Why storm chasing?
JB: I’ve always been fascinated with storms. When I was a little girl, we used to visit my grandmother in southern Minnesota in the summers, and often, in the middle of the night, the tornado siren would go off and we’d have to run to the cellar. To me, a girl obsessed with The Wizard of Oz, this was terribly exciting. When I was four, I had the experience my heroine Karena has in THE STORMCHASERS: of seeing a tornado while everyone else was asleep. Like Karena, I hid beneath the living room couch and watched the black rope twister move across the picture window. I then spent much of my life trying to see another. My obsession with severe weather led me to stormchase as an adult, first as an amateur in Minnesota with my poor mom in tow, later with the professional stormchase group Tempest Tours (for description of what this was like, see Chase Diaries on my website). Like my characters, I’m still trying to understand the mysterious, majestic machinery behind big weather: how something
