Eidolon
The narrative power of butterfly wings, rewriting the history of women in science & how to become an "intellectual smuggler"
Vol. 1, Issue 8
First, a quick note of apology for this issue’s delay. I’ve been fully absorbed in writing a new novel manuscript, and I sometimes struggle to balance deep dives into fiction with other writing.
My new project is starting to take form as a story about a flooded town set on the Gulf Coast. It’s a sort of coming-of-age meets coming-to-terms novel about climate-change denial and the chronic struggle for women to achieve credibility and influence in their careers and communities. It is also a book about a hurricane. A very big hurricane.
I’ve been dabbling with climate-related fiction for several years now; one of my first published stories was about a flood, and my most recent story short is about the physical and psychological damage of storms on children. After college, I started my writing career as a science communicator, and I’ve always wanted to somehow reconnect that earlier part of myself with the writer I’m becoming now. Unlike some of my former sci-comm colleagues, science isn’t what drew me into writing; instead, writing enticed me into the laboratories of brilliant people at a crucial and impressionable time in my life. I interviewed dozens of researchers across many disciplines, and I skimmed the surface of their work just enough to begin to appreciate the work and dedication and sacrifice it requires to find answers to questions and problems that affect our lives and world.
And now, of course, scientists are working during an especially hostile era for intellectual endeavors. It’s an important moment, I think, for creative people to lend a hand. One of my all-time favorite writers, Barbara Kingsolver, has demonstrated the raw emotional power of stories that are thoughtfully interwoven with scientific knowledge and admiration for scientists. Flight Behavior is, I believe, her best example of this. That novel is about a young woman in Tennessee who witnesses a massive migration of monarch butterflies, which sets off a chain reaction in her rural community that pits religious zealots against scientists and environmentalists. (I also recommend her more recent Unsheltered, which is similarly amazing.)
Writers like Claire Vaye Watkins, Lydia Millet, and Charlotte McConaghy are also wrestling deeply and meaningfully with environmental and climate-related themes in their most recent works. There are, in short, many great creative role models who are already doing the sort of work I’m feeling a strong pull toward right now.
It feels increasingly urgent for creative writers to find new ways to tell stories that provoke, at the very least, more empathy for the people who perform scientific work. Maybe we can embed a few pieces of useful, real information within our otherwise fictional worlds. Maybe we can invert the mad-scientist villain trope into something better. Maybe the pages of our stories can fan like butterfly wings and oscillate some positive cultural change for scientists in this time of seemingly endless chaos.
Listen
This week’s soundtrack is by another of my long-time personal eidolons, Zoë Keating, a classical music innovator and fierce champion for independent musicians.
Read
Women scientists were written out of history. It’s Margaret Rossiter’s lifelong mission to fix that, Smithsonian Magazine. “Rossiter was one of the first to map out a problem in science that its practitioners are only now struggling to address with peak urgency: Earlier this year, the prestigious medical journal the Lancet devoted an entire issue to the underrepresentation of women in science, announcing, among other things, that less than 30 percent of the world’s researchers in science are women.”
Barbara Kingsolver: It feels as though we’re living through the end of the world, The Guardian. “‘At the end of an era, people keep grabbing harder on to the world that they know.’ See what happens, as she puts it, ‘when you put a bunch of rats in a box.’”
Books, Birds, and Beauty: A conversation with Megan Mayhew-Bergman, Jeff VanderMeer, and Lili Taylor, LitHub. “It’s so important to me that there’s no element of the natural world that’s not from first-hand observation in any of my books. Even in the ones that are more fantastical, if there’s some element that’s still tied to the real world, it’s from experience.”
Consider
“At the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, we create inspiring, inclusive, technically grounded visions of the future by bringing together artists, authors, and educators with scientists, technologists, policy thinkers, and community members. We publish collections of science fiction, nonfiction, and art; lead informal and formal education initiatives around science, technology, culture, and society; host public events and forums and create podcasts and videos about science fiction, media arts, and possible futures; conduct interdisciplinary research about collaboration and imagination, and more.”
The Imagination Desk podcast features “artists, scholars, scientists, and technologists about what inspires them and how they define and use imagination in their work.” Listen to a sample episode below.
First/Last Words
You can become an intellectual smuggler by packaging the truth in a fictional context … If it’s exciting enough, [readers will] learn something.
—Carl DjerassiGood fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another.
—Raymond Carver
It’s tempting to be cynical about the role of fiction writing in the current state of the world. But while scientists are busy uncovering truths about the environmental, medical, and technological issues of our day, creatives can help interpret and make social and cultural meaning of that work. We writers are not merely bystanders to history; we are the makers of artifacts that will preserve the memories and experiences of our time. We have so much power to amplify topics and people that matter, yet too often we forget or downplay this.
As you make your way to the page this week, I challenge you to read a few articles about a scientific topic that interests you and think for awhile about what characters or places or ideas are being presented and/or oversimplified. What unsung heroes can you trumpet? What fresh light can you shine on the story?
If you’re uncertain about where to start, try meandering through the Poets for Science collection, curated by Jane Hirshfield, and see what speaks to you.
Connect
You can find Sandra on Twitter, Instagram, and at sandrabarnidge.com. As always, thank you for being here.