Maria Isabel Garcia is unlike other authors because, to her, the best thing about having a published book is not about getting rich from sales or leaving a legacy. For her, being a writer is more about the satisfaction of seeing a finished book get a life of its own. She is a natural explorer who writes about what she sees around her, connecting her observations in life with science. Her inquisitive nature has led to become a science writer of The Philippine Star, a content author for Rappler, and ultimately, the curator of The Mind Museum, an innovative science museum in the Philippines that adds to the reasons why it's more Fun in The Philippines.
Maria Isabel Garcia's first book is Science Solitaire: Essays on science, nature and becoming human. It's all about science, but the kind that is more personal and derived from her own personal experience of the world, which comes to her in a visual manner in her head.
Ideas do not come to her in words but in symbols that take on a visually solid or liquid form in her head. She combines what she sees with what she reads and viola, new ideas emerge to help her llustrate a point. That is what she writes about. "Writer's chase" which she does in order to capture the essence of a thought. It's what she experiences instead of "writer's block." She tries to chase after her own understanding of a topic and do all sorts of things to share it clearly and beautifully to people. Getting the approval of the book review board of the Ateneo De Manila University Press was something that she was very happy about.
Garcia’s wish for Science Solitaire is for it to inspire young people to write about science. Oddly enough, it's not even shelved with the science books but rather under the ‘Filipiniana’ section, which even her own friends, who are also science writers in the US, find very strange.
Here's how Maria Isabel Garcia describes her book on Amazon:
"Science Solitaire is a mind dance with nature's cards, in a style and lens that could help us see that science is alive - as it inhabits not just classrooms and textbooks but also our everyday lives. It consists of pieces of discovery that try to reveal the possible connections between the snippets of understanding we gain from science and our journey toward becoming human. What happens to our brains when we are happy, when we delight in music or food or other pleasurable pursuits? What lurks behind the awesome powers of some creatures with whom we inhabit this planet? What is E=mc2 and why is it the most popular icon for scientific ideas?"
Maria Isabel Garcia is also the author of Twenty-One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire
