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Change is the mantra of the age of Obama. But what essential aspects of human nature best prepare us for change and for the unexpected? The world is now particularly fragile economically and braced for major stress and the need for change.

A new Science of Play is emerging that, I believe, provides a  salient  approach to the urgent need to facilitate healthy changes in our society.

A close look at the evolution of play behavior, an instinctive force that becomes more complex the smarter and more social the creature, reveals important long-term survival data, based on our biological design. It has been long known that the brain stem of all vertebrates, that part above the spinal cord and below the cerebral cortex  and other higher centers, contains the essentials for survival, such as regulation of respiration, heartbeat, and the initiation of sleep-dream-waking cycles. Major disruption of any of these centers results in death. (though it takes a couple of weeks of sleep deprivation to kill you) These survival structures, though influenced by the environment nonetheless operate automatically such as the tracts of neurons that produce dilation or constriction of the pupil of the eye when illumination changes. All of these survival elements are similar in mammals, and their cellular architecture, and neurotransmitters are virtually identical. Each has a fascinating evolutionary history, now allowing comparative biologists to see our human similarities to other like endowed creatures. What is currently not appreciated, is that the structures that initiate and foster play are also located in the brain stem. So what has this got to do with our capacity for adaptive change? Plenty.

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I have just returned from an amazing two-week writer's residency at Hedgebrook, a retreat for women writers on Whidbey Island in Washington's Puget Sound, and I owe it all to my latest novel, Flygirl.  It was the first chapter of Flygirl that won me my much coveted spot (only 48 writers chosen out of 400+ applicants!) at Hedgebrook.  Needless to say the book and its heroine, Miss Ida Mae Jones, have been on my mind because of it.

My flight left at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and I spent the previous several days packing and making lists of what not to forget.  My husband dropped me off at the airport, and I ran into check-in desk with my giant rolling suitcase and my laptop on my back, ready and determined to write the good write.  I had butterflies in my stomach-traffic and rain had made me late for my flight.   (Rain is practically a national disaster in Los Angeles, to be approached with 10-mile-an-hour caution on the freeways unless it's nighttime, and then nothing below 80 mph seems to do.)  I made it, but just barely.  Sitting in my aisle seat, uncomfortably sweaty from running through the terminal, stomach still wobbling, I thought about Ida Mae and how she must have felt boarding a bus to Texas to start her training with the WASP.

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Alive in Necropolis Is Given an Honorable Mention for the PEN Hemingway Award

Doug Dorst’s debut novel, Alive in Necropolis, which was published by Riverhead in August of 2008, has been cited as an Honorable Mention for the 2008 PEN Hemingway Award, which honors the best work of debut fiction by an American author. The book was already selected as one of Amazon's Best Books of the Year, and met with outstanding praise upon publication. The San Francisco Chronicle called it a “smart and accessibly unconventional first novel . . . not quite a horror story, nor exactly a mystery, nor just a hard-boiled police procedural, but an adult coming-of-age saga that pulls with energy and imagination from these various genres. . . Alive in Necropolis proves truly haunting.” The book was also selected as an Editor's Choice by The New York Times Book Review, which called the novel “daring and bighearted."

Dorst's second book, The Surf Guru, a collection of short stories, will be published by Riverhead in 2010.