Perhaps it’s the number of trees per person on Earth. Perhaps it’s the existence of a sea rose that only release pollen in response to the vibrations of a specific kind of African bee. 

We’re asking you to share what you know from science through writing short creative pieces, or “micros.” Your piece can be prose or poetry; it should be shorter than 365 words.

We’ll be publishing these on trees around campus in late April to help increase science literacy through creative writing. This “Poet/Tree+ Anthology” will be up for three weeks, heading towards the end of this academic year.

This project is part of Ideas That Matter: Climate Change & the Individual, supported by the Science Communication microcredential. We especially invite submissions that help raise awareness of the science around climate change, but welcome any submissions rooted in scientific ideas, terms, and concepts.

We’re looking for submissions from students, staff, faculty, community members. We ask for submissions by Friday 4/6 (although if it’s later than this date, you can still try us!). You will use the Submittable platform to submit your work to us.

Times and dates for writing workshops and Publishing & Creativity Studio opportunities to help you create are coming soon. In the meantime, please use the menu items above to help you source science, gain inspiration from creative writing, and think about science action steps we can all take.

For questions, please contact Lytton Smith, smithlj@geneseo.edu.

Perhaps you don’t primarily think of yourself as a scientist or as a writer. But we all know the world through what we know of its science, and we all have the potential to weave words together so that someone else can know that science too. Please help us share science and science action through creative writing!

Instructions for your micro

Your micro should:

• be up to 365 words long
• be accompanied by a reliable scientific source supporting the science it shares (see here for tips or contact us)
• ideally be accompanied by an action step we can take based on this action; it does not have to be huge (volunteer at the eGarden; join Geneseo’s beekeeping club). For tips, see here or contact us; we can help you identify useful actions.
• in addition to you ,365 creative words, provide us about 150 words about who you are and why you wanted to communicate this piece of scientific information. Feel free to point out something you’re proud of and hope the reader notices about the piece! You might find inspiration from the short “About this Poem” statements on the poems that are part of the Academy of American Poets’ “Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize,” such as this one (scroll down and look on the right hand side, if you’re reading on a computer).

We will accept previously published work: the key thing is that it shares sciences and that it is your human-authored work.

In addition to our workshops, the Writing Center is a great resource for collaborating on writing projects like this. Please reach out to us if you have questions or want to participate but are stuck on something or just need some encouragement!