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The Case of the Curious Question

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More Musings on a Career in Science Writing

A few years ago I was at a conference about communicating astronomy to the public and ran into a colleague I hadn’t seen in probably 15 or 20 years, back when we were both Young Turks in our community.  We’d served on some committees together in various groups we belong to but really hadn’t chatted or kept up with each other recently. So, we had a good time catching up on each others’  lives and accomplishments.

My friend asked me what I’d been doing lately, and as I’d just finished working on some exhibit materials for Griffith Observatory and was about to start on the exhibits for the California Academy of Sciences, I described that work.  We swapped some tall tales about exhibit designers and curatorial committees, and then got to talking about writing books.  I’ve written and/or edited several astronomy books over the years since I worked with this colleague, and apparently this person wasn’t aware of the work I’d done. Nor was my colleague aware I’d gone back to grad school, worked at Sky & Telescope, or doing video projects about astronomy, or been teaching some workshops in script writing for planetarium folk. Totally understandable — we’re both busy people and don’t always have time to keep up on everybody we know all the time.

After I’d heard about my friend’s latest work and I’d described all I’d done, there was this sort of quiet moment as we both caught our breath. Then came a sort of plaintive question, “So, tell me Carolyn — how is it that YOU have gotten to do all this interesting work?”

It was a curious query and I had to think about it a moment. It’s like one of those questions you get during a job interview and the interviewer lobs it out there as much to find out how you’ll react to it as they do to find out the answer.  Was my friend truly curious? Or, working from knowledge of me when I was younger and still starting out as a writer?  Had a couple of decades of writing, graduate school, and more writing flown by so fast that I and my friend hadn’t realized it?  I suspected that curiosity was really driving the question, so I replied, “Well, I’ve gotten to be really good at what I do and people recognize that. But, you remember back when I first started, I was going to become the best science writer I could be!”

It sounded really self-serving, but my friend nodded sagely and agreed and then said, “Well, you’ve earned every bit of it. Now I have to go read some of your work and see what I can learn from it.”

That was a couple of years ago, but I still think about that conversation. I like to write about science in as many venues as I can — as my friend Kelly Beatty said at dinner recently, “You’re omnivorous” when it comes what I write about and where my work appears. And, that’s cool. It wasn’t quite where I set out to be described as when I was a beginning science writer, but it has been an adventure to be a science writer and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Reporting the Universe

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Writing the Cosmos Takes You Places You Don’t Expect

I got my start as a science writer when I decided I could do a better job of telling a story about astronomy than somebody else was doing. As I recall, the first thing I wrote was a planetarium show about light-travel time. Not much later, I found myself at a newspaper, doing all kinds of odd editorial and writing jobs. Not all of it was science-related, but occasionally I’d get to tell an astronomy story. And, sometimes I’d get stuck with something like “Balance an Egg on the Equinox: Fact or Fiction?” Eventually I moved fulltime into science writing just about the time I went back to graduate school.

Life’s like that. You start out in one direction and end up going places you never expect to be. I made that observation to a student reporter from the University of Colorado who called me a while back to update my “facts” for the alumni association. That led to a story that showed up in the spring issue of Bylines, the CU Journalism alumni magazine. I’m not sure she knew what to make of what I said. As I recall, when one graduates, it seems like life’s paths are set — you major in journalism or physics or whatever and that’s what you’ll do your whole life, right?

Well, not so much. I went back to school to try for a PhD in Astrophysics. I didn’t get there for various reasons, but I did study a lot of physics, astronomy, and planetary science along the way. Ultimately I ended up with hours and hours of science course work, but a masters’ in journalism and mass communication aimed at presenting astronomy and space science to the public. And, today I routinely research and write about astronomy, astrophysics, and planetary science — depending on the project I’m doing.

I’d like to go back and complete that PhD path, but for now I’m on the trail of science writing, taking all that immense background and experience in science and science writing and using it to tell stories about the universe. Along the way I’ve worked on an HST team, edited a science magazine, written research papers, worked with scientists to tell their stories, written exhibits (one set about astronomy and another about climate change) for two major institutions, and created many a planetarium and online video piece to help astronomers and the public understand the cosmos.

The message here is that one’s paths can be as varied as there are places to explore in the cosmos. Not sure if my Bylines profile got that across, but it was interesting to see a snapshot of my career taken by someone else.