Mary Woodbury

This month’s spotlight is on Susan M. Gaines, who wrote Carbon Dreams, her first published novel – and she has just completed another. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals, such as the North American Review and the Missouri Review, and in the anthologies Best of the West V and Sacred Ground: Writings About Home. She studied chemistry and oceanography before a love for literature lured her away from the lab, and her book, Echoes of Life: What Fossil Molecules Reveal about Earth History (Oxford University Press, 2009), employs narrative and literary prose to report on research in organic geochemistry. Currently she holds a post as writer-in-residence and co-director of the Fiction Meets Science program at the University of Bremen in Germany. Despite having spent much of her adult life abroad and found homes in Uruguay and Germany, Gaines regularly returns to her roots in northern California. Carbon Dreams was published in 2001 and is set in the 1980s; it is

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When I first talked with author Brian Burt a couple years ago, we sat in on a SFF World panel about climate change in fiction, and I was surprised at the things we had in common: we both hail from Indiana (go Hoosiers!), still dream of our golden (albeit separate) journeys to Ireland, and love red wine. And we like cycling and hiking. After a few talks about writing, I invited Brian to become a moderator at our Google+ newsgroup, “Ecology in Literature and the Arts.” Despite things in common, I was even more impressed that a debut novelist had had such success at creating a following for his books. Brian’s Burt’s biography: While on a consulting assignment in Dublin, Ireland, Brian became sufficiently inspired by the magical scenery and the rich literary tradition to try writing his own short stories. He had more than twenty science fiction and fantasy tales published in small press anthologies, genre magazines, and online

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