On The Road Again & Fish Medicine

As you may have figured out from my air silence the last couple weeks, I'm on the road again. This time I'm in Pittsburgh, where I'm teaching at the University of Pittsburgh as a visiting writer for the fall semester (in the Cathedral of Learning, pictured left).

I got to Pittsburgh a few days ago after an exhilerating week in Baltimore teaching at the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers Conference -- an intensive event filled with readings, panel discussions and heavy workshopping. I teach there every August, and it's always one of the best parts of my summer ... like geek summer camp for writers, only better. It's endless fun.

From Baltimore, I headed straight for a crazy-fun week in North Carolina with Dr. Greg Lewbart, where I filmed a segment for Nova ScienceNOW about fish surgery. That's right: Fish medicine. There's a whole field of veterinary medicine devoted to treating fish. We're talking MRIs, CT scans, bloodwork, surgery, pain medications, you name it -- procedures that cost hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, to treat pet fish. Everything from fancy koi to regular goldfish people win at fairs. I wrote about this last year in a New York Times Magazine called Fixing Nemo, but the Nova segment will cover fresh ground: It explores new developments in the field, and really getting into the isue of fish personality, and the relationships people form with their fish. It does all of this with beautiful television footage, which means that when it airs (October 18th on PBS) you can see this stuff with your own eyes -- you can watch a fish surgery performed by one of the nation's top fish vets (known in the field as "The Big Fish"), and you get to meet several personality-filled fish, and the people who love them. I'll post a reminder about it when the time is closer.