Pitch/Story Direction:

For this profile piece article, I want to write about Professor Thomas Klak. I know Professor Klak is very passionate about his work here at UNE and with the American Chestnut Foundation, as he is the Vice President and Chair of Gene Conservation of the Maine Chapter. I would like to speak to him about how he initially got interested in his field of work, some of the things he is working on now, and what some of his plans and goals are for the future. I think that he would be a very interesting person to talk to because of how ecologically important restoration efforts for the American Chestnut Tree are. He has also brought a project to help restore the tree here to UNE and students have been able to get involved (I could possibly speak to one of those students as another person to interview). I got in contact with Professor Klak and he is willing to do an interview this Thursday. 

Question Ideas:

1. Tell me a little bit about your early life: when did you first start to notice you had an interest in science and the environment? 
2. What are some challenges that you have faced throughout your life? How have you used them to benefit you now?
3. What got you initially interested in working to restore the American Chestnut Tree?
4. Tell me about your work for the American Chestnut foundation: How did you find out about it? What are some specific examples of what you do there now? 
5. How have you brought aspects of your involvement with the American Chestnut Foundation to the University of New England? How does your job as a professor overlap with your work outside of the University?
6. What are some of your goals or plans for the future?
7. Is there anything else that you think is important to add that we have not discussed?

Revised Draft:

Early Draft:

Thomas Klak is a professor at the University of New England in the school of Marine and Environmental Programs. While it is made clear through his teaching that he loves everything involving nature, his passion for the environment stems beyond his work in the classroom. Klak has also played an integral role in efforts to restore a functionally extinct keystone species, the American Chestnut Tree. 

Klak is the Vice President and Gene Conservation Chair for the Maine Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, and for his efforts was awarded the Source Maine Sustainability Award in 2021, an award granted to only six of the seventy people nominated.

In addition to his work for the American Chestnut Foundation, Klak has brought restoration efforts directly to the UNE campus, allowing students to get involved as well. In 2019 Klak introduced the project to UNE where he and his students work with fungal-blight tolerant American Chestnut seedlings and breed the species efficiently in a controlled area. This made UNE the first institution in New England to be working with the blight-tolerant species. 

Klak first received his BA from Augustana College in Rock Island Illinois in 1979, later going on to receive a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987. His areas of expertise include eco-resilience, ecology, genetic engineering, and genomics.

Workshop Draft:

University of New England Professor Thomas Klaks Impact on the World of Ecological Restoration.

By: Duffy Rose

Thomas Klak is a professor at the University of New England in the school of Marine and Environmental Programs. Along with his career as a professor, Klak has played an integral role in working towards restoring a functionally extinct and keystone species, the American chestnut tree. 

“I don’t think that there could be a more significant species to focus on than the American chestnut for our region,” said Klak. 

The American chestnut tree used to dominate forests in the Eastern United States, but a parasitic fungus named as the chestnut blight accidentally introduced from imported Japanese chestnut trees has wiped out around three to four billion American chestnut trees throughout the 20th century. 

The once prosperous tree that provided an abundance of important resources for both wildlife and humans now remains almost completely extinct, and Klak has made it his mission to work towards bringing the species back. 

“I spend a lot of my time on this subject, there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t do something having to do with this project.”

Klak is the Vice President and Gene Conservation Chair for the Maine Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation. For his dedication to the project, Klak was awarded the Source Maine Sustainability Award in 2021, an award granted to only six of the seventy people nominated.

While Klak grew up in the city of Chicago, he has come around to be more nature oriented over time, “The biggest picture of why would a boy from the big city become an environmentalist? I think it’s from watching what’s happening in the world and realizing how important it is for us to be a lot more concerned about nature and taking care of the earth.” 

Klak went on to receive his undergraduate degree, masters degree and PhD in Geography. Klak chose to study the field because, “Geography is very broad and looks at the world in many different ways. It’s open to all possible ways of thinking including a social science perspective and looking at the physical world.”

Klak is now able to inspire and inform students through academics with his career as a professor at the University of New England. 

Klaks’ interests in restoring the American chestnut were sparked in October of 2015 when he attended the Fryeburg Fair where the American Chestnut Foundation had a table. After speaking with the chapter president at the table for about an hour, he knew that this was something he wanted to be a part of. “I got involved right away. That winter we began growing chestnut trees in the greenhouse on campus,” he said. 

When Klak first brought restoration efforts to the UNE campus, he and his students began planting American chestnut seedlings that had been bred with the Chinese chestnut in an attempt to bring over the blight tolerant genes. Unfortunately this approach was not as successful as anticipated, but that has not stopped Klak who switched to working with a different method.

“Then as I looked more into the science I realized that a potentially more promising

approach would be the one that I’ve been deeply involved with over the past four or five years, which is the idea of bringing over one gene from wheat,” said Klak. “This gene is very common in nature and allows all kinds of different species of plants to protect themselves against various fungi, which the American chestnut does not have.”  

Klak has been able to plant these blight-tolerant seedlings in a federally-permitted orchard in Maine as the foundation awaits deregulation from federal agencies, which would allow for mass distribution of these seedlings. 

There is a promising future for the American chestnut. According to predictions from individuals involved with the deregulation process, if things continue on the track they are now, it is anticipated that we can expect deregulation as early as the fall of 2023. 
“When that happens, suddenly my work is going to change completely,” said Klak. “A whole new realm of ecological restoration is going to open up for us.”

Workshop Experience

I feel like having my piece workshopped today was very helpful and gave me a lot of ideas on how I should move forward with revising my story. Based on some of the comments I received, I know I will need to go back and get a little bit more information from Professor Klak and conduct some more research. My story is missing a few small but important details such as how long Klak has been at UNE and where he received his degrees from, which I want to include in the final draft. There are also a few areas in my story that I want to go back and rework to make everything flow better. I got some feedback on the third paragraph where I use “American chestnut” multiple times, so it was suggested that switching up the terminology could make the paragraph sound better. I also got a suggestion to break that third paragraph into multiple sentences, rather than one run-on sentence, which I will definitely fix. In my last paragraph on the first page it was mentioned that I could introduce the quote in a different way so I want to go back and fix up that paragraph as well. One area that I’m still struggling with is figuring out who else to interview. It was suggested that I talk to some of the students who have worked with Klak on the chestnut project, but I don’t know how I would go about finding these students. Other than that, I feel like I’m on the right track and have a pretty good idea of what I need to do to revise this story.

Editorial Team Reflection

Just like with the feature story project, all of the workshops were beneficial for not only the writer, but for everyone else in the class as well. I think that everyone remained respectful throughout the whole process while still giving feedback that was meaningful and would really help improve the stories we were discussing. People gave feedback and suggestions on a variety of different things including big picture ideas like the angle of the story and smaller details such as word choice. When it comes to the angle of a story, we had some discussion on how to narrow down the area of focus. With profiles specifically there is often a lot of information to sift through and finding that one area of focus can really bring the piece together. One topic of discussion that was brought up in pretty much every workshop had to do with quotes. Through this project I’ve realized how important quotes are in a profile piece, they are what allow the reader to get an idea of what the person is like and quotes can reveal a lot about one’s character, which is essential in these kinds of stories. People gave suggestions to allow the quotes to speak for themselves and stand on their own, that way they are more impactful and allow the reader to hear information directly from the source. With that being said, there were also suggestions to take out some quotes if the story was too long or to remove quotes that may not be essential to the main idea and replace them with quick summaries of the information instead. I noticed a lot of the feedback also had to do with who the writer might want to interview for their piece to add different perspectives and build credibility on the points being made. Overall, I enjoyed the whole workshopping process and was able to learn a lot from what my classmates had to say.

Profile Story Reflection

This project was definitely out of my comfort zone, but I was able to learn a lot from the whole process of creating a profile piece. In the beginning I wasn’t quite sure who to write the story on, but I’m really glad I decided to reach out to Professor Klak. He was happy to let me interview him for the story and when I had to contact him throughout the writing process to ask further questions, he always got back to me right away which was very helpful. I think that the most difficult part of pulling information together for this story was going through the recording of the interview I had with Professor Klak. This interview was a lot longer than the one I had for my previous story and there were a lot of great quotes that I wanted to include. Once I was able to narrow down these quotes/information, I was able to pull together a story that I felt made sense while also getting across the points that I wanted to make. One area of this story that I struggled with, which was the same for my feature story, was finding other people to interview. I initially wanted to try and find students who had worked with Professor Klak on the restoration project here at UNE, but I quickly realized I couldn’t find any students to contact and my revised draft was due before I could find anyone. I think that if I was able to include some quotes from students it would have added a lot to my story and I’m disappointed the piece was missing that element. Besides the lack of interviews, I’m pretty happy with how my story turned out. I also sent the piece over to Professor Klak, and he is hoping to have it published in the American Chestnut Foundation Maine Chapter Newsletter. I was very excited to hear this because I have never had my work published in a newsletter before, so if that happens, I’m really looking forward to it.