NEUWRITE NORDIC
NeuWrite Nordic is a European branch of the international network of science-writing groups NeuWrite, based in New York City. NeuWrite is a unique collaboration that brings scientists and creative writers together to workshop each other's approaches to communicating with the general public about science.
Once a month NeuWrite Nordic provides a comfortable room in Helsinki with dinner and drink, and a videoconference link to connect with participants around the region, to host a creative-writing workshop inspired by the Nordic folkbildning tradition of collaborative learning.
We provide feedback on drafts of each other's science writing, broadly defined, and sometimes study the work of other science writers, too. We are actively seeking new participants across the Nordic area and from other parts of Europe as well. Learn more.
News
September workshop
Our September dinner salon and workshop meeting is on Thursday, the 11th. We are workshopping a draft essay about what might happen in the consciousness of a scientifically-minded person if…
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European Association of Creative Writing Programs Conference
NeuWrite Nordic was invited to give a presentation about what we do, and about what writers might learn from scientists, at the conference of the European Association of Creative Writing…
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Medicine meets literature
A talk organized by NeuWrite Nordic board member Jussi Valtonen: Time: 7 May (Wednesday), 16:00 / 4pm Place: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies Common Room 3rd floor Fabianinkatu 24a Description:…
Read MoreRecent workshops
Who defines disease, and who gets money to study cures?
At our August meeting we workshopped two draft opinion essays that, from different angles but from within the same field, raised fundamental questions about how we should describe and nurture…
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Unconventional science lessons in health
Embracing uncertainty This tends to be an unconventional public stance for scientists these days, which could be why our first draft text this month felt so fresh when it began…
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Ethical dilemmas of genetic testing, and the history behind them
Imagine you are in a hospital lobby bustling with parents and noisy children, and then you take the elevator way up to a quiet prenatal diagnostics center, where no children…
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The hypoxia of the sea & the silent hitman
The sensation of being unable to breathe had both literal and symbolic resonance in our texts this month. Of the two texts-in-progress we workshopped, one was an evocative memory of…
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Bringing opinion essays into being / The Chronic Migraine Chronicles
To welcome spring we kicked off an opinion-essay writing drive, then workshopped sections from a forthcoming memoir-and-science-guide for general readers about living with chronic migraines. Benefits of opinion-essay writing Opinion…
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Is life a battle?
The famous essayist Susan Sontag thoughtfully criticized militaristic metaphors for illnesses and medical science. Yet our participant draft texts this month both made compelling cases-in very different ways-that science maybe…
Read MoreConvention says science and literature are separate, and that the public must be told the correct facts of objective science. But as scientists, writers, and audiences, we are communally navigating mixed-together scientific and humanistic narratives going all directions. Thus science writing can, and perhaps should, also embrace uncertainty, vulnerability, subjectivity, emotion, metaphor, and imagination if the goal is to create lasting insight and impact.
—Trevor Corson
Director, NeuWrite Nordic
NeuWrite Nordic is supported by a generous grant from
NeuWrite Nordic ry | 2024