"Sideways" on Tour

As if on cue, the clouds returned to the Pacific Northwest as Mountaineers Books' released my new book, A Sideways Look at Clouds. The clouds never do anything on cue, so their timing is notable here. (Even stranger, Hurricane Maria made landfall as I was starting my book tour).

The clouds have been dramatic this fall and I've been on the road encouraging readers to look up and enjoy the every-changing drama in the skies at bookstores and other venues in Olympia, Seattle, Bellingham, Marysville, Kirkland, Portland, and Washington, DC. (Check out my events calendar for upcoming talks and book signings).

More than talking about my book and sharing some of my photos of the spectacular clouds we have in the Pacific Northwest, I've loved answering their questions about clouds: How exactly does it rain? When is a cloud a "cloud" and when do you call them "clouds?" Why do we have so many clouds here? What's the deal with high and low pressure? Are clouds changing? I am going to create a FAQs page to answer all of these and more.

I've also loved hearing people's stories about clouds. Here is one story (handwritten) and delivered to me at the 2017 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) trade show by Mary Anne Fraser, manager of Brilliant Moon books in Shelton.

"100 years ago, when I'd just turned twelve, I spent met hard-earned babysitting wages on a small Kodak camera. Within an hour the complete roll was filled and my mom (knowing how excited I'd been about this long-awaited purchase) offered to take the roll to our local "Pay and Save" to have my photos developed.

The week-long wait was finally over and I ran to the car to discover what my new hobby had delivered. Before I could open the obviously already opened packet, my mom said to me in a rather disappointed voice: "They're all clouds."

I looked at her, waiting for the rest of the observation ("They're beautiful." "I love the one that looks like an otter." "What an artist's eye you have.") but, alas, that was the sum total of her opinion.

I, on the other hand, was thrilled. Yes, they WERE all clouds."

While in Portland, I visited KATU-TV to talk with Helen Raptis on "AMNW" and Tra'Renee Chambers on "Afternoon Live" and also with Jefferson Smith, host of "XRAY in the Morning" (skip to 1:54:48) before my talk at Powell's on Hawthorne

After my interview on "Afternoon Live," the on-set photographer, Mark Plut, showed me photographs of his two recent paintings--of clouds!  "I too am fascinated by clouds," Mark told me, "especially how to paint them." In the first painting, Mark as painted a sky washed with what look like cirrostratus clouds to me. In the second painting, the landscape is transformed by more dynamic cumulus and altocumulus clouds. What a difference, eh? Thank you, Mark!

And because you can never have too many clouds--or paintings of clouds--in the Pacific Northwest, I went on a cloud hunt at the Portland Museum of Art. What a bonanza of clouds! Here is a gallery of a few of my favorites. 

Oskar Kokoschka/Tuileries Gardens, Paris; George Inness/Apezzo Pass, Titian's House; Joe Goode/Torn Cloud Painting; Robert Henri/Rue de Rennes; Robert Goonough/Grey Development; N.C. Wyeth/Rip Van Winkle, endpaper illustration; [forgot to photograph the label of the skyscrapers in the clouds--ooops]; George Michel/Landscape; ibid/detail of cloud

REMEMBER....EARTH WITHOUT ART is JUST "EH"

Speaking of...I'll be signing books at the 37th Annual  Wild Arts Festival at Montgomery Park in Portland, OR. The festival runs November 18-19 and benefits the fabulous Audubon Society of Portland. I'll be there Sunday noon-4 p.m. along with 36 other authors (and more than 200 artists) whose work is inspired by nature.

Sideways Plus #3: +Visible+

This third "Sideways Plus" post offers an excerpt from "Visible," the third chapter of my new book, A Sideways Look at Clouds plus illustrations and resources related to the chapter.

"Ironically, the more I understood about the visibility of clouds, the more difficult they were for me to watch. While gazing at the clouds, I would superimpose onto them as many individual water droplets as my minds' eye could generate. Then I'd travel 93 million miles to the sun and bring a big beam of light into the clouds and imagine multicolored wavelengths scattering every which way. My clouds flashed in rainbow colors. My clouds flashed bright white and gray. My clouds vibrated and buzzed with energy. My clouds were exhausting. I felt scatterbrained. I gave up drinking coffee for a while, thinking that the buzz from the caffeine might be jamming some electromagnetic channel of understanding between my brain and the clouds. Some days I couldn't bring myself to look at clouds at  all. They were just big billowing reminders of how little I know. Gone were the happy, innocent days when I saw them simply as dragons or elephants--or ice-cream castles in the air."  (page 49)

"Pure sunlight is not yellow and it does not emanate in lines or triangular rays. Pure sunlight is white and moves in invisible waves. This makes the sun difficult to depict accurately with crayons or any medium." (p. 46)

"That white light was composed of several constituent colors was proven by Isaac Newton  in a serious of experiments he conducted with a glass prism between 1666 and 1672. Although nearly 350 years had passed since Newton's discovery, I was happy to rediscover this 'celebrated phenomenon of color' on this morning." (p. 47) (Portrait of Newton by Godfrey Kneller, 1609)

"There are plenty of books on 'the art of seeing' but none so perfectly--and uncannily--addressed my problems of seeing the clouds as a book of art and literary criticism by British novelist, Jeanette Winterson." (p. 52) 

"'Pea souper' struck me as a quaint and colorful British name for the particularly thick fog common in London and elsewhere in the U.K...[but] this naturally occurring fog turned toxic during the Industrial Revolution when the water droplets in fog formed around sulfur dioxide and the soot belched from coal-boring factories and fireplaces." p. 56 Read the story of the Great Smog of 1952 here. [NOTE: Smog is a word combining "SMoke" and fOG."]

"Fog is the only cloud you can swim in, though no one mentions this fact or recommends this simple, rare pleasure." p. 57

"At the crest of the hill leading down to the lake, I felt a smile stretch across my face. There was no lake. There were no docks, no boats, no lake-front houses. It was all fog. All fog except for the wide cement slabs of the public boat ramp. And the brown wooden fishing regulation sign. And the pickup truck." (p. 60)

Saving the best for last here... PLEASE PLEASE click here to watch Joni Mitchell singing her song "Both Sides Now" on the Mama Cass TV show in 1969. Perhaps unwittingly, Mama Cass is wearing an outfit that shows her uncanny (or unwitting?) understanding of the sunlight and visible spectrum ;)

Read Other Sideways+ Posts:  Prologue + Chapter 1/Cloud

Sideways Plus #2: +Cloud+

This second "Sideways Plus" post offers an excerpt from "Cloud," the second chapter of my new book, A Sideways Look at Clouds, and illustrations and resources related to the chapter.

"I recognized a cloud when I saw one of course, but I couldn't explain what made a cloud a cloud and not something else, such s smoke, haze, steam, or mist. I knew clouds were made of water and that they floated, but so did icebergs. What kind of water were clouds made of? Was it plain old water--H20--or something more special? Was fog a cloud? What were the defining features of a cloud?."

"From twelve different sources, I copied out twelve different definitions of "cloud." I marked the words that appeared in at least three of the definitions. Ten key words emerged: visible, mass, water, droplets, ice, crystals, suspended, atmosphere, above, earth. By adding a few prepositions and articles, I created a new definition: 'A cloud is a visible mass of water droplets or ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the earth.'...Each word felt like a stepping-stone--no, more like a door. A door I could open. A door I could wanter through to find my way into the clouds."

The Danger Zone: Click here for information on the free, two-hour SkyWarn Weather Spotter Training offered by National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Local classroom training and online training are offered. Click here to hear the song that accompanied the time-lapse sequences of "menacing" clouds shown during my training course. The poor clouds! 

Luke Howard (1772-1864). This man brought order to the chaos of the skies when he introduced the Latin names for the clouds in 1802.

Order a copy of The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, by Richard Hamblyn. This story of Luke Howard (a chemist and lifelong cloud watcher) answers the question: Why did it take so long to name the clouds? 

Get lost in the clouds by following this link to the International Cloud Atlas. This new digital edition was released in March 2017 by the World Meteorological Organization and is the gold standard for professional meteorologists, for those working in aeronautical and maritime environments, and for the amateur cloud-watcher.

The Cloud Appreciation Society is a web-based organization for cloud lovers around the world. On blue-sky days, you can find all the clouds (photos, poems, science, history) you'd ever want here. Become member and get a cloud a day in your inbox. 

My three go-to books for identifying clouds:

Next Sideways Plus post will feature the  "Visible" chapter. 

Why Read My Book on Clouds?

Readers all--I've just come from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association conference in Portland, OR, where I delivered a 5-minute "Sideways" pitch to a room full of wonderful booksellers, librarians, and bookstore owners from Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. (In fact, I delivered 4 of the 5 minutes of my comments because I mistook the 4-minute warning signal for the 5-minute signal and stopped abruptly. Oops!). The fifth minute follows the bold face, uppercase type about half way down.

According to the national weather service a “cloudy” day is one in which 7/8 or more of the sky is covered in clouds.

By this definition, the city of Olympia, WA—where I moved to 11 years ago is cloudy for a whopping 228 days of the year.

I assumed that people living in such a cloudy city would talk about clouds fluently and fondly the way they talk about salmon runs, tides, double carmel lattes, and IPAs.

Yet I never heard anyone talking about the clouds. Sure, they talked about the rain and the gray skies—but not about the clouds.

Was everyone talking about clouds behind my back?

I began asking around. I designed and posted an online “Cloud Survey” to find out what my friends and acquaintances knew about clouds. Sixty-seven people took my survey. Most of them could name two or three clouds (thunderheads, mare’s tails, cumulus, mostly). Most could recall childhood memories of spotting shapes in the clouds. Only a few could identify the clouds from the photographs included in the survey, explain how clouds formed, how they floated, or explain why they were white or pink.

They didn’t know much about clouds at all. They were just like me.

My survey respondets also expressed their embarrassment about their ignorance. How had they forgotten whatever they might have learned about clouds in school? Why, as adults, had they lost their curiosity? Why didn’t they look up more? 

Again—they were just like me.

I felt embarrassed by my near-total ignorance of clouds as well. Embarrassed, but also intrigued, and inspired to do something about it.

Long out of school and two years into my life in the Pacific Northwest, I began my journey into the clouds.

I am not a meteorologist. I have never taken a class in atmospheric science. I cannot claim to be a lifelong cloud watcher.

If you are wondering how such an unqualified person could written book on cloud--I have a little secret. The clouds are everywhere and you can learn about them—whoever you are and wherever you are.

You just have to look up and follow your curiosity.

I wrote my previous book, Rare Bird—the story of an endangered seabird called the Marbled Murrelet—the same way: By following my curiosity and not letting the fact I didn’t know anything hold me back.

A Sideways Look at Clouds is structured around the ten key words that define a “cloud.”  A visible mass of water droplets or ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the earth.

These words form the ten main chapters; each chapter pairs an exploration of the ten words with explanations of the one of the ten main cloud types cumulus, stratus, cirrus and the rest.

A SIDEWAYS LOOK AT CLOUDS  contains stories about what I learned over eight years of looking at the clouds around the Pacific Northwest and from what I learned from:

·      Textbooks in Atmospheric Science, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy

·      Professional meteorologists and graduate students with questions.

·      My husband my very own in-house “Dr. Science.”

·      Children’s books on weather and the atmosphere

·      The Cloud Appreciation Society—a web-based organization of 43,000 cloud lovers worldwide who share their cloud photos, poems, songs, art, and news about clouds.

·      Art Museums in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francsisco, and Washington DC

·      Open fields, rain forests, prairies, mountains, and the Pacific Ocean

·       Wilderness Skills Classes offered by the Mountaineers

·      A 17th-century Chinese Painting Manual

·      One early-morning swim in the fog

·      Listening to the rain on my roof day after day after day

·      Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”

·      A house fly

·      The movie Soylent Green

·      The view out my window seat on airplane trips

·      From the linen department at Bed Bath and Beyond

·      And from looking—really looking at the clouds for five minutes every day from my front yard.

My learning curve was steep and bumpy. I have done the hard work for you—by creating a gradual, and hopefully delightful and memorable learning curve for the lay reader. My book is a blend of science, natural history, memoir, and lots of humor. A Sideways Look at Clouds takes readers on the scenic route into the clouds. It will inspire them to chart their own idiosyncratic route into the clouds.

If you want to learn how clouds can deepen your sense of awe in the natural world, can bring you abiding joy and even solace--you and your devoted readers will love A Sideways Look at Clouds.

Ta dah!