Posts by Trevor Corson
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: 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…
Read MoreIs 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 does involve fighting. Is battle an appropriate metaphorical framework when communicating about science? Morphogens fight it out The first text we workshopped, about how morphogens…
Read MoreCan extremophiles save the cat? Using “story grid”
Telling science stories can take the basic form of a “why / how / what” presentation, or the more ambitious form of a “story grid”, like the kind that bestselling writers use in nonfiction books, thrillers, and Hollywood films—one popular version is the “Save the Cat” technique of gridding out a story from 15 key…
Read MoreScientific genius—or not?
How do we as a society figure out if scientific genius is the real thing? What role should science writers play in celebrating or critiquing apparent scientific brilliance? What happens if we get it wrong? One of the most celebrated polymath geniuses of 20th-century America was the cosmologist/physicist/environmentalist/architect Buckminster Fuller. Yet doubts remain whether Fuller…
Read MoreBioracism reborn?
Many science bloggers and writers put their thoughts into the form of essays that discuss a new book, or several new books where the writer sees a theme. We studied an example of this kind of book-review essay this month to see how such essays can work, especially in terms of structure and argument. The…
Read MoreBrain, mind, and science communication—panel discussion
NeuWrite Nordic director Trevor Corson discussed journalism, storytelling, and creative writing about science as part of a panel discussion on science communication, during the concluding event of the Brain & Mind Symposium in Helsinki on October 25. The panel brought together a rich mix of perspectives from: eNeuro, the journal of the Society for Neuroscience—panelist:…
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