This past summer, Chemistry Associate Professor Lillian Chong teamed up with the English Department’s Sam Pittman and Marylou Gramm to coordinate the University of Pittsburgh Summer Workshop in Creative Science Writing, funded by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Grant and the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Four undergraduate writers were selected to participate as writers in residence, each working with both a writing and science mentor. The two-month program culminated in a reading by the writers, as well as a Conversation with Lee Gutkind, a former Pitt Writing faculty member and founding editor of Creative Nonfiction; Humanities Center Associate Director Dan Kubis dialogued with Gutkind for the podcast Being Human. To review some of the work by undergraduates that came out of the workshop, check out Lab Musings Summer 2018.
Pitt Writing Junior Qi'Ang Meng
Below is an essay by junior Writing and Philosophy major Qi’Ang Meng on his experiences as a Creative Science Writing resident.
Had I not decided to become a poet, I would have been trying to be a passable astronomer. According to Zhao Jiabi’s memorial essay for his teacher—the Chinese poet Xu Zhimo—Xu used to persuade his students to “read some shallow books about astronomy” along with the literary masterpieces so that their souls would not be trapped merely on this spinning earth. Pitt’s Creative Science Writing Program 2018 offered an opportunity for my poetic mind to take wings and roam in the mysterious space.
The program was initiated by Dr. Lillian Chong of the Chemistry Department, and this year’s session was the second one. The main purpose of the program, as suggested by its title, is to produce creative writing works related to science topics through a series of workshops. The selected undergraduate students were encouraged to bring their interdisciplinary insights into their composition. I first talked to Dr. Ellen Smith of the English department about this project in March of 2018. In her office on the fourth floor (the furthermost from the elevator), Ellen took off her glasses, widened her eyes and said she would support me, same as she always did when she said she would support any of my crazy ideas.
Creative Science Writing Student Residents and Coordinators
In addition to a mentor from the English Department, each candidate had to have a science supervisor in their chosen field. Dr. Sandhya Rao, a research professor in Physics, greeted me with a welcoming smile. I had taken her course “Stars, Galaxies, and the Cosmos” the previous fall. Having been impressed by her words in one lecture, that our sun “will eventually die and turn into the largest diamond out there,” I thought of science as romantic for the first time. “I used to write some poetry too when I was young,” Dr. Rao said to me, and I felt happy that we had something in common. She lent me a fascinating book, the seventh edition of Astronomy Today, and wished me good luck.
The weekly workshops were scheduled each Wednesday over the course of a summer. At our first conference, I met the small group of peer science writers, from whom I would soon learn about the moral dilemma of killing fruit flies for experiments, the story of mitochondrial DNA and queer love, and the tangled neurons connected with personal sadness.
We started off by attending the annual Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference in Pittsburgh, a platform where writers from across the nation gathered and shared their knowledge. In addition, guest speakers visited our on-campus workshops with information about writing as well as publishing, so even the non-writing-major students could begin to think about the literary landscape.
Writing on a theme is hard. For a period of time, my mind was jammed with the question of how to express theorems in a figurative way. While visiting my friend in Washington, D.C., this August, I insisted on going the National Air and Space Museum because my project kept haunting me. Sitting down in the Albert Einstein Planetarium, I found myself submerged in the unfathomable night sky projected onto the dome. There were numerous brilliant aspects to write about, as many as the observable galaxies, but how and where to start? A solution turned out to be: pay attention to the unimportant things happening in the surrounding world. When I had severe writer’s block, inspiration was always sparked by seemingly insignificant details—a homemade ice-cream cone, a girl cycling passing the campus lawn at dawn, or a book I had read recently about the French Revolution.
Sometimes, I failed to explain to Ellen, my Writing mentor for the summer, the scientific facts in my poems, but she looked excited just hearing them and could tell me which parts were beautiful or infectious. Sometimes, Dr. Rao was confused by the metaphors (“I’m sure that’s just because I’m not used to reading poetry,” she said), but she could tell me whether a piece was “astronomical” enough. By frequently checking with them, I made sure that the poems were fine from both disciplinary points of view.
I was surprised to witness the hybridization of science and literary art, especially as it began to unfold in my own work. In hi “Sonnet—To Science,” Edgar Allan Poe criticizes science as a vulture who snatches imagination from “the poet’s heart” and whose “wings are dull realities.” However, the experience of writing science poems made me realize that the two disciplines are compatible in some sense, and the two cultures can actually reach great harmony.
At the end of the program, the participants held their celebration in the auditorium of the Frick Fine Arts Building. After finishing reading my last haiku to the audience, I felt lost because I feared I might go back and stay on the track of writing ordinary poems, setting aside all the stuff about astronomy I had been immersed in. But, maybe on the day when I returned her book, I would tell Dr. Rao about my thrilling discovery: that more poems made of atoms shall come to be, that more poems shall stay visible in the dark universe.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."