So here I am at the ScienceWriters2013 meeting, but this post is not an effort at comprehensive impressionism. You can get that at its twitter feed (@ScienceWriters ; #sciwri13), the live blogging, and other such things reachable at the meeting's website, ScienceWriters2013. org. Today, Saturday, NASW workshops are winding up. Tomorrow the CASW's New Horizons in Science briefings on what's coming as seen by top scientists, get underway. Flocks of people from the latter half of the meeting's host, the University of Florida, seem everywhere – like the butterflies at the giant rainforest exhibit where we had a reception yesterday but even more friendly and more useful than the butterflies that settled on our heads.
There are about 420 registrants here in Gainesville. This is just one of their stories – a teeny sample of the things that come up in the schmooze-a-thon that is a ScienceWriters meeting.
Erik Vance, a really tall guy with reddish hair, was leaning on a wall talking with a Brit friend, a guy named Bobby (if I get the rest of it I'll amend this). Erik said hey Charlie, let's catch up on things. (Amendment – It was Bobbie Johnson, soon to arrive in San Francisco as tech writer for the online news outlet Matter).
A little while later we were relaxing in two big soft chairs amid the hall hubbub and I was getting a fast verbal tour through one of the more interesting places upon which any science writer in the English speaking world can perch: Mexico. Vance got started in science writing mostly in San Francisco. He is an ace on marine fishery issues. But he's been in Mexico City with his wife, an NGO worker, for a year or so, exactly how long I don't know. He is, he modestly said in amazement at how things turned out, the go-to guy for US and other English language outlets that need or want a science story from that nation. There is, he explained, practically no other science writer to call for science stories in English and already in Mexico. That's why he became overnight the go-to guy. His Spanish is still lousy, so he is compelled to write Mexican science in English. And he is busy as can be.
We had a good chat and then I went and looked up some of the stuff he's done, a lot of it at his recently redone website that is named what else but ErikVance.com.
Don't miss a story he wrote on Popocatepetl, the big volcano near Mexico City. At this and just about every ScienceWriters meeting there is a workshop on how to refine story pitches until they are asymptotic to perfection. Erik's tale is different. It is a flash on the way things really go sometimes: how to totally screw up a pitch and yet survive for another day because the editor to whom you pitched it already trusts you. Here it is:
- The Last Word on Nothing: The Most Dangerous Volcano in North America ; Wherein we learn what happened after a well-lubricated Vance got to talking with a similarly capacitated geologist at a Dylan concert, whence Erik hurried to call Robin Lloyd at Scientific American with his slam-dunk story idea.
I should add that The Last Word on Nothing is the blog site for a cabal of about a dozen accomplished science writers, most of them in the Western US but elsewhere too. They call themselves LaWONians (See UPDATE below) and elsewhere write for money but here they let off steam and otherwise give the goods away. Another piece there, Vance's most recent, is a fine, dashed-off meditation on the beautiful, dangerously spiny and glamorous lionfish of the Pacific that becomes, when in the Atlantic, a total (Erik's terminology here) uh, douchebag. Here:
- The Last Word on Nothing: A Crappy Little Bastard That Tastes Great ; By the way, the edibility of lionfish is not fresh news. We even heard it before. A previous post three years ago referred to their tastiness, as reported by Erik Olsen in the NYTimes. But Erik V, shown above reaching for one more bite, does a tastier, more exciting, surely funnier and more effective job of it than did Erik O.
If you look at Erik V's site you will quickly see that he is busy, has prominent buyers of his stuff, and usually doesn't write for laughs. He tackles very serious issues with style. One sample:
- Scientific American – Eric Vance: Why Can't Mexico Make Science Pay Off? A razor sharp analysis.
After Erik took off, down sat Dennis Meredith, the former Duke University, Cornell, Caltech p.r. man, ex-AP, NASW stalwart, and recently the writer of fabulously brilliantly cheesy novels. His latest is Wormholes. It is the only one I've read but take on faith that they are all brilliantly cheesy. It is about portals to other universes (or this one, but to different places and maybe different times too) that make a mess of the parts of the Earth where they suddenly start opening, roaming around with sometimes awful results, and then blinking shut. I told him he misspelled science adviser. And had a long discussion about parbroiled fish, maybe including some lionfish. Everything intersects if you just wait.
*UPDATE:
It is now nearing 11 pm, following the Awards presentations for NASW and CASW science writing prizes. It is also, but this is a major event not compressible into this post, marked a surprise prize and grand salute to Ben Patrusky, recently retired as main poobah for the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing for the last, I dunno, 38 years or so. The event was moving, Ben is legendary in the minds of all who know him. But back to the theme of this post. The evening's scheduled prizes reinforced the point of resonances, overlaps, intersections, and small-world exclamations encountered at this meeting. As it happens, Erik Vance's on line and clubby hangout LaWON's stuff birthed one of the evening prize winners: Christie Aschwanden in the Commentary and Opinion category of NASW's Science in Society Awards. And the guy I replaced in Erik's conversation space, Bobbie Johnson at MATTER? Turns out that another winner, Megan Scudellari who recieved the Evert Clark/Seth Payne award for young science writers, got it for three pieces including one in MATTER.
Pull on a string around here and it'll send shivers just about everywhere.
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