19 Jun 2017 Tragedy leads McClafferty to writing

by Susan Peterson

It was a tragic accident that motivated Carla Killough McClafferty, a radiologic technologist, to write.

When the youngest of her three children, a son named Corey, fell from a swing and died at age 14 months, Carla had many unanswered questions. As a means of healing and working through her grief, she wrote her first book, “Forgiving God” (Discovery House 1995). Although she had no background or training to be a writer, she discovered her passion for writing.

Her medical background knowledge inspired her second and third books, “The Head Bone’s Connected to the Neck Bone: The Weird, Wacky, and Wonderful X-ray” (2001), followed by “Something Out of Nothing: Marie Curie and Radium” (2006).

Since then, she has penned four more non-fiction books for young adults, many of which have appeared on book lists and received awards.

Carla is a meticulous researcher and often travels to far-off locations to do her detective work. After scanning and photographing documents at museums and libraries, she returns home to filter and arrange the information in an understandable way for her readers.

When researching “In Defiance of Hitler: The Secret Mission of Varian Fry” at Columbia University, she used historical records, family photographs, personal letters and first-person accounts. The hard work paid off. In 2009, she had a book signing and gave a presentation at the Holocaust Memorial Museum bookstore in Washington, D.C. The next year, she was surprised and delighted to be invited to visit Marseilles, France, to participate in a conference about Varian Fry that was held in conjunction with the opening of a new auditorium at a local high school named for him.

Her research trips to Mount Vernon, Va., resulted in the book “The Many Faces of George Washington: Remaking a Presidential Icon.” She has done research at the Fred W. Smith Library for the Study of George Washington in order to “dig for details” to make historical worlds come alive for her readers while maintaining accuracy.

A reviewer called her latest book — “Fourth Down and Inches: Concussions and Football’s Make -or-Break Moment” — “prescient and insightful.” It came out about a year prior to the popular movie “Concussion.” Because of her background, Carla was often called upon as a TV commentator, and her work was referenced in documentaries about this controversial topic.

Carla is busy at work on her next book, another one that relates to George Washington. The working title is “Buried Lives: George Washington’s Enslaved People.”

When growing up in rural Tomberlin (Lonoke County), Carla’s school didn’t even have a library. Now she sees her books for sale online, in bookstores and at Walmart, and on the shelves of libraries around the world. She often visits schools to talk about her research process, speaks at educational conferences and provides videoconferences with schools all over the nation.

Carla currently resides in Benton. For more information about Carla and her books, visit carlamcclafferty.com.