Breathing Water
Whoops, Where Did That Year Go?
Dear friends, It has been an event-filled year in my life and so you haven’t heard from me in a while. There were a few challenges that stalled my writing life: early-detected cancer (thank you, Baystate doctors for catching that so early), Carpal Tunnel Syndrome that made it…
The Canine-Human Success Story
Dogs ARE human’s best friend Genetic success is defined by numbers and dogs are a huge genetic success story. World-wide population estimates of dogs range from 700 million to 1 billion, usually listed behind the most populous large mammalian species of humans (7.8 billion- 2020), followed by cows,…
Who Was Rosie The Riveter?
Imagery This Rosie the Riveter image is widely recognized as a symbol of female empowerment and the feminist movement. It was originally a poster made to encourage the newly working women at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company during WWII. The poster was made by J. Howard Miller…
Disaster at the Brooklyn Navy Yard
In my novel, Breathing Water, Tony’s father works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, along with ~70,000 others during the WWII peak and ~10,000 others during peacetime. They mostly built battleships and aircraft carriers and did repairs on any number of other types of ships. The USS Arizona (sunk…
What Makes a Fox Tame?
Thanks to my friend Nora, another dog lover, for recommending the 2017 book: How to Tame a Fox (And Build a Dog) by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut. The book chronicles an extended experiment done in Siberia started in the 1950s by two amazing geneticists, Dmitri Belyaev…
Dating in the 1950s: Romantic and Dangerous
Dating became more formalized in the 1950s and also less chaperoned than in earlier generations. Although dating originated at the turn of the century, it continued to evolve away from courting rituals where men interacted with potential spouses in the girl’s parents home or in very public venues.…
The Cloisters Museum in Manhattan: a Peaceful Retreat in Life and Art
The Cloisters Museum, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is an unusual oasis in the very northwest corner of Manhattan (Inwood). The museum is a collection of Medieval art and architecture highlighting the Romanesque and Gothic periods from ~1050 -1500. Since the Catholic Church was the…
Being a Scientist and a Novelist … Isn’t That an Oxymoron?
Cultural Division of the Sciences and Humanities We live in a culture where facility with science, facts and numbers are considered left brain activities and creative endeavors like fiction, painting and music are considered right brain activities. Individuals are supposedly trapped into primarily using one half their brain…
As a Willow Grows So Does a Story
One of the most common questions people ask an author is: How long did it take to write the book? Some writers churn out a book a year and others take 5 or 10 years. The answer for me with Breathing Water is more complicated and I’ll tell…
Donna Barten: Writer, Scientist and One Who Wonders…
I first became interested in writing fiction while co-leading writing groups in a women’s prison. I volunteered with Voices From Inside as a balance to my work as a research neuroscientist, where I ran a lab studying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease for over 20 years. In these small…
Donna Barten 