1. Please tell us what inspired your work in Song for a Whale (as well as any future work you’d like to share about).
It was the real-life "lonely whale" who inspired Song For a Whale; when I found out about him, I kept wondering what his life was like and why he had an unusual song. Pretty soon I started writing about him, and then came up with the character of Iris as someone who'd feel a strong connection to him.
2. What draws you to write for young readers?
I especially love writing for the middle grade audience because it's such an interesting time in our lives, when we're not little kids anymore but still several years from adulthood. It's during those years we start figuring out who we are, what books or hobbies we like (instead of what parents choose for us), who our friends are, etc. When we're asked to remember our first favorite books, most people think back to something they discovered during those middle grade years, about 10-12 years old.
3. What message/s do you want to share through your work?
I love to explore connections that we humans have to the natural world and to one another, and I hope that the stories I write show the importance of those connections, and that everyone has a need to be seen and heard. I also like writing characters who discover during their journey that they're strong enough to do what's right.
4. Any message for young creators?
I'd tell young creators that like any skill, we get better at writing by doing it. If you play sports or a musical instrument, you know that you improve with practice. Writing is no different; the more we write, the more we learn about how to create interesting stories and characters. Every author has written hundreds of pages that will never be published, but none of that is wasted. We're better writers after all of that work on our craft.
You can keep a notebook with you to jot down ideas, character traits, bits of dialogue, and more.
I like to get to know my characters so well that they feel like real people. Then when I'm writing the story, it's easier to think about how they'll react to the problems that come up (and how they'll cause their own problems, then solve them).
Here are a few more connections that might be of interest: there's a blue-fin hybrid who's been spotted off the California coast: https://condorexpress.com/flue-finblue-the-hybrid-joins-the-blue-whales-humpbacks-and-loads-of-dolphins-on-todays-list/
If the real 52 hertz whale is a hybrid, he's likely a blue-fin, since those are two closely related whales that occasionally have calves together. If not a hybrid, he could be a blue or a fin whale who has a weird song for some reason. There's a great new documentary about the search for the lonely whale, if you haven't seen that yet.
And there's this video of some Deaf students in the Dominican Republic on a whale watch: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-environment-39319947
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