Lindsay H. Metcalf Uses Verse to Write about STEM

by Sue Heavenrich

Today I’m chatting with award-winning author. Lindsay H. Metcalf. I was introduced to her writing through her nonfiction picture books about Beatrix Potter and indoor farming. This spring her newest book, Footeprint: Eunice Newton Foote at the Dawn of Climate Science and Women’s Rights, was released from Charlesbridge. Footeprint is written for teens and, unlike her previous books, is a novel-in-verse! I loved reading it so much that I knew we had to sit down and talk about her book, climate science, and women’s history.

Welcome to the GROG, Lindsay. The first thing I want to know is why you decided to write this book as a novel rather than nonfiction? 

Lindsay: I started writing FOOTEPRINT as nonfiction but ran into roadblocks with few sections I didn’t have answers for. When I began researching Eunice Newton Foote’s life, there were no traditionally published books about her. Here was a woman who had discovered something groundbreaking—that excess carbon dioxide warms the atmosphere—and she had been largely forgotten after her 1856 experiment was published. I became determined to piece together a birth-to-death story of her life, just to get it all on the record. 

The vast majority of the book is factual and documented in the book’s extensive bibliography. In a few places, I hedged to access the emotional core of the moment. Take, for example, the poem where Eunice learns about the upcoming 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in her town of Seneca Falls, NY. The poem says she learned of the convention by reading an article in the Seneca County Courier. It’s true that Eunice attended the convention and got involved, and it’s true that the newspaper ran an announcement. I can’t prove that she read it. There are a few other examples of this kind of “light fiction” throughout the book. Generally, I stuck as closely to the facts as I could. 

Me: That makes sense. Can you tell us how you decided to use verse as the means of telling Eunice's story?

Lindsay: Verse was an extension of my desire to stick closely to the facts while also pulling emotion into the story. With verse, I could use the conventions of poetry (metaphor, simile, white space, etc.) to invite the reader to bring their own emotion to the story, rather than me assigning feelings to Eunice:

Eunice isn’t sure what to expect, 

but she is drawn to this women’s convention

like a magnet, 

or like gravity. 

Another advantage with verse was the nature of the poems themselves. Each one captures a moment, and the breaks between them represent the passage of time. During my research I created a timeline of Eunice’s life, but there were gaps of months or years where I had no idea what Eunice was doing. Instead of making anything up, I could transition with a poem about what was happening around her or a more thematic poem to set tone. These helped place her firmly in the period of industrialization and contextualize why her experiments and women’s rights activism were important.

photo: Lindsay,  standing next to statues of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass at the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, NY where she presented a program about FOOTEPRINT on April 18.

Me: That’s a brilliant reason to use poetry to tell a story! The combination of poetry and Eunice’s story engaged me more than I expected. The story is from the 1800s, but the battles Eunice faced – to be taken seriously as a woman in science and to be acknowledged for her contributions – continue. In one poem, Eunice wonders: how can any group advance while holding back any other? I get the feeling that this book is informed and inspired by our current time.

Lindsay: I was absolutely inspired by current politics. We are living through a time of extreme contradiction. Scientists have proven that climate change is real, and yet so many world powers are failing to heed their calls to action. And not just failing through negligence, but in the case of the United States, actively erasing documentation of human-caused climate change, first by scrubbing federal websites (1) and documents of climate-change references and data, and last winter, by taking steps to shutter the National Center for Atmospheric Research.(2)

Eunice’s story fascinated me because she and her family’s storyline intertwined with many consequential events of the mid-nineteenth century. She and her husband, Elisha, were inventors, and he went on to be the US patent commissioner in the late 1860s during the height of industrialization. His department approved patents for many of the first machines to use fossil fuels—the cradle of human-caused climate change itself.

Me: Can you talk about word choice? I especially like how you describe Eunice’s birth as being born “kicking the glass ceiling" and, later, describing the women’s convention as “the convention to defy convention”. Do you think verse opens up to this sort of word play more than straight nonfiction?

Lindsay: For me it does! I love to play with language—the way it sounds, feels on the tongue, and looks on the page. This applies when I write picture books, but verse especially opens up the latter, with line breaks emphasizing certain words visually. I wrote most of FOOTEPRINT in free verse, but I often toyed with tabs and white space to echo a poem’s theme, sometimes veering into concrete poetry. All of that brings a distant story more into the visceral present.

photo: Lindsay points to a tiny portrait of a woman who she believes is Eunice Newton Foote. The painting is "Dudley Observatory Dedication, August 28, 1856,” by Tompkins Harrison Matteson, 1857. It’s held at the Albany Institute of History & Art, where Lindsay talked about FOOTEPRINT and her suspected presence in the painting on April 19.

Me: What are some of the challenges you faced writing about climate science, and the experiments Eunice undertook? Did the complexity of the science sway you toward YA?

Lindsay: The science was one of the easiest parts for me to write, because it was fully documented. Eunice’s experiment, “Circumstances affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” was published, so I could write in detail about how she conducted her experiment by placing test tubes filled with different gases in the sun and measuring their temperatures over time. I could quote Eunice’s words and conclusions. The understandings of the scientific community of the mid-1800s were also well documented, so I could readily understand that she sought to understand why the world was warmer when dinosaurs lived.

I wrote and the story poured out without me giving much thought to where it would appear on the shelf. I had a half-formed belief that the book might be middle-grade, but I wasn’t sure. It didn’t feature a child protagonist because I didn’t know much about Eunice’s childhood. My editor at Charlesbridge wisely read what I had written, considered the language level, and placed it in the YA category. 

Me: Before writing for children, you worked as a journalist. How did that experience inform your approach to writing for kids and the topics you choose?

Lindsay: I started out covering education in a suburban bureau of The Kansas City Star newspaper, so I was always in the space of thinking about what kids learn, and how decisions made by adults affect that learning. My favorite assignments were both investigative and narrative, layered with emotion. Those stories departed from the daily churn I had to produce after attending school board or municipal meetings. 

With writing for children, I get to cherry-pick my favorite parts of journalism—the heavy, archival research and the reveal of the universal human experience through empowering narratives. There was a learning curve to go from writing for a daily newspaper to working on a project alone, on spec, for months or years at a time. But I am still having fun as I attempt to reveal stories that help people think about the world in a new way. 

Me: What do you hope readers take away from your book?

Lindsay: On a personal level, I hope readers see Eunice’s resilience and feel inspired to chase their dreams, no matter what obstacles they face. Eunice lived during a time when women could not vote or own property, intellectual or real. She wanted to practice science and share her inventions with the world. To achieve that, she had to join a movement to fight for her right to do so. 

Zooming out, I hope readers think about the what-ifs of today. When I talk to young people about Eunice, I ask them to consider the butterfly effect. How would our present time have been different if the world had listened to Eunice? What about the future and the paths before us? What if we don’t listen to the scientists of today? 

Thank you, Lindsay! You can find out more about Lindsay at her website, lindsayhmetcalf.com.

Read more about Eunice Foote, the scientist that history forgot at 

https://www.charlesbridge.com/blogs/news/the-brilliant-climate-scientist-history-forgot