Random stack of books that grew spontaneously during bibliographic editing of "Beyond Walden: The Hidden History in America's Kettle Lakes and Ponds."

Writer

For the first twenty years of my career I was a typical science professor at a public research university with a grant-funded lab, graduate students, post-docs, scientific meetings, whose output was mainly peer-reviewed journal articles. As with most academics, my writing audience was an “in-group” cloister of scientists and graduate students with similar expertise.

Then three things converged.  During the 1999-2000 academic year, the language side of my brain lit up as a consequence of becoming fluent (albeit with poor grammar and pronunciation) in Castillian Spanish to the point where I was dreaming that that language. That year I lived on the coast of Chile in Vina del Mar as a senior Fulbright scholar.  Secondly, I was paying increased attention to the process of writing as a form of thinking. Thirdly, field- and lab-based research program was increasingly being challenged by the imminent breakup and abrupt closure of the former Department of Geology and Geophysics.

At this point, I made an abrupt turn toward writing, rather than research as my main scholarly activity.  In 2002, after seventeen drafts of what we now call hard copy, my first book, Stone by Stone, became a surprise bestseller and won the 2003 Connecticut Book Award for nonfiction. I also began dabbling with freelance newspaper journalism, pitching to and publishing in the Hartford Courant,  Boston Globe, Providence Journal, and the New York Times.  By 2003, I was a regular essayist and weekly opinion columnist for the Courant, Connecticut’s flagship daily, then with a print circulation of nearly 300,000.  This gig ended in 2018 when the my editors and I were forced out during the tanking turmoil of print journalism. By then, I had published nearly 500 articles.  Having left, the Courant, the Wall Street Journal, with a circulation near 4 million, invited me to be a contract book reviewer.

During this interval, I also published trade books for general readers as a form of scholarly engagement, and scholarly books for the humanities in lieu of research.  My seven books range in scope from a 1998 Smithsonian award-winning illustrated children’s book Stone Wall Secrets, a to the first Guide to Walden Pond, which was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (now Mariner Books) in March 2018 to honor the bicentennial birthday of Henry David Thoreau.  This “place of the book” for Walden, is  visited by over half a million people per year, 160,000 of which are estimated to be internationals.  My current book project, provisionally titled The Walden Experiments, is currently in review at Princeton University Press.

Owing to a shift in my principal scholarly activity, I designed, piloted, and teach a new course for the department of Earth Sciences: ERTH 2050W – Communicating Earth and Environmental Science.

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Photo:  Random stack of books that grew spontaneously during bibliographic editing of  “Beyond Walden: The Hidden History in America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds (Bloomsbury).