Dear reader,
You may be wondering why a scene captured from 1992’s Medicine Man, starring Lorraine Bracco and Sean Connery, is shown below, but watching this movie in grade eleven was a life-changing moment for me.
It was the day I realized what I wanted to do with my life: be a scientist.
My science dreams evolved over the years. I was only sixteen when I watched these two searching for a cure for cancer in the Amazon rainforest, but it got the gears going in my head. I started with also wanting to find the cure for cancer, a noble desire, but then I visited Vancouver, and, out there on the ocean for the first time in my life, I changed my mind. I was going to be a marine biologist instead. Once I actually started college and realized that there were only about three jobs in the world for marine biologists back then, I switched to plain old zoology. Surely I could make a career of this!
But after transferring to the University of Calgary, I met a professor who happened to be the dean of a brand-new program: environmental science. Given my unusual proficiency in organic chemistry (no secret superpowers here, I’m just a visual learner!), I was invited in. And this is where I stayed. I graduated and got a job as an environmental consultant, which is where I spent the next eight-ish years.
But life sometimes has other plans, and after staying home to raise my two girls, I found myself needing something to do that was just for myself. Although I was an avid reader, I never planned on becoming a writer. It started as a form of therapy, but once I started, I couldn’t stop. And it seemed so natural for nature and science to start creeping into my stories. By the time I wrote No Higher Ground, I was fully into this idea of Mother Nature playing a huge role in a story and having a female protagonist (Raven) in STEM—it made my degree feel a little less wasted.
Like Raven, I still love the water. I often wonder what my life would have looked like if I had stayed in my marine-biologist era, but writing has brought me more joy than anything I could have planned for, so I wouldn’t change a thing about how it went.
I hope you enjoy No Higher Ground and, like a good Canadian, I apologize in advance for the stress you might feel while reading!
Take care,
Nicole
Nicole Brooks has a bachelor of environmental science and a lifelong love of reading, which has enabled her to blend two of her passions—nature and writing—into stories that put people into the thick of environmental disasters. She lives just outside Calgary with her husband and two daughters and can be found curled up with a book during long, cold Canadian winters, searching the skies for bald eagles, or hurting herself while playing pickleball. No Higher Ground is her thriller debut.
