Science  Write  Now

When we first started generating ideas for our themed issues, and landed on synergy, I thought the word meant to have an affinity with another life form – for example, you and a friend could be said to have a ‘good synergy’. When I looked up the definition, however, I found that synergy is the interaction or combination of two or more organisms or entities that produces a greater effect together than separately. 

What could be a better definition of friendship? 

(Or, my train of thought continued, of ecology, community, or creativity itself?)

In the cover image by our featured artist, Kathryn Cooper, individual starlings in flight achieve a murmuration – a collective body in motion. ‘Meteor’ shows the birds amass in the evening air, their presence as striking as a stone from space. Our latest Synergy edition of Science Write Now is something like this murmuration, generating resonance through the proximity of poem and story and essay and image. 

Poems in this edition consider the relationships among humans and ecosystems (‘Heart to Leaf’ by Anne Elvey; ‘Interdependence Intricacies’ and ‘Metanoia’ by Magdalena Ball), permutations of time (‘Isochronism: Three Sonnets’ by Shey Marque), and the marvel of plums becoming jam (‘The Jam-Maker’ by Lisa Collyer). In ‘Micellisation’, Michael J. Leach considers the chemical properties of surfactants with a structure that mimics the movement of molecules —a wonderful example of the way that science and poetry interleave. 

In our essays, Heather Taylor-Johnson tracks the permutation of wind, from its entrapment in her middle ear, to Provence and the mistral and Vincent van Gogh, to the bushfires in Australia, touching on a range of artists on the way. Paul Bogard muses on the way the moon bears witness to human activity, and how its light seeps into our literature and lives. Coen Hird writes on First Nations peoples’ connections to Antarctica and the impacts of these connections on health and cultural responsibility. Like the wind powering Taylor-Johnson’s essays, the yalingbila (whales) travel through Hird’s words.

Other essays feature the synergy of human connections. Anne Carson visited an archive in Leipzig to find out more about Anna Magdalena, Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife, and when her day didn’t work out as planned, she fell into the orbit of the only other Anna Magdalena in the city. It’s an amazing literary exchange, one echoed by Dan Beachy-Quick’s essay on the correspondences and collaborations of poetry in his friendships with fellow creatives — a never-ending conversation of thirteen-line poems with Bruce Bond, and the remoulding of poems by potter-sculptor Del Harrow that prompt meditations on the interplay between humans and objects. 

In ‘Beware of Imposters (the secret life of flowers)’, Selene de Carvalho searches for an orchid, Prasophyllum taphanyx, among a cemetery, reflecting on death and extinction, colonisation, and her installation at Dark MOFO exploring these themes. The Royal Hobart Botanical Gardens Seed Vault hasn’t yet collected the seed for the orchid, and the conditions for storing it would be complex as it requires mycorrhizal fungi for its germination. Without its friendship with fungi, the orchid becomes ‘an endemic plant with no backup.’

With funding from the Queensland Government, we have been able to support two young writers to write a piece of fiction inspired by science, while another two young editors worked on selected submissions. Ellyse Reese has penned a striking depiction of the interactions between benzodiazepines and the chemicals in grapefruits in ‘Death by Grapefruit’, while Adeeba Shaik draws on the synergy of poetry and nature, bees and flowers in her poignant piece about connection and loss, ‘The Greater Story’. We are also grateful to Georgia and Kael for their edits.

Miles Hitchcock, in ‘A Long, Flat Poem’, describes how a tiny indentation on a flat surface can bring a whole world into being. We never know when an idea will come but, when it touches us, whether invited or not, it generates an internal spark — one that prompts us to reach out, connect, and repeat the process of endless creativity.

We hope that in reading this edition you find creative inspiration, a sense of connection and belief in the ways that – together – we can build something greater. 

Artwork: 'Meteor' by this issue's featured artist, Dr Kathryn Cooper.