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Soon — perhaps as early as 2019 — we will see the creation of the first woolly mammoth in almost 4,000 years. 

At least that’s what a team of Harvard researchers is hoping. If everything goes to plan, they will pull off the “de-extinction” using an artificial womb and an embryo engineered by splicing mammoth genes (preserved in the Siberian ice) into the DNA of an Asian elephant. If it works, and they eventually succeed in bringing an embryo to term, the resulting creature will have the small ears, subcutaneous fat, long shaggy hair, and cold-adapted blood of the long-vanished mammoth.

I have been thinking a lot about woolly mammoths for a while now...

I begin with the hunger of Albert Camus. The philosopher, novelist, and playwright was born in French Algeria, living for much of his childhood in a home without electricity or running water. No oven — just an alcohol stove. No toilets — just holes in the masonry. And no father: his dad, Lucien, was killed by shrapnel when Camus was a baby. In The First Man, Camus wrote of his mother Catherine's "gnarled" hands, broken by years of scrubbing floors and wringing laundry. He described his grandmother's whip, the bull pizzle, used when the boy did not obey.

But this was no simple lament. Camus also offered his childhood pleasures: the Mediterranean sea, the smell of dirt in autumn rains, soccer matches, the stoic manliness of sailors, even the stink of urine after days of banal office labor...

An obsession with bees offers unexpected pleasures. I stand, motionless but ready, by a clump of flowers. Then, the quick swoosh of the net, the moment of uncertainty while the results are still unknown, and finally, the belly leap of joy at a successful catch.  Bee hunting has been a surprising side benefit of my quest to learn about native bees. 

Five years ago I never would have thought that I would find bee hunting a delight or that I would fall in love with a battery of insects, and yet I have, all thanks to the discovery of one small fact: honey bees can’t pollinate tomatoes. That piece of information shook my world. I’ve gardened my entire adult life, had a garden design and coaching business...

Describe your book:
My very first book, 50 Hikes With Kids: Oregon and Washington, is a handpicked selection of the most kid-friendly hikes in the region. Over the course of a winter I was on the ground, hiking trails, finding hidden gems, and recording data to come up with the best trails to get kids excited about the outdoors. All the essential details are in there to make exploring a breeze — easy to follow maps, distances and elevations (all easy to moderate and under 4 miles), and tons of fun scavenger hunts to keep the kids engaged!
 
What was your favorite book as a child?
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. This book introduced me to maps and I fell in love...

Being the most sentient form of life on a planet can be a lonely business. We humans are constantly looking for our reflection in the animal kingdom — we want the sea otters holding hands to be “in love” and our dog’s smile to mean it is happy. Our urge to anthropomorphize is compulsive, but it is especially distracting when it comes to observing our closest animal cousin, the chimpanzee, which is something I discovered firsthand when I had the chance to join the primatologist Dr. Catherine Hobaiter and her team studying the communication of wild chimps in Uganda. 

Our expedition began at the tail end of the night in order to catch the chimps as they woke...

So, as a writer, I write a lot of sequels. And because I write a lot of sequels, I sometimes worry that I'm going to write a book that someone who is new to me is not going to want to read. The reason for that makes perfect sense to me as a reader: they're worried that they're going to get into the story late. They won't understand what's going on. They're going to be confused by events, and that's going to make them angry. Then they're not going to have any fun reading my book. I think this is a serious problem, especially in science fiction and fantasy, where so many books are sequels, or in a series, or otherwise part of a larger universe...

I was new to the writers’ room. Mostly, I’d been helping myself to the ubiquitous snacks that filled the otherwise unremarkable, whiteboard-lined office. Keeping my head down. Listening and learning what it meant to be a TV writer. But when somebody pitched that our main character — the president — should fire his FBI director, I saw an opportunity to prove my worth.

“Guys,” I started in, “No president these days would realistically fire his FBI director while under investigation.” Of course, the real often bends to the dramatic in my new business, but the room, deferring to my expertise, agreed it was a nonstarter for our pretend president. We broke for what I had already gathered was the linchpin of the day...

Describe your latest book.
My latest poetry book, Sea of Strangers, invites you to go beyond love and loss to explore themes of self-discovery and empowerment as you navigate your way around the human heart. Sea of Strangers follows my internationally bestselling debut novel, Sad Girls, an emotionally charged coming-of-age story, where young love, dark secrets, and tragedy collide.

What was your favorite book as a child?
The Green Wind by Thurley Fowler was my childhood favorite. Other notable mentions include The Chocolate War, Hating Alison Ashley, Matilda, The Ordinary Princess, The Outsiders, The Singing Tree, Deenie, and Looking for Alibrandi...

Summer of 2000, after the first of a two-year MFA program at NYU, I had gone to Detroit for the annual Cave Canem retreat for African American poets, and met Don, another aspiring bard. Poets were arriving from all over the country. Like me, Don was from New York. I had only lived in New York for a year, having escaped the tedium of my native South Jersey, but because I had ridden the New York subway uptown a few times, I felt entitled to some metropolitan cred. Later that summer, after we got back home from Cranbrook, a kind of high-art school and museum where the retreat convened that year, Don introduced me to Ginger, my future wife...

“Write what you know.” 

Platitudes. No fun. Yet...

You’re gonna write what you know no matter what you write. And it’s not going to come out the way you think it is. It’s not a matter of writing about science because you’re a scientist, or setting your book on a farm because you grew up on one. It’s about taking pieces of the life you’ve lived, almost always subconsciously, and discovering you’ve put them in the story long after you’ve written the end.

The rough draft for Unbury Carol was written in a 15-day explosion of some 5,000 words a day, a gloriously manic run. The rewrites, of course, took forever. That’s how it goes for us pansters, those of us who write without an outline...