By JONAH LIPSKY

Before she began writing and illustrating children’s books, Molly Bang earned master’s degrees in Far Eastern languages and literature from the University of Arizona and Harvard University. These experiences helped her realize, “how unsuited I was for scholarly research and a life spent in libraries.”

She then turned to reporting, learning, essentially, the same lesson. She worked at the Baltimore Sun and discovered, “how unsuited I was as a reporter by getting fired.”

At this point two of her close friends pulled her aside and convinced her finally to embrace what she had always wanted to do: Illustrate children’s books. It was very good advice.

During the course of her thirty-year career, Ms. Bang has illustrated or written close to 30 books. Perhaps her best known work is When Sophie Gets Angry: Really, Really Angry.

In preparation for that book, Ms. Bang researched whether there were other children’s books showing a little girl getting angry. She discovered there were none. As she writes on her Web site, “There are no books specifically about a girl who gets angry and knows how to calm herself down. I expect this is why the book has been so popular: We daughters and parents and siblings need it!”

When looking into her process as an artist it would seem Ms. Bang also benefited from the experience.

“I began the book with bright pinks and purples and chartreuse, turning to reds and oranges when Sophie gets angry, then turning to browns, then blues and greens as she calms down, and then using the full palette when she returns home, ‘whole’ again. It was interesting to notice how angry I felt while I was making the angry pictures, and how much calmer I felt when I was painting with the blues and greens.”

As a child Ms. Bang spent summers with her family in Falmouth, and attended science camp at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute for many years. These early experiences stayed with her. She is currently publishing a series of illustrated children’s books about the way light interacts with the planet. She will also be leading a discussion here on the Vineyard in a program called Arts à La Carte about the way kids learn about science. Her talk takes place on Wednesday, July 27, and is being organized by local art teacher Lani Carney, who teaches at Featherstone Center for the Arts.

“It’s a way that I like to give back to the parents that have been so supportive of the children’s studio at Featherstone where I teach year round programs,” said Ms. Carney. She started the Arts à La Carte series five years ago and Ms. Bang was the first speaker at the series.

Recently, Ms. Bang has noticed a specific trend in books for children and adolescents. “There are a lot of books out right now, for example ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid,’” there are a lot of books about ‘how tough my life is,’” she said in an interview with the Gazette at a coffee shop in Woods Hole this week. “And a lot of [young adult] books about abuse, about menstruation, about masturbation is happening now. About all of these things that were not even mentioned twenty years ago. And there are books for little kids about all those issues as well There are books about the Holocaust that are picture books It’s tricky. How is a book about the Holocaust going to help a kid? I have no idea. How is a child going to integrate that?”

While she denounces abundant television watching for kids because of its inactive nature, she is withholding judgement, for the time being, on video games.

“The jury’s out so far on video games and things like that because there is a huge amount of cooperation that boys do when they’re watching...They play together, they solve problems, they have huge amounts of problems to solve and they have to figure out how to get from here to there, how to use this weapon, how to trade this weapon with somebody else You have to cooperate with your friends; the more you talk to friends about which weapons they use, the better you are. So it’s really teaching you how to be a team member, a team player.”

Looking back on her career and the process of writing, Ms. Bang feels she does not adhere to a set formula for writing children’s books. Sometimes a book requires many drafts to write and sometimes the way it comes out the first time is the way it is published. However, she does have a more structured process for illustrating books. In 1991 she published a book called Picture This, in which she breaks down the structure of drawing pictures and what elements trigger emotional responses in the viewer.

In Picture This, Ms. Bang uses the example of Little Red Riding Hood to show how different shapes and colors can elicit various emotions. It is, one could argue, a scholarly work on the subject.

Perhaps then, her early experiences in academia were not so unsuited to her, after all.

Molly Bangs’ talk takes place on July 27 from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in Edgartown at the home of Mark and Jill Ingerman. There is a limit of 22 participants. To register, call Lani Carney at 508-696-7671.