Posts by Trevor Corson
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 they were to experience seeing an unidentified flying object themselves, as well as a lyrical essay about atomic half-lives, phantom elements on the periodic table,…
Read MoreWho 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 scientific progress—in this case, in medicine. In our first text, a surgeon began with an anecdote about her mother to interrogate how illness is defined…
Read MoreUnconventional 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 by doing just that. The author described working in science for most of their adult life, and having believed, in the past, that after putting…
Read MoreEuropean 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 Programs (EACWP) in Paris in May. The theme of the conference was a perfect match for us: “Writing in the Real World”. NeuWrite Nordic director…
Read MoreEthical 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 have yet appeared. You are entering the world of to be born or not to be born. The future is now So began the beautifully…
Read MoreMedicine 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: Narrative medicine brings healthcare into conversation with literature. It begins with a comparison between listening and reading, with the physician as the “reader” and interpreter…
Read MoreThe 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 diving in the Baltic sea that conjured feverish dreams linked to the fate of the planet. The essay began with a diver floating on their…
Read MoreStorytelling or spinning narratives—what’s the difference?
NeuWrite Nordic director Trevor Corson met with the University of Helsinki branch of the international ReproducibiliTea journal club to discuss the downside of narratives in science. Bias and the spinning of results have become endemic, especially in medical research. What, actually, are the differences between justified storytelling to convey robust scientific findings on the one…
Read MoreAward for Buckminster Fuller project
Congratulations to NeuWrite Nordic participant, science journalist, and scholar Pasi Toiviainen for winning the prestigious Aalto University dissertation award for his psychobiographical reinterpretation of the life and works of Buckminster Fuller. At NeuWrite we’ve been excited to try to help workshop the development of Pasi’s project on Fuller into a possible story about science for…
Read MoreBringing 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 essays about science for the general public can appear in newspapers or blogs and have many advantages. Writing them forces us to clarify the social…
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