire?

For me, though, writing is very much like breathing.  Something I do because that’s what it means to be alive.  And I wasn’t ready to quit breathing, either.  (Besides, a career as a freelance writer doesn’t come with a pension.)

So instead of leaving reading and writing behind, I began to explore books of a different kind, the ones that define themselves by what they are not.  Nonfiction.  There is, I discovered, so much I’m eager to know!  And eager is the right word.  I found a bone-deep excitement in these books of facts and ideas.

Naturally, being a writer, I wanted to share that excitement.

I know myself well, though.  I am not a sophisticated enough researcher to gather loads of information, dissect it, analyze it, and then lay it out for new readers.  What I can do, though, is to read widely and deeply enough to understand the basics of something that intrigues me, then compress and recast, cogently, simply, even lyrically.

Thus The Stuff of Stars was born. 

Today, We, the Curious Ones follows.

We, the Curious Ones rose out of a fascinating book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli, an Italian quantum physicist.  Rovelli begins by analyzing ideas that have, from as far back in history as we can trace, made up our view of ourselves and our place in the universe. 

I was captivated by the tension of this changing view, by the inevitable struggle between what we understand with our heads and the meaning we create with our hearts, captivated, in other words, by the tension between science and story. 

Science evolves every day.  But story is stickier.  It changes very, very slowly.

I found Rovelli’s ideas so seminal as to be life-changing.  Exactly the way immersion in good fiction can be life-changing.

More science-based picture books are already in the pipeline, each coming to me through other much more complex books I have come to love.  But looking back, I can see for the first time exactly what it is I’ve fallen in love with. 

It’s a celebration of life that moves me, that compels me to go on reading, to go on writing.  A celebration of all life.  And could there be any better way to play out the rest of my career than in celebration?

Today We, the Curious Ones is born.  Over and over again, we humans are saved by our curiosity.  Over and over again, every one of us is made new. 

This aged writer, too.

Come celebrate with me!