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. We are actively seeking new participants across the Nordic area and from other parts of Europe as well. Learn more.
News
December workshop coming up
Our next dinner salon and workshop will be on Thursday, 11 December. We have several possible texts in the mix for our December and January workshops, but we still have…
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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
Teaching structural biology and exposing affective atmospheres
At our October meeting, we workshopped a draft of an instructional short story imaginatively dramatizing the history of structural biology, and an essay-in-progress that sought to trouble the conventional wisdom…
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What does “knowledge” depend on?
Beware of UFO In the consciousness of a scientifically-minded person, UFOs might seem like just another quirky, conspiratorial, psycho-social delusion to be analyzed from the safety of academic objectivity, and…
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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…
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
Member, European Association of Creative Writing Programs
NeuWrite Nordic is supported by a generous grant from
NeuWrite Nordic ry | 2024