Who's Afraid of Science Books?: An Interview with Seymour Simon

GD: How did you get involved in writing science books for children?

SS: I've always written—even while I was a high school student. When I started to teach, I wrote for the kids I was teaching. I started teaching fifth grade in New York City because I had gotten out of the Army, was in graduate school, and needed a job. I continued teaching in a junior high, and in a middle school. I've also taught a variety of things on an adult level. I've taught English and social studies because in the city you do whatever is around, but my background was in science and that's what I finally ended up teaching. I attended the Bronx High School of Science and was very interested in science when I was younger, so after I began to teach, I decided to try to write while I was teaching. I sent some articles to Scholastic magazines and although they didn't accept the articles, the editor of one of the magazines asked me to come in and he gave me an assignment, which happened to be for an article about the moon. The editors were very interested that I taught science because they were having a very difficult time finding anyone who could write who also knew something about science.

RN: When was this?

SS: In the early sixties. I then began writing regularly for them. We started a four-page monthly science supplement for a fifth and sixth grade magazine, called Scholastic NewsTimes and I worked with Katherine Hill, who was a professor of science education at New York University at the time. Together we would plan the science supplement. I would write it and she would do the teacher copy for it. I did that for a number of years until I decided to do a book. Since my field in graduate school was mostly animal behavior, the first book that I wrote was called Animals in Field Laboratory: Science Projects in Animal Behavior. I was teaching ninth grade then and a lot of kids in my classes were doing projects. I would tend to influence them to do work on animal behavior. So I did quite a long book for McGraw-Hill. Interestingly enough, my book, which was written for junior and senior high school students, wound up in college libraries. Evidently it's very useful for psychology courses. It's since gone out of print, but it got excellent reviews in Kirkus Review and Library Journal. Because of this I started to get calls from other publishers to do other books. The first book came out in 1968, and within a year or two, I was doing four to six books a year.

GD: You're writing full-time now?

SS: Right. I taught until about five years ago. When I stopped teaching, I had published about forty or fifty books. But I found that I wanted to spend more time in selecting the types of books that I would do. I had been doing books that were very curriculum-oriented. They were not textbooks by any means, but they were books which were tied in with class work. What I really wanted was to write the kinds of books that a kid might pick up in a library or in a bookstore, and I found that I needed more time to do that kind of book. My newer books are different from the earlier ones.

RN: Did publishers ask you to do the books you've done or did you simply write them?

SS: All the recent books have been my own doing. Generally, I approach my publishers with an idea. I always think of the idea—I think they rely upon me primarily to do that because most of my editors are not strong in science and ideas are always coming to me for one reason or another. I'll jot it down. It may go through some changes; I may simply get rid of it completely, or I may not do...