The Nature Detective
Philippi Hall: A photo essay of USM's 'Flip' side

The Nature Detective

By Gregory Reid

Sometimes, the best stories are the ones people find the hardest to believe. Take, for example, the book about dust that Amazon.com named among the Best Books of 2001. Seriously. Dust: The same stuff that’s gathering behind your couch and covering the dashboard of your car. Yes, a whole book about those tiny particles that seem to come out of nowhere and end up everywhere, entitled The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things (Wiley & Sons, 2001). Written by South Portland resident and University of Southern Maine alumna Hannah Holmes, it’s a hit, complete with glowing reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Scientific American. And it has garnered media coverage from The Maine Times to National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, and national radio networks from Canada, Britain, and Australia.

A pre-publication mention in Time bounced it from obscurity in Amazon’s database to its 60,000th best-selling book. In February 2002, the day after an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air was broadcast, The Secret Life of Dust leapt to Amazon’s 18th best-selling book, before eventually falling back into the pack.

Was all this evidence that the culture that embraced Seinfeld, the TV show about nothing, had reached a frightening new interest in the mundane?

Not even close.

Holmes, who earned a bachelor of arts degree in English in 1989, came to the book after she’d carved out a career as one of the top science and natural history writers in the country. Her freelance work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Sierra, National Geographic Traveler, and Escape. She’s been a regular contributor to Discovery Channel Online, and had done broadcast work for NPR’s Living on Earth and Discovery Channel Online’s Science Live. In all, she’s been on assignment in 20 countries over 10 years.

In The Secret Life of Dust, Holmes turns to her subject with a research scientist’s zest for detail and a magazine journalist’s flair for storytelling. The result? A swirling mass of dirt transforms into a shimmering font of gold.

A wild ride

“It’s really important in science writing to have characters and scenes to pull the reader through the information,” Holmes says. “People believe they don’t like science anyway. So as a writer, you need to make your stories as gripping and compelling as they can be.

“You need to give the facts personality and plot. Convince people they’re reading a story, not a science report.”

In a little more than 200 pages, Holmes takes readers on a tour of our dusty universe, beginning as far off as the formation of stars, and ending, more or less, with the personal dust storm each of us creates every instant we’re on the planet. We learn about the stuff’s role in the formation of heavenly bodies, and its life in the upper stratosphere. Holmes tells us of its role in the preservation of dinosaur bones, and in the rise of asthma in children and the premature death of 60,000 Americans and a million Chinese each year. She tells us what’s in it, how it is changing life on the planet. And she even takes us to the frontlines of a microscopic war zone, where dust mites battle deep in the carpet beneath your bed. It’s a story built on science, but it’s a story told through people.

Readers get to know scientists from as close by as Hanover, N.H., to Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, to Seattle, Washington. We meet people whose work in astrophysics, geology, anthropology and epidemiology, among others, is affected by dust in far-flung places as diverse as a mile beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, to the jungles of Madagascar and the sandstone cliffs of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

Holmes had little trouble convincing San Francisco-based literary agent Karen Nazor ’87 that a book about dust could be a compelling read. Nazor and Holmes were childhood friends and English majors at USM. Over the years, they’ve kept in touch. Periodically, Nazor nudged her old friend to write a book.

“We were on the phone, and she’d been traveling,” Nazor says. “And she just wanted to stay home a while, and write something in-depth. I told her, ‘Want to stay home? Write me a book proposal!’ ”

Holmes tells of the book’s genesis in its introduction. On assignment to write about dinosaur beds of the Gobi Desert, Holmes saw great clouds of dust high above the desert floor. Now, Holmes was no stranger to dust. It was everywhere—in her hair and ears, in her camera gear, notebooks, even the base of her sleeping bag. “What hit me like a ton of dust was the realization that there was tons of dust in the sky all the time. I don’t think I was thinking a book-size project at the time, but I knew there was something there.”

Turns out, it was something everywhere. In the desert and on other trips, she realized, that dust was into everything—even conversations she had with scientists she’d interviewed over the years. Finally, she sat down to work out a detailed book proposal.

“I wrote very rich outlines for each chapter,” Holmes says. That meant extensive research. A regular part of her routine was phone calls and visits to USM’s Glickman Library in Portland. “It’s incalculable how large a role the USM library played in the making of the book.”

She says David Vardeman and the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office acquired journal article after obscure article for her. “I always considered libraries symbols of civilization,” she says. “But until I started the book, I had no idea just how powerful their reach is.”

Six months later, she had a 30-page package to offer publishers. They liked what they saw. Five were interested right away. Three weeks after it hit the market, the proposal had a buyer, John Wiley & Sons of New York. Eighteen months later, Holmes had her first book published.

“It wasn’t as hard a sell as you’d imagine,” Nazor said. “Hannah had an audience from the Discovery work. The subject has very broad appeal. Here’s a story about something that affects our health, our environment, and the future of the universe.

“And Hannah’s writing is so smart,” she says. “She’s got that terrific wry, New England sense of humor that comes through on the page. She’s taken something as dry-seeming as dust and added a sparkle to it.”

Defying convention

Another great story that’s hard to believe: Holmes, the globetrotting science writer, avoided lab sciences in college. In fact, at first she avoided college altogether.

In 1982, fresh out of Boothbay Region High School, young Hannah, the daughter of longtime USM microbiology professor Peter Holmes, seemed headed for her freshman year at the University of Massachusetts. She wanted to be a writer: since childhood she’d dreamed of writing for National Geographic. But by ’82, she also wanted to be a rock star. Or maybe an artist. She was a young woman listening to her muse. Only the muse told her to buy a van and travel around the United States for a year and a half. When she came back, Amherst had lost its luster.

Initially, her decision to attend the University of Southern Maine was a financial one. As the child of a faculty member, she enrolled at reduced tuition.

“In retrospect coming to USM was the ideal situation,” she says. “It was in the part of the world I wanted to be. The student body was a bit older, and more interesting to me. And it left me with no debt, which is a huge advantage if you’re going to be a writer.

“It was a very small group of us, the English majors,” Holmes says. “You got a sense from faculty that you were an individual. You got a lot of individual attention.”

Soon after she enrolled, something shifted inside. She was in a class with English professor Nancy Gish. Gish handed back a paper and told her, You’re very good at writing. You ought to consider pursuing it.

Then came a news-writing course with longtime Portland-area writer and editor John Lovell. At the time, Lovell was working for the Portland Newspapers. Holmes calls that course a formative experience, opening the door to opportunities to write.

At 19, she was hired as a correspondent for the Portland Evening Express, covering Buxton and Standish. From there, she took whatever work a writer could find. She was an intern with Portland Monthly. She wrote for the Maine Audubon Society, USM’s university publications, The Portland Business Journal, and the fledgling Casco Bay Weekly. She knew what she wanted to do, and she was doing it. By 1989, she worked her way up to news editor at the CBW. Still, she was one course from graduation.

“Maybe it was a rebellion thing, with my father on the faculty and everything,” she says, smiling at the memory. “But all through school I avoided that lab science requirement. I wanted nothing to do with it.”

Of course. The dreaded lab science requirement. What self-respecting liberal arts major wouldn’t put it off? Still, the time had come to graduate. A night course in geology fit her schedule, so she signed up. What was the worst that could happen?

“I left that course regretting that I didn’t major in geology,” she says. “There was just something about the language of rocks that drew me in.”

Eventually, she fit her interests together.

“You’re handed little choices in life, and subconsciously you opt toward the ones that interest you most,” she says. “My choices steered me away from local social issues and politics, and toward nature, science and the environment.”

That steered her toward the next professional hurdle, learning magazine feature writing. She took a job in New York, spending almost four years on the staff of the environmental publication, Garbage. That experience taught her the magazine business from the inside out. Specifically, she learned how successful freelance writers pitched story ideas, landed assignments and produced work that magazines needed.

Then she moved back to southern Maine. (“No matter how many times I try to get away, I kept moving back. It’s an affordable place to live, and there’s a wonderful quality of life.”) She began sending out proposals to national magazines. Her first major travel assignment was for the magazine, Eco-Traveler. The editor there sent her to Churchill, Manitoba, to cover polar bear migration.

One assignment led to the next, and her portfolio grew to include some of the biggest-name general interest and popular science publications in the country. Soon she was a regular contributor to Discovery Channel Online, launching her entertaining stories of the natural world into cyberspace.

“I’m extremely fortunate to have the lifestyle I do,” she says. “It’s often challenging and frustrating but I stop and compare the challenges and frustrations I’d have to face as a real estate broker or banker. And I recognize this line of work is much better suited for my character.”

Next chapter

For now, an assignment for National Geographic remains a goal. In the months following the release of The Secret Life of Dust, Holmes found herself in demand for interviews and working a circuit of local and national bookstores and other venues as a guest speaker.

She’s “giving talks on space dust for the astronomy crowd, house dust for the bookstore crowd. Public speaking isn’t natural for writers. But it can be learned. I’ve confronted my demons and I’m really getting to enjoy it.”

A paperback publication of the book is planned. Meanwhile, she’s eased back toward the magazine market. But a softened economy has cut back work for freelancers. So she’s back at work on a book proposal.

In her new project, Holmes hopes to tap the growing market for books about urban ecology, a sub-genre of the bio-diversity movement. For the 10 or 20 years, publishers have been buying books about environmental concerns of wild and exotic places; the upper canopy of a South American rain forest, for example. In urban ecology, writers and scientists look at similar concerns, but in far more familiar places. The book’s working title is The World’s Smallest Safari: Crawling Across a Suburban Backyard.

“It’s the kind of book where I’m asking more prosaic questions, like why don’t tulip bulbs freeze and rot in winter? What do worms really eat? How do residential uses of land affect the ecosystem? How many pounds of ants are in my yard?”

Trust Holmes to present quirky facts (earthworms were not indigenous to North America) in her insightful and amusing way. And expect more extensive end notes, interesting characters, and gripping plot lines. And about those ants? Better stand back. Under Holmes’s steady and experienced hand, you can bet those buggers will soar.

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