Editor’s Journal: Telling Stories
KEVIN FINNERAN
“The universe is composed of stories, not of atoms” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem “The Speed of Darkness.” Good stories are not merely the collection of individual events; they are a means of expressing ideas in concrete terms at human scale. They have the ability to accomplish the apparently simple but rarely achieved task of seamlessly linking the general with the specific, of giving ideas flesh and blood.
This edition of Issues includes three articles that use narrative structure to address important science and technology policy topics. They are the product of a program at Arizona State University that was directed by writer and teacher Lee Gutkind and funded by the National Science Foundation. Begun in 2010, the Think, Write, Publish program began by assembling two dozen young writers and scientists/engineers to work in teams to prepare articles that use a narrative approach to engage readers in an S&T topic. Lee organized a training program that included several workshops and opportunities to meet with editors from major magazines and book publishers. Several of the writer/expert teams prepared articles that were published in Issues: Mary Lee Sethi and Adam Briggle on the federal Bioethics Commission, Jennifer Liu and Deborah Gardner on the global dimension of medicine and ethics, Gwen Ottinger and Rachel Zurer on environmental monitoring, and Ross Carper and Sonja Schmid on small modular nuclear reactors.
Encouraged by the enthusiasm for the initial experiment, they decided to do it again. A second cohort, again composed of 12 scholars and 12 writers, was selected in 2013. They participated in two week-long workshops. At the first meeting teams were formed, guest editors and writers offered advice, Lee and his team provided training, and the teams began their work. Six months later the teams returned for a second week-long workshop during which they worked intensively revising and refining the drafts they had prepared. They also received advice from some of the participants from the first cohort.
They learned that policy debates do not lend themselves easily to narrative treatments, that collaborative writing is difficult, that professional writers and scholars approach the task of writing very differently and have sometimes conflicting criteria for good writing. But they persisted, and now we are proud to present three of the articles that emerged from the effort. Additional articles written by the teams can be found at http://thinkwritepublish.org/.
These young authors are trailblazers in the quest to find a way to make the public more informed and more engaged participants in science, technology, and health policy debates. They recognize narrative as a way to ground and humanize discussions that are too often conducted in abstract and erudite terms. We know that the outcomes of these debates have results that are anything but abstract, and that it is essential that people from all corners and levels of society participate. Effective stories that inform and engage readers can be a valuable means of expanding participation in science policy development. If you want to see how, you can begin reading on the next page.