Good storytelling illuminates and celebrates complexity. The ‘Communicating Science Through Books’ event, the first in Reuben’s Hilary Term Pandemic themed seminar series, was particularly fascinating because of the different ways science can be effectively communicated in books, and the richness of being led through the writing journey by Lucy Ward, John Tregoning, and Daniel Davis.
The three books engage with the concepts and stories in pandemics and diseases in different ways. Listening to the writing journeys and the narratives behind and within these books make me reflect particularly about time and space. Having always experienced books as territories to explore and emerge changed at the other end, I now have a much greater appreciation for the practice of talking about the books. How absolutely marvellous to experience the story of Catherine the Great’s innoculation through Lucy’s eyes, and listen to the emotion brought through, one imagines, dusty and serious archival materials! It was fascinating and humbling to hear about the mediation of the writing process and engaging with the materials in pandemic times when writing about pandemic times. Experiences of such circularity must be quite rare, I would think.
To then have the emotive experience of the timelines, places, people, and story running through ‘The Empress and the English Doctor’ complemented by John Tregoning’s writing process, mapped over time and content, was particularly interesting in terms of the time made tangible in the writing experience. A very different kind of tangibility compared to the picture of the lancet used for inoculation shared by Lucy, and to Daniel Davis’s carving out the space and time for the writing process by installing a dedicated writing shed.
I came to the event determined to learn and be inspired to write a book. I went away with a rich and deep understanding of how books are vehicles for stories that live outside them, and how necessary passionate enchantment and obsessive care is when producing books that matter. My experience of reading these books will be much more impactful than before these conversations – a peek behind the curtains, as it were. Science communication has the potential being much more than a transmission exercise, and books must be talked about a lot more than they are, by those who create them.
Saher Hasnain is a Research Fellow at Reuben College, within the Environmental Change theme. She is a researcher at the Food Systems Transformation Programme with the University of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute.
