I am a scientist-turned-writer. While writing gives me joy, the learning, discovering, and research into neat new subjects is what gives me joy in science. I came across this article on Andrea Barrett who not ony intensely researches her books, but folds into her works the details and feelings of scientific discovery.
I need to go out now and read some of her stuff, both for the thrill (they sound exciting) and for the technique.
Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Magazine / The Science of Her Art
In person, Andrea Barrett does not seem like the kind of woman who has slept in a tent on an Arctic ice sheet in 30-degree weather — though she did just that in 1997 to research her novel The Voyage of the Narwhal, plunking down the entire sum of a Guggenheim grant to travel for six weeks with her husband, biophysicist and photographer Barry Goldstein, to the northern edge of Canada’s Baffin Island in Nunavut.
