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Po Bronson has done pretty well with his writing life.

He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children, Thia, 5; and Luke, 8, and he's gotten some recognition for what he's done. I mean, getting on the New York Times bestseller list is a pretty good thing, right?

Anyway, he and Ashley Merryman, his writing partner, have won magazine journalism awards for their stories about the science of children.

But he only started writing about science and kids with "NurtureShock,'' his 2009 bestseller about the science of the brain when it comes to children and teenagers.

It's some fascinating stuff. But the interesting thing is this:

Po and Ashley stumbled into it when they were working on a piece for New York magazine about the motivation of grown-ups and dug into the effect of praise heaped among children.

That discovery led to "NurtureShock.''

It all reminds me what Greensboro mystery writer John Hart, the former stock broker who just won an Edgar Award,  told me a few months back about his creative process: "It's all grope and hope.'' 

It seems Po does a lot of that. With a lot of things.

He first jumped into fiction writing when he wrote about Bay Area bond trading and Silicon Valley upstarts, and he later wrote the bestseller, "What Should I Do With My Life?'' Now, as a 45-year-old father of two, he's dove headfirst into touchy-feely publishing world of child-rearing.

 Well, kinda.

"NurtureShock'' is more a series of feature articles, chock-full of anecdotes and data about how the science of the young brains affects everything from why kids lie to why kids self-segregate even in an incredibly diverse school.

It's like "Freakonomics.''  You know, the book co-written by Winston-Salem native Stephen Dubner, the former frontman for The Right Profile, a N.C. group from the early 1980s. Dubner wrote about the economics of dealing drugs, naming kids, to ... well a bunch of off-the-wall stuff.

Well, Po sees "NurtureShock'' as the "Freakonomics" of parenting.

He'll talk about all that at 7:15 p.m. Thursday at Barry Hall on Canterbury's campus. And yeah, that gig is free.

But after 30 minutes on the phone with him earlier this week, where we talked about all things kid, I wondered one thing: Where do you write?

"I write in a closet,'' he told me. "In the beginning, I wrote in a 2-by-3-foot closet and closed the door and really blasted the music in my headphones. And now that I have an office downtown near the ballpark, there's a closet in my office. It's real luxurious. It's three feet by five feet. I go into that closet to block out all distractions and get in the zone and put words on paper.''

The zone?

"Yes, when my writing goes well -- even when everything else is falling apart in my life -- I feel good. It's those days when I can articulate on paper my thoughts and feelings and insights that I have long felt. And when I''m able to put that into words, it's like a crystalization. And that moment of artistic translation, it's like a peak high.

"If I can do that a couple of times a day and write a couple thousand words, everything is great.''

By the way, Po's favorite book is "Catch-22,'' Joseph Heller's classic 1961 satire on the insanity of war. Po's first novel, 'Bombardiers,' was a tribute to 'Catch-22.'

"High literature is serious, and I feel something is wrong with literary society when everything is dead serious, and 'Catch-22'' helps us remember that you need to have a sense of humor, and you don't have to be dead serious all the time.''