Science and Storytelling

Science and Storytelling

PC Profile of Dana (Greenspon) Bate OPC ’99

by Jennifer Raphael

You don’t meet many successful fiction writers with a degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry. But Dana Bate, author of The Girls’ Guide to Love and Supper Clubs, is a science nerd who also happens to be a language nerd. At Penn Charter (OPC class of 1999, nee Greenspon), she could do both with ease.

Dana Bate (nee Greenspon)

In the writing corner, she had Erin Hughes (formerly Ms. Purcell), who inspired her love of creative expression through words.

“She is the one who lit the spark. She made me realize I could write. She made writing fun,” Bate said. “She not only made reading accessible and made my writing much stronger, but she led me to find my own voice. Of course my eighth grade voice is not the same as my voice today, but she helped me understand what that meant.”

In the science corner, she had Alice Davis, who inspired her love of creative expression through chemistry. “Ms. Davis was like the mother hen when it came to chemistry. She would take people under her wing and encourage them and mentor them,” Bate recalled. “It was two completely different sides of my brain. In high school I could wear lots of hats. When I got to Yale I had to focus.”

At Yale she chose science over writing, and stayed under the chemistry umbrella. “Yale was a challenging place, and I needed to focus on one discipline,” she said. “It’s a confusing decision, considering what I do now.”

While her creative writing muscle didn’t get as much exercise, it didn’t atrophy completely. “By end of junior year and beginning of senior, I missed having an outlet for storytelling,” she said. She found that outlet writing for the Yale Scientific Magazine, and then in her senior year she started reporting for an “NPR-esque” program on Yale’s WYBC radio. “Gradually, I was doing anchoring and producing, and I fell in love with storytelling again.”

Most of her molecular biophysics and biochemistry peers went on to medical school, but she knew that wasn’t the path for her. She was intrigued by broadcasting but lacked the tools to move on to a job she desired. She decided to go to Northwestern University and get her master’s in journalism. After graduating, she landed a job working as a reporter and producer for the Nightly Business Report on PBS in Washington, D.C. For five years she fully immersed herself in visual storytelling, reporting on issues such as health care reform, nanotechnology, the housing crisis and the credit crunch. Her series on the Indian economy earned her a prestigious Gerald Loeb Award. And then, just as she began to feel the limits of journalism, an interesting opportunity presented itself.

“I was pushing up against the boundaries of what I could do within journalism when it came to storytelling,” she recalled. “You’re locked in to the truth. You can’t make stuff up. I had been wanting to take a stab at returning to creative writing.”

Her chance came in 2009, when her husband was offered a temporary job in England. “I thought, we may never get the chance to take this kind of leap again,” she said. She quit her job, and she and her husband moved to London. They spent four months there, and Bate began working on what would become her first novel.

When she and her husband returned to D.C., she buckled down and completed Girls’ Guide. “I spent all of 2010 writing the book. I found an agent in early 2011 and sold it that summer.”

The well-received novel tells the story of a young Hannah Sugarman, who abandons a safe, seemingly perfect life to start cooking in a world of underground supper clubs. A few weeks after the book was published in February of 2013, Bate’s first child was born. “I gave birth to my first book and my first baby,” she said. “It was like having twins.”

Bate and her husband moved back to the Philadelphia area to be closer to her family. She is currently at work on her second book and balancing her writing and parenting duties. She hasn’t forgotten the people who helped her on her very circuitous journey to lady novelist, and made sure to email Hughes after Girls’ Guide was published. “Teachers often go through class after class. It must be difficult to know if you are having an impact on people. You never know if they remember anything you taught them.” But Bate remembers. She remembers to use an active voice, to (try and) never start a sentence with “it” or similar weak words and to always look for compelling language. Her writing is very visual and fluid; it seems to take your hand and skip along with you as you turn the pages. But that science nerd is still inside her.

“What I realize, all these experiences inform what I write about and how I write,” she said. “It may seem wacky that I majored in biochemistry, but that is in my pocket. I could have a character who knows all about science. All of my experiences inform what I do in the future.”