Literary Aviatrix: The Power of Story - Women in Aviation

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What happens when an astronaut takes a needle and thread to space?

In this episode, I talk with astronaut, engineer, and textile artist Karen Nyberg and author Ann McCallum Staats about their gorgeous new picture book, A Quilt of Stars: Karen Nyberg Stitches a Dream.

Buy the book: https://literaryaviatrix.com/book/a-quilt-of-stars/

Karen began dreaming of becoming an astronaut when she was eight years old, growing up in a tiny Minnesota town. That seemingly impossible dream eventually carried her to NASA, two spaceflights, and 166 days aboard the International Space Station. Along the way, she also carried something else with her: a lifelong love of sewing and textile art.

During her long-duration mission aboard the ISS, Karen brought fabric, thread, and needles into space. What began as a personal creative outlet eventually inspired an invitation to quilters around the world to contribute star-themed blocks to the Astronomical Quilt Block Challenge.

They expected enough for a quilt.

More than 2,400 blocks arrived from at least 30 countries.
Those individual pieces—each reflecting the hands, imagination, and experiences of the person who made it—became 28 quilts and a beautiful physical representation of something Karen experienced while looking down at Earth from space: we are individual pieces of something much larger.

Our conversation ranges from Karen's childhood dream and path to NASA to the very real challenges of working in a spacesuit that wasn't designed for smaller bodies. We talk about imposter syndrome, the decisions and disappointments that unexpectedly open other doors, and what it meant to help build the International Space Station.

But we also spend a lot of time talking about art.

Karen and I both grew up sewing, and I loved exploring the false boundaries we sometimes draw between technical and creative pursuits. Engineering requires creativity. Traditional quilting is deeply mathematical. A person doesn't have to choose between being an engineer and an artist—or between pursuing an audacious dream and finding joy in making something beautiful with her hands.

Ann shares how Karen's story grew from a chapter in her book High Flyers into a picture book of its own, and how illustrator Alida Massari brought the story to life on the page.

We also talk about the Overview Effect—the profound shift in perspective astronauts often describe after seeing our small, interconnected planet against the blackness of space—and Karen's hope that A Quilt of Stars might give young readers a little glimpse of that perspective for themselves.

This is a conversation about space and science, but it's also about art, possibility, connection, and what can happen when a little girl is allowed to believe that an impossible dream might not be impossible after all.
Did you know you can support your local independent bookshop and me by shopping through my Bookshop.org affiliate links on my website? If a book is available on Bookshop.org, you'll find a link to it on the book page. By shopping through the Literary Aviatrix website a small portion of the sale goes to support the content you love, at no additional cost to you. https://literaryaviatrix.com/shop-all-books/
Thanks so much for listening!

Stay up to date on book releases, author events, and Aviatrix Book Club discussion dates with the Literary Aviatrix Newsletter. 
Visit the Literary Aviatrix website to find over 600 books featuring women in aviation in all genres for all ages. 
Become a Literary Aviatrix Patron and help amplify the voices of women in aviation. 
Follow me on social media, join the book club, and find all of the things on the Literary Aviatrix linkt.ree. 

Blue skies, happy reading, and happy listening!

-Liz Booker

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A decade before Amelia Earhart became a household name, Harriet Quimby made aviation history.
In 1911, Quimby became the first woman in the United States to earn a pilot’s license. The following year, she became the first woman to fly solo across the English Channel—a dangerous and extraordinary achievement at a time when aviation itself was still in its infancy. And then history largely forgot her.
In this episode I talk with longtime television journalist and author Don Dahler about his biography Fearless: Harriet Quimby, a Life Without Limit.
He shares Quimby’s beginnings on a struggling Michigan farm; her successful career as a journalist, critic, and travel writer; her determination to learn to fly despite widespread resistance to women in aviation; her ingenious plum-colored flying suit; and the extraordinary 1912 English Channel flight whose moment in the headlines was eclipsed by the sinking of the Titanic.
And Harriet was much more than a pilot. Don describes a fiercely independent woman who traveled the world, wrote fearlessly, resisted the limitations society placed on women, supported her family, wrote screenplays, and imagined an eventual career as a novelist—a future cut short when she died in an aviation accident at just 37.
We also wander into Don’s own fascinating story. A former CBS News correspondent and war reporter, Don is the author of the memoir Souvenirs from an Absurd Life. We talk about journalism, adventure, writing, encounters from Ethiopia to Grenada, retirement, curiosity, and what a lifetime spent deliberately seeking out the wider world has taught him.
And near the end, our conversation circles back to the word at the heart of Harriet’s story: fearless. Is anyone really fearless? Or is courage something more interesting—the ability to acknowledge fear, accept the risk, and keep doing the thing that matters anyway?
Did you know you can support your local independent bookshop and me by shopping through my Bookshop.org affiliate links on my website? If a book is available on Bookshop.org, you'll find a link to it on the book page. By shopping through the Literary Aviatrix website a small portion of the sale goes to support the content you love, at no additional cost to you. https://literaryaviatrix.com/shop-all-books/
Thanks so much for listening!

Stay up to date on book releases, author events, and Aviatrix Book Club discussion dates with the Literary Aviatrix Newsletter. 
Visit the Literary Aviatrix website to find over 600 books featuring women in aviation in all genres for all ages. 
Become a Literary Aviatrix Patron and help amplify the voices of women in aviation. 
Follow me on social media, join the book club, and find all of the things on the Literary Aviatrix linkt.ree. 

Blue skies, happy reading, and happy listening!

-Liz Booker

Send us Fan Mail
In her memoir, Lady MacGyver, Michelle Huntington shares everything from ferry flights across oceans to surviving a lightning strike over Australia's Snowy Mountains, building an airline career after being told women couldn't be pilots, motherhood, breast cancer, and the mindset that carried her through it all. Our discussion explores those experiences, along with her writing process, her philosophy of "keep going until you can't," and even a friendly debate about the word aviatrix.
But when we chatted, I hadn’t finished the book yet. Without spoiling the ending, I'll simply say that the final chapters gave me an even deeper appreciation for Michelle's courage and reminded me that the barriers women face in aviation are far more recent, and far more persistent, than we'd like to believe.
Lady MacGyver needs to be on every aviation company CEO’s, COO’s, and Human Resources Manager’s reading list. Our community’s culture still needs a lot of work.
Did you know you can support your local independent bookshop and me by shopping through my Bookshop.org affiliate links on my website? If a book is available on Bookshop.org, you'll find a link to it on the book page. By shopping through the Literary Aviatrix website a small portion of the sale goes to support the content you love, at no additional cost to you. https://literaryaviatrix.com/shop-all-books/
Thanks so much for listening!

Stay up to date on book releases, author events, and Aviatrix Book Club discussion dates with the Literary Aviatrix Newsletter. 
Visit the Literary Aviatrix website to find over 600 books featuring women in aviation in all genres for all ages. 
Become a Literary Aviatrix Patron and help amplify the voices of women in aviation. 
Follow me on social media, join the book club, and find all of the things on the Literary Aviatrix linkt.ree. 

Blue skies, happy reading, and happy listening!

-Liz Booker

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Few figures loom larger in aviation history than Amelia Earhart. Yet after hundreds of books, countless documentaries, and nearly a century of speculation, how much do we actually know about the woman behind the legend?
In this episode, Laurie Gwen Shapiro talks about her bestselling book, The Aviator and the Showman. Drawing on newly digitized interviews, archival discoveries, and years of research, Laurie argues that the real mystery of Amelia Earhart isn't what happened to her at the end of her final flight—it's understanding who she was as a person.
We explore Earhart's journey from social worker and hobby pilot to international celebrity, the complicated role publisher and promoter George Palmer Putnam played in her fame, and the tension between aviation skill, public image, and advocacy. We also discuss the extraordinary ways Earhart used her platform to champion both aviation and women's rights.
Along the way, we venture into the world of some of Earhart's remarkable contemporaries, including Eleanor Smith, Louise Thaden, Lady Mary Heath, Bessie Coleman, and Jackie Cochran. We also talk about the challenges—and rewards—of writing history that is deeply researched, rigorously sourced, and unafraid to embrace the complexity of its subjects.
Whether you're a lifelong Amelia Earhart enthusiast or someone who has wondered why she continues to captivate the public imagination nearly a century later, I think you'll find this conversation both thought-provoking and illuminating. And if you're a writer hoping to dig into a different historical mystery, you'll learn from Laurie's expertise as an author, journalist, and professor of journalism. 

Buy the book: 

https://literaryaviatrix.com/book/the-aviator-and-the-showman/

Some links we discuss in the episode: 

NASM Amelia Earhart Project Recordings: https://sirismm.si.edu/EADpdfs/NASM.2020.0025.pdf

Archive Grid: https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/

Book Finder: https://www.bookfinder.com
Did you know you can support your local independent bookshop and me by shopping through my Bookshop.org affiliate links on my website? If a book is available on Bookshop.org, you'll find a link to it on the book page. By shopping through the Literary Aviatrix website a small portion of the sale goes to support the content you love, at no additional cost to you. https://literaryaviatrix.com/shop-all-books/
Thanks so much for listening!

Stay up to date on book releases, author events, and Aviatrix Book Club discussion dates with the Literary Aviatrix Newsletter. 
Visit the Literary Aviatrix website to find over 600 books featuring women in aviation in all genres for all ages. 
Become a Literary Aviatrix Patron and help amplify the voices of women in aviation. 
Follow me on social media, join the book club, and find all of the things on the Literary Aviatrix linkt.ree. 

Blue skies, happy reading, and happy listening!

-Liz Booker

Send us Fan Mail
What happens when a family scrapbook opens a door into a forgotten chapter of aviation history?
Author Cindy Weigand never intended to become a historian of women in aviation. While sorting through her late mother's belongings, she discovered scrapbooks and newspaper clippings connected to her great-uncle Jack, a barnstormer of the 1920s. What began as a family history project soon became a deep dive into the remarkable women pilots who shared the skies during aviation's Golden Age. 
In this conversation, Cindy and I discuss her novel Mavis Perkins: Flying Journalist, a work of historical fiction inspired by the real women aviators of the 1920s. Together we explore the world of barnstormers, air races, flying clubs, Billy Mitchell's controversial warnings about air power, and the women who flew alongside Amelia Earhart whose stories are rarely told today. 
The conversation also touches on Cindy's earlier work documenting Texas women who served during World War II, the challenges of historical research, self-publishing, and her efforts to adapt these stories for film.
If this history piques your interest, you might enjoy my Aviatrix Classics discussions with Dr. Jacque Boyd and Captain Jenny Beatty. You can find our latest conversation about Ruth Nichols, one of Mavis’ Snooty Skylarks in Cindy’s book, on the Literary Aviatrix website, YouTube Channel, and podcast. https://literaryaviatrix.com/ruth-nichols/
Did you know you can support your local independent bookshop and me by shopping through my Bookshop.org affiliate links on my website? If a book is available on Bookshop.org, you'll find a link to it on the book page. By shopping through the Literary Aviatrix website a small portion of the sale goes to support the content you love, at no additional cost to you. https://literaryaviatrix.com/shop-all-books/
Thanks so much for listening!

Stay up to date on book releases, author events, and Aviatrix Book Club discussion dates with the Literary Aviatrix Newsletter. 
Visit the Literary Aviatrix website to find over 600 books featuring women in aviation in all genres for all ages. 
Become a Literary Aviatrix Patron and help amplify the voices of women in aviation. 
Follow me on social media, join the book club, and find all of the things on the Literary Aviatrix linkt.ree. 

Blue skies, happy reading, and happy listening!

-Liz Booker