Science in Service
to the Literary Arts  

I would have never considered myself a science communicator until I began working with my coeditors on this special issue. I would have considered myself primarily an avid reader of narrative nonfiction, often with a scientific angle such as ecology, geography, health sciences, or cosmology. I also knew that as a creative writer, when I sought to explain ideas, concepts, or feelings that were just out of reach, I often used a science metaphor or scientific grounding to explain. When I began teaching science writing for the public, using my creative nonfiction background as a springboard, I realized how many creative writers were already intentionally engaging with the sciences in a way that not only helped communicate urgent science matters to the public, but brought depth and artistry to their work that might not otherwise be possible. I was inspired to not only start exploring such engagement in my own work but also to help my students do the same, which is why I developed W&L CS 149: Multigenre Workshop - Science in the Literary Arts.

I was also in part motivated to push back against the STEAM framing of the meeting of the arts/humanities and the sciences. In their introduction to Writing STEAM: Composition, STEM, and a New Humanities, Vivian Kao and Julian Kiernan (2022) traced the rise of STEAM back through the early years of STEM education's centrality to the United States' strategy to remain competitive in innovation, economics, and wealth creation at a global scale as well as create opportunities for climbing the class ladder at home. The establishment of land-grant universities, World War II, and the space race of the 1950s all marked times of increased attention to STEM education, long before the National Science Foundation (NSF) coined the acronym in 2001.

However, the limitations of curricula overly focused on STEM became apparent to many educators, including, "a lack of contextualization of scientific and technical expertise through humanistic concerns; a lack of student-centered teaching and learning practices that value all students' interests and talents; the gender, racial, and ethnic disparities in STEM achievement that continue in the workplace; and the evidence that higher earnings do not necessarily lead to greater happiness long-term" (Kao & Kiernan, 2022, p. 6). As such, beginning with an advocacy effort at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), more educators began the push from STEM to STEAM by integrating arts and humanities education into STEM curricula. However, even in this new framework, the goal was still largely to teach STEM subjects more effectively. Maria E. Gigante (2018) called this the "culturally imposed rift between the sciences and the arts"; even when the two are brought together, there still seems to be a "privileg[ing of] science over art, as if art were the handmaiden of the sciences" (p. ix).

In my work as a creative writing instructor, I wanted to design a course that would challenge this privileging of STEM over the "A" in STEAM, so I created W&L CS 149: Science in the Literary Arts, an upper-division creative writing workshop geared towards (but not exclusive to) experienced undergraduate creative writers. The course was described to students as follows:

The meeting of the arts and sciences is often framed as STEAM, an acronym that adds "A" for the arts to the more common STEM, for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. However, in such contexts, the arts are often put in a service position, as a fun way to ultimately still teach science, with little benefit to the arts themselves. In this class, we will seek to flip this paradigm on its head, asking instead how the sciences can serve the literary arts, for the benefit of the literary arts. In this class, students will develop poems and prose from scientific concepts, focusing on the unique language, metaphors, and images that science offers.

The course was then divided into four main units: an introductory unit inviting students into the ongoing conversations about the intersection of science and creative writing, a poetry unit focused on using scientific facts and the unique language of science as a basis for metaphor and other figurative language, a nonfiction unit on how to balance artistry and accuracy, and a fiction unit that encouraged students to use science as a springboard for imaginative work in ways that included and went beyond fiction in the "sci-fi" genre.

Perhaps the most important and transformative unit of the class was the one on poetry, perhaps because it is the genre least associated with any kind of science communication. We began by engaging with many different collections of science poetry, such as poet Jane Hirschfield's Poets for Science (n.d.) initiative; Maria Popova's (n.d.) project, The Universe in Verse; or Sam Illingworth's (n.d.) work on his blog, The Poetry of Science.

With that inspiration under their belts, students did a few exercises in class to warm up to the idea of writing science poems, including some in-class writing where we all wrote poems based on the same Science News article by Tina Hesman Saey (2024) about scientists forcing tardigrades into a state of suspended animation called a tun state. The resulting poems showed the diversity of perspectives poets could bring to science. Some of the poems discussed the ethics of experimenting with living creatures, some imagined life from the tardigrade's point-of-view, while others used figurative language to explain the science of coaxing the tardigrade into the tun state in which they are almost impervious to insult from the outside world. Below, a student took a creative spin on the assignment by quoting the article but adding images to create a visual poem. When the class discussed this student's work, many agreed that the meaning of the words changed significantly with the use of images, the final frame almost turning the poem into an unsettling critique of gun violence.

Next, students wrote a small collection of poems for a full-class workshop. There, they could write on any science topic and in any poetic form. Students also wrote reflections on their work, in which they discussed their writing process and how science informed their work. In class, we discussed these reflections and noticed patterns emerge around how they were using science. We came up with some general categories into which their poems fell in terms of the kind of work that science poetry allowed them to do as artists. The first category we identified together were those poems that used science as grounding, that is, poems in which science provided a concrete, tangible way to discuss larger ideas and abstractions. Next, we found that many of the poems used science to elucidate the human experience. In these poems, students found they were able to discuss the science of the nonhuman world—animals, plants, rocks, particles, and so forth—in order to better communicate their very human experiences. Finally, students noted that they were able to use poetry to critique science, often through a lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or ethical concerns.

Having worked with this first group of students on science poetry, I'm excited to refine my pedagogy in the future, using the categories of types of science poems we identified as a starting point to think about how to write science poetry and what other uses such poems might have, including what avenues for expression students might yet discover. In particular, the science poem as critique strikes me as a potentially useful tool not only in a creative writing class, like this one, but also perhaps in a more traditional science writing classroom, where a poem might give students an entry way into an argument or critique of science that might be more difficult to access in other forms. Indeed, I might also imagine an entire course on science poetry, one in which I might overtly connect science poetry to the larger tradition of activist or protest poetry.