Meet the Character: Talise Calder

Talise Calder stands at the edge of Welsh water as both scientist and witness.

Trained in Environmental Science and Water, Climate & Sustainability, she has built her life around the lakes of Wales—mapping their boundaries, analysing their chemistry, modelling their seasonal rhythms, and working with conservation groups to safeguard their fragile ecosystems. Her days are divided between misted dawn fieldwork and late evenings spent overlaying drone imagery and satellite data in GIS software, watching patterns emerge from numbers.

Yet there is something in her that belongs as much to story as to science.

She kneels at a lake’s edge and lowers a Secchi disk into its depths, noting the moment it disappears into shadow. She takes sediment cores that hold decades of quiet history. She sketches the way light fractures across the surface. She greets each lake softly, a private habit born of long hours alone in wind and weather.

Her field kit is practical: a waterproof jacket, fleece, quick-dry trousers, GPS device, water-quality meter, sediment corer, and drone packed carefully into her rucksack. Her boots are often caked in mud. A thermos of tea waits in the side pocket. Around her neck rests a small silver droplet pendant—a reminder that water shapes stone slowly, but it always shapes it.

Talise is analytical, patient, and deeply observant. She thrives in remote terrain and unpredictable weather. She is meticulous with data, but fiercely protective of the landscapes behind it. To her, hydrology is not abstract modelling alone—it is a relationship.

Every lake she maps becomes known to her: its inlets and outflows, its silences, its vulnerabilities. She does not see herself as the master of these waters, only as their careful guardian.

The lakes are waiting.

Release date: 17th April.

Step into Talise’s world here: https://books2read.com/Still-Waters-Deep

Here's to new chapters, ancient legends, and the stories that connect us all. Happy reading. 💙