100 Arkansas Insects

 The way we like to proceed is thus. When the weather is good, we pack our close-focusing binoculars, our macro cameras, a picnic lunch, and take off for the countryside. We're looking for birds and snakes and anything moving, but especially insects. Cheryl with her sharp eyes spots everything, and I with my lack of shame wriggle up on my belly to get close, and we both take pictures, especially if the particular creature we see is demonstrating its amazing behavior. Then we come home and download our pictures and see whose were best that day.

The last few cold dreary winters (and they seem to be getting colder and drearier) when there weren't any insects out, for something to do I began trying to gather some of our thousands of pictures together into books, with catchy titles like A Field Guide to the Tachinid, Syrphid, and Asilid Flies of Northeast Arkansas.  And then I started on a more conventional book, growing out of classes we taught for several years at the Arkansas Audubon Society adult workshops. After a minimal amount of class work, we would go outside (this was everyone's favorite part) and go walking, and when someone saw an interesting insect, we would stop and talk about it, then continue on till someone spotted another insect. So I started working on a book like that, trying to follow that pattern. I would put down our best pictures of our favorite insects and say a little something about each one. Cheryl read these and did the research to fact-check them, and modified them for clarity. Then we combined our best pictures, and it turned out that almost exactly 50% are Cheryl's and 50% are mine. We ended up with something we imagined might be publishable.

I don't remember how long ago it was I mentioned in this blog that I was contemplating starting a book to be called, I think I may have said, 50 Arkansas Insects.  If you remember, I put into this blog a few sample views and write-ups, and asked my readers if they thought the idea looked promising.  I got favorable responses from you, and the book went to 75, and then to 100 common insects, and it was so much fun I might have gone to 500 or a thousand, but decided I had better stop where it was still possible some publisher might be interested.

Well we found a very elegant small press in Little Rock, Et alia Press. We read up about them and the kinds of things they were interested in publishing, and it included an interest in the environment, and I wrote to them with my idea of a book aimed at a popular audience in which I would try to make insects so interesting that people would be friendlier and more tolerant of them. They thought the book was a good idea, so it was time to work on it seriously.

It was a very long process, and coming down the final stretch we have been working night and day on it, the designer of the book working with us on the photographs, the editor going over the MS with a fine-toothed comb. But it is finally finished, and the book will be out in May.

http://www.etaliapress.com/new-products/100-insects-of-arkansas-and-the-midsouth-their-portraits-stories