Rebecca E.F. Barone is an engineer and author. Realizing her love of books in addition to numbers, she now describes the world with words rather than equations. Her first two books, Race to the Bottom of the Earth: Surviving Antarctica and Unbreakable: The Spies Who Cracked the Nazis’ Secret Code, received a combined nine starred reviews and were featured on numerous “Best of” lists. Her third book, Mountain of Fire: The Eruption and Survivors of Mount St. Helens came out on May 14, 2024, to starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist. Visit Rebecca's website to learn more about her work.
1. How did you begin your journey as an author?
I always feel sheepish saying this, but I hated writing when I was a kid! I’m not a person who says they wrote their first book at 6 or something and just kept going. Writing for me came about as a necessity. As I started doing more researching as a part of my engineering work, I had to write more and more. I wrote so much that first it became comfortable for me and then enjoyable. It got so that I liked writing the story of my research more than I liked doing the actual work! That’s when I knew I was a writer at heart.
2. When you begin creating a book, do you always know where the story is going?
Not at all! I was surprised when my first two books went in a different direction than what I had anticipated. Now, I’ve come to accept the winding journey.
With my first book, I thought I would write about what it took to survive traveling in Antarctica; I ended up writing about what it means to be a hero. In Unbreakable, my second book, I started out writing about spies and codebreaking, but I ended up telling a story about teamwork in the face of the worst kind of adversity. Mountain of Fire is of course a story about a volcano, but it’s really about the necessity of science literacy. These days, I’m glad to be surprised where a story takes me!
3. Once you’ve created a first draft, what’s your next step? Critique group? Check in with your agent? Tuck it away to let it age?
I’m a big fan of stepping back and just letting work sit for a bit. If I can swing it with deadlines, I’ll walk away from a draft for a month or more. When I come back to it, there are some parts I’m surprised at how much I like, but there are usually far more parts I read with a grimace.
4. How do you divide your time between research and writing?
This seems to change with every book! For Mountain of Fire, I was lucky enough to be able to interview so many of the people featured in the book. Unfortunately, I had to start drafting before I could get to all the interviews. I usually try to get the brunt of the research done upfront, so this was an interesting experience researching and writing in parallel.
5. What’s a particularly striking or memorable reaction someone has had to this book? Mountain of Fire: The Eruption and Survivors of Mount St. Helens takes places in 1980, which isn’t is all that long ago, really! I love when people tell me they remember the eruption and remember where they were when they heard about it. Every time I speak with readers, someone always says that they had a jar of ash from the eruption. It’s so fun to hear what people recall!
6. If you read this book to a room filled with kids, what message would you want them to leave with?
Science is a process. The first answer isn’t always the right answer, and there are usually mistakes along the way. Keep going.
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