Artivist Series - Karen Romano Young
Karen Roman Young who has worked as an education consultant, journalist, and resident artist and communication specialist for ocean scientists working in the field, is the writer/artist of Antarctic Log. This curious and rough-edged comic provides a look at life at Palmer Station and the waters around the Antarctic field station. Karen has made nearly ten ocean expeditions to places like the Galapagos Islands, the Arctic and Antarctica, and created more than 180 Antarctic Log comics.
Video conversation with Karen…click here
What Karen talks about…
Karen describes herself as naturally curious. From a young age she was always drawing but decided that what she wanted to do was be a writer. For a number of years she wrote for Scholastic, writing science materials for students. She never imagined that she would end up working in the field alongside scientists. Karen talks about how she came to travel to and work at Palmer Station in Antarctica. Although she is no longer in Antarctica, she continues to create pages for her Antarctic Log, now numbering more than 180 comics. Each focuses on some aspect of life at the station or in the water surrounding the station. Karen says that her drawings allow people to image things they might not otherwise see.
Show Notes
Kate Hruby (00:01): Hi everyone, my name is Kate. I have a podcast called Go Forth in Science and I am Women Mind the Water's first ever guest host. It's also the first time I've guest hosted anything and it's really quite exciting. Women Mind the Water is a series of interviews of women artists who use art to tell stories about the freshwater and the saltwater that they love. This episode is about Karen Romano Young. She's an illustrator, an author, and an explorer. She dives in submarines, she wanders the poles, and she draws comics about the ocean.
Pam Ferris-Olson (00:47): Today I'm speaking with Karen Romano Young. Karen is a writer and illustrator who is passionate about combining art and science, particularly when it has to do with ocean science. In addition to having written nearly 30 science oriented books for young people, she creates a weekly science comic called Antarctic Log. Karen has worked with expeditions that have explored a shipwreck, performed deep ocean research and mapping, and traveled to Antarctica. Welcome Karen. Let me start by asking about where you grew up and your journey to becoming an artist. Were you always interested in illustrating your world?
Karen Romano Young (01:31): I grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut and in Ocean City, Maryland. And I was always drawing. From the beginning that was my favorite thing to do. Writing came a little bit later.
Pam Ferris-Olson (01:44): So which came first, your interest in art or in science?
Karen Romano Young (01:48): Well the natural world is how I would define science. And I have a mother who loves the beach and would literally have us on the beach from eight in the morning till eleven o'clock at night. And one of the very first things that I became aware of was the tides coming and going, what changed on the beach, what changed in the air, what changed in the way that the water moved. It was just something that we were expected to know. We were expected to know whether it was coming out, going in, high tide, low tide, what was happening, how to handle a rip tide as well as a consciousness of all the animals that lived on the beach, the different qualities of sand. And that was in the summer.
Pam Ferris-Olson (02:31): So tell me more about your work. How is it that rather than becoming a scientist or an artist you found a way to merge the two? And how did you end up on such interesting expeditions?
Karen Romano Young (02:44): You're asking a lot of different things. Initially I started out really falling in love with books. And our local library had a contest to create a cover for a book that already existed. I was six years old and I entered the contest. And the most exciting thing to me about the contest was not the artwork or even the books, but the idea that people created books. I don't think that before I was five years old I knew where books came from, that maybe they just were there. But the idea that people drew them and wrote them, I just immediately said, this is what I want to do and set out to try to do that.
That said, now there's a creative writing major, now there are publishing degrees that you can get. Then it was kind of like you, do you want to be a journalist? Do I want to be an English major? There wasn't even a writing major. I wound up being an education major because education teaching meant that I could keep on studying all the subjects, which is what I've learned I really wanted to do. I didn't go into teaching though. I went to work for Scholastic and the classroom magazines. And we were doing all the news, it was like Time Magazine for kids, and I quickly realized that what I liked most was talking to scientists, that they were the people who were the most enthusiastic, genuinely childlike awestruck by what they saw and did, and that they had incredible adventures. They went down to the bottom of the ocean in submarines. They went up to the Arctic ice and pounded through it in icebreakers. And they came back to tell the story and then to make new discoveries.
And I started trying to figure out how I could work more for them. And at the beginning it was let me just write more stuff about them, let me interview them more because they're so fun to talk to and write more about them. And while I was working on a book about submarines, someone suggested that I talk to someone who was currently working with submersible Alvin, which is our deepest going American submersible. And when I called that person to interview him for my book, he said, "how would you like to help me with my education and outreach?" So getting the news of his science into the schools. He had just begun a program and he needed assistance. And sometimes things happen and a crazy door in the universe opens.
One of my jobs for him was to populate a website that was all about the people who are going on his expedition, interview each of them, and write it up. And when I got to the very last one, it was a graduate student who was supposed to be doing his shipboard outreach, and I just called to interview her and she said, "I'm not going." And I said, "well, he thinks you're going." It was two weeks out and I called and said, "she can't go, but I can go." And I got to go because he was desperate for somebody who could do writing on different education levels and who could try to understand the science. I was not convinced, [Pam 00:05:56] that I could understand the science. I don't have much of a science background, but I did discover on that trip that I could learn pretty well on my feet and that if there were scientists along, that you could always find someone who was willing to explain something to you.
And it has gone on from there. I've been on close to 10 expeditions at sea, including the Arctic ice, including Antarctica, and two dives in Alvin to the bottom of the deep sea, as well as the Galapagos Islands, a transit up to Southern California, and work with robot submarines from that ship. So it's been a really exciting time.
Pam Ferris-Olson (06:37): Would you discuss one of your Antarctic Log Comics to give a sense of what you do? And please describe it for those who are listening to an audio only version.
Karen Romano Young (06:48): Yeah. When I went to Palmer Station Antarctica, which is one of the three US research stations, it's a tiny one, and I was invited to go with one of the scientists that I had been studying the deep sea with, deep sea microbes. And it turned out he was interested in microbes that lived in lots of extreme conditions, including Antarctica. And we had had a good time on the ship translating the science stories of that and he asked if I would apply for an Antarctic Artists and Writers Grant to go with him and his team to Antarctica and be his lab assistant, going out and hunting for water that had plankton in it and then coming back to the lab and processing it.
I started off thinking that what I would do as my Antarctic Artists And Writers project for him would be a blog, but I decided I didn't want to just write a blog, that it seemed as though the trend for that had passed a little bit. But I wanted to do some kind of a journal and decided I would do a visual journal where I was drawing and writing at the same time. And it became Antarctic Log because I wanted to be able to share it digitally. You can't do too much in print from Antarctica, but you can email things. And so I started off with the size of Instagram, six inches by six inches square, and didn't really know what I was going to do. But the very first thing that had to happen was that I had to go get a blood test to physically qualify to begin this long physical qualification process to go to Antarctica. And while I was having my blood tested, the phlebotomist asked me some questions about the nature of climate change in Antarctica and it turned into my first Antarctic Log comic. Now I think I'm going into week 183 after two different trips to Antarctica.
But one of the reasons that I wanted to do visual was because I am daunted by what I don't know about science and I have realized over some of these trips that if I just sit on the deck of a ship somewhere or sit in a lab somewhere and draw, that not only will people warm to me, they don't always know what a communicator is doing along on the trip. So not only will they warm to me and come over and look over your shoulder, but you'll get a lot of information. And even if no one does that, I finish with a drawing that I can then go off and say, what is this? Can you explain this to me? Here's a picture of your instrument, here's a picture of your robot, here's a picture of in this case, Palmer Station Research Station.
And the picture that I drew was from photographs taken from the back of our ship as it pulled up to this station, which just looks like a little town on a coast except that it's backed up by a massive glacier. And it's the coast of Antarctica. And even as you're pulling in big chunks of glacier are falling off into the water and calving into icebergs. It's a very strange looking place. It's very remote. There's only 47 people maximum at Palmer Station. So I began to draw it. I drew every building that I could see in my photographs. I drew all the little boats and I drew the glacier in the background, added animals. There are seals there, lots of birds, penguins. And then I went around the whole entire station to all the places that I had drawn and asked them what went on there. So I found out everything. I found out what every antenna did, every tank was full of, every little shack held inside. And this has become my way of learning my way around something.
So what you see is the glacier and the ocean and a big rocky peninsula that is part of Andrew's Island where Palmer Station is and then everything behind it. I created a poster out of this and then I made a comic from it by zooming in on the station. And the comic is about the camera that is posted up at the top of the hill through which you can go online and see what's going on at Palmer Station, what the weather is, whether the ship is in or not, whether there are penguins or seals going around any time and use that as the comic sort of follow up to Palmer Station after I had left to say, if you're missing all of the stories from Palmer Station, you can go back and look through this camera and check it out year round.
Pam Ferris-Olson (11:38): So how is your art an expression of you as a person and your view of the world?
Karen Romano Young (11:44): It's curious. It's rough edged. I am not a trained artist, just like I'm not a trained scientist. I'm just a curious and interested person who has tried to do something out of the box really. Artists identify with that, scientists identify with that. They're often trying to do something outside the box as well. That's the nature of science is that they're reaching into the unknown. So am I. It also really appeals to kids who recognize when someone's trying to do something that they maybe don't feel that good at. I say in my comics frequently that my super power is feeling dumb. Not being dumb, but feeling dumb and having to get comfortable with that feeling in a room full of people who know more than I do and enables me to confidently ask questions and to recognize that I am increasing my own knowledge by doing so.
Pam Ferris-Olson (12:45): So as an artist, how do you think your work can engage people in caring about the ocean?
Karen Romano Young (12:52): Lots of different ways. I mean just through the use of color and drawing I can really show the beauty of things. I'm doing a series now in Antarctic Log called A Polar Whale and literally every week I'm focusing on a different whale that migrates to and from either the Arctic or Antarctic. If you look up photographs of whales, you can't see that much. It's hard to see. Things are shadowy, the water's in the way, part of the whale might be under the water or out of the water if you're doing an underwater shot. But with a drawing I can really show everything clearly. I can alter the light. I can zoom in on details and really show you all the different makings of the whale. And I think that it's also a way to open doors to higher level science because there's a picture there. So it's engaging and it pulls you in and it shows you what the story is about even if you haven't read a single word yet. So it's letting you in the door in a lot of ways.
Pam Ferris-Olson (13:59): I have been speaking with Karen Romano Young on the Women Mind the Water Podcast series. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com. An audio only version of this podcast is available on the Women Mind the Water website and on iTunes. This is Pam Ferris-Olson. Thank you for listening.
Kate Hruby (14:20): If you want to learn more about Karen, you can visit her website, karenromanoyoung.com. If you want to see more of the work that I do, you can go to goforthandscience.com. And last, but certainly not least, make sure you follow Women Mind the Water on social media. And you can go to womenmindthewater.com to find more interviews from awesome women who love the ocean.