Katelyn Allers on exoplanets and contributing to the encyclopedia of the universe

Katelyn Allers

Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy

What writing project(s) are you working on right now?

Right now I have two manuscripts in the works.  The first is the write-up of the design analysis and first results for a custom filter (similar to a camera filter) that I designed a few years ago.  The filter is designed to easily identify very low-mass stars and planets outside of our solar system (exoplanets).  The second manuscript is based largely on the work of Joe Lyons, a UMass-Amherst student who participated in Bucknell's NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in the Physics and Astronomy Department.  This paper is about determining if a planet or very low-mass star is young.  And by "young" we mean about 10 million years old!

What do you love about it?

Both of these papers are exploring directly-imaged exoplanets, which make up a new and exciting field in astronomy.  The first directly imaged exoplanets were discovered in 2008, and it seems like every new study reveals something unexpected about their nature.

What about it (if anything) is driving you nuts?

As is common in the field of astronomy, our work builds on previous studies. This can be somewhat aggravating, if the previous studies have been presented at a conference, but not published in a refereed journal.  Even worse is when the refereed journal article comes out and has very different results than the conference paper we were working from.

How would you describe your writing process?

I try to write a paper in plots.  I come up with the scientific plots that will best tell the story I'm going for and then craft the written manuscript around those plots.

What kind of feedback on your writing do you find most helpful?

Feedback from people in my field who are likely to use my results is the most useful (i.e. from my audience).  For example, I will try to solicit feedback on my filter design paper from scientists who might use my analysis to design their own filters. 

What would you like students to know about you as a writer?

One thing I think students should understand about scientific writing is how an individual's work is a piece of a much bigger puzzle.  My work builds on the work of other scientists and will, in turn, be built upon by future scientists.  I like to think that I'm helping write the encyclopedia of the universe!

Jeff Plunkett ’85 on writing and connection

Jeff Plunkett ‘85

Actor and Entrepreneur

New York City 

I write because people fascinate me as much as they infuriate me.  And I need to give voice to that.  Because deep down, everybody just wants to be loved, of course, and there is too little love on the streets today.  There is far more fear.  Fearful people react disproportionately to their surroundings.  While there is inherent comedy in these situations, there is something touching, too.  You see, I see myself in the people I write about.  And when I write down their little foibles or outrageous conflagrations, I connect with their fear.  I understand their need for love.  I infiltrate.  It is unbearable at times.  But when others write back to me that they understand the tableaux I’ve described, they make me feel less alone and less afraid.  That they read me is the better part of the equation. 

Click here to read Jeff's bio.

See what Jeff's rehearsing for now at the Florida Studio Theatre!

Fiction Writer Claire Watkins, Assistant Professor of English, on walking into the unknown and waiting for “the click”

Photo credit:  Lily Glass

What writing project(s) are you working on right now?

I'm currently at work on my first novel. I've previously only written short stories, so this is my first stab at the longer form, ever. I wish I could tell you more about it, but I am too superstitious.

What do you love about it?  

Compared to short stories, writing a novel seems very freeing. You have the room to expand and explore, though you don't have to. It feels more forgiving of whims, digressions, experiments, so composition on this project has been a more extemporaneous process. That's a real thrill.

What about it (if anything) is driving you nuts?

Pretty much everything. I don't know myself as a novelist. For example, I write short stories from outlines but that practice hasn't exactly translated to novel writing, so it's really freaky not to have a plan, not to have a better sense of where the project is going (or when it will end). Of course, the same process exists when I'm writing stories--giddy inspiration, walking into the unknown, the click when everything makes sense again--but it's extended over years, rather than months. So I've been walking into the unknown for some time now, and I sure could use a click.  

What would you like students to know about you as a writer?

I'd like them to know that I fail at writing all the time, every day. I'd like to remind them that my published work--or anyone's--is elaborately constructed to hide its flaws, so those are difficult to see, especially when you've just begun. But those flaws are certainly there, and always will be. I'd also like to tell them that while I was not a huge reader for most of my young life, reading and writing have become the most important, most sustaining non-human things in my life. Whether students consider themselves "writers" or not, I hope they carry the nourishing practice of reading and writing, which are, fundamentally, acts of empathy, with them wherever they go.

Check out Claire's website.

Read a review of Battleborn in The New York Times.

See a profile of Claire on Bucknell's website.

Vincent Stephens, Director of Multicultural Student Services, on scholarly and personal writing about music and queer musicians

What writing project(s) are you working on right now?

I’m implementing finishing touches on my manuscript Rocking the Closet: Queer Musicians and the Limits of the Closet and preparing a book proposal to send it out to an academic publisher.

I’m also writing for an essay collection on popular music called Sound Love.

What do you love about it?

Both projects represent two key aspects of my writing style. Rocking the Closet is an academic book that grew out of my training and dissertation research, and aims for a scholarly audience. By definition its content, structure and tone are formal but hopefully interesting to a range of readers.

Sound Love is a more personal work written in a more accessible voice. The collection addresses singers as disparate as Freddy Cole and Bobbie Gentry and is laced with personal insights and some autobiographical reflections.

What about it (if anything) is driving you nuts?

The editing process is always challenging because it requires writers to step out of their own voice and assess their work with some sense of distance. Depending on the duration of the project this frequently requires breaks from the project to achieve maximum clarity. Integral to editing is the ability to economize and use language precisely and efficiently.

How would you describe your writing process?

I approach academic writing, notably scholarly essays, with a strong sense of concept and organization. I thrive when I have a skeletal sense of my argument and its structure before writing. I also prefer to have evidence nearby so I can integrate components more readily. The first few drafts I write are rarely sufficient and require intricate attention to revising, editing and formatting. More recently I’ve worked on the book using a schedule and have found myself writing for longer periods than I anticipated which is a good sign usually.

For more casual writing I write when I’m inspired rather than on a schedule. I try to have an internal map and tend to be more willing to play around with structure and focus. My drafts tend to have a lot of sketching and notes. 

I like to write in a closed, relatively isolated space such as my home office and to play music for texture.

What kind of feedback on your writing do you find most helpful?

I like clear and detailed feedback about overall concepts and ideas, the quality of prose, organizational structure and overall persuasiveness. I find that typed criticism is more useful than oral comments because on paper there’s room for more detail, I can reference it and nothing gets lost or forgotten. It’s also less emotional which is essential to developing a sense of critical distance.

What would you like students to know about you as a writer?

I value writing as a professional practice and for personal expression. There are essays/chapter I have published that represent important aspects of my intellectual interests and have professional resonance. But I have also written pieces that are purely for personal expression. At its best writing feels like a personal extension rather than a task.

Reading inspires my writing immensely. I learn a lot about form, style and voice reading great writing. I enjoy reading literary fiction, non-fiction books, newspapers, magazines and occasionally journal articles. Reading puts me in conversation with an infinite array of voices and perspectives and is essential to feeling informed, connected and human.   

Prof. Michelle Oswald writes about a constantly evolving concern: adapting infrastructure to climate change

     

        Michelle Oswald, Assistant Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering

What writing project(s) are you working on right now?

I am currently writing two journal papers on the topic of climate change adaptation and transportation. One of the papers is an evaluation of current transportation planning agencies and their level of progress with adapting to climate change impacts such as sea level rise, temperature changes and extreme weather events.  The other paper focuses on how transit agencies throughout the country can start prioritizing rail and bus network projects in order to protect and prepare facilities for climate change impacts.

What do you love about it?

I love the fact that this topic is so innovative and timely to our infrastructure needs. Climate change projections are constantly improving and as a result, understanding how this effects transportation infrastructure is extremely valuable. Planners and engineers have the opportunity to design and protect existing and future transportation systems from flooding, extreme heat waves, sea level inundation, etc.  Therefore, writing about this topic just emphasizes its importance and disseminates examples and ideas for agencies to move forward and take action.

What about it (if anything) is driving you nuts?

One of the challenges I have faced is that the topic of climate change is always evolving.  As a result, background literature on this topic is being updated and published everyday. I aim to have the most up-to-date information and examples incorporated into my writing, and therefore, staying in tune with the latest publications, reports, news articles, etc. is very important. 

How would you describe your writing process?

I have found the writing process to be pretty iterative as a result of the evolving literature review.  Although I have written the background section, I keep revising and adding more to in order to stay up-to-date.  I have used an outline format throughout both journals and this really keeps me on track.  I take it one section at a time and then always reread before moving on.  Taking breaks after each major section has also helped thanks to participating in the Writing Boot Camp this winter!

Kiara Huertas ’14 on making ink trails between post-it notes

Kiara Huertas ‘14

Major: Creative Writing

Minor: Religion

Hometown:  Waterbury, CT

To an Ex-lover

We are not bombs waiting to explode beneath each other’s feet,

scattering limbs until I cannot tell where my frame ends and yours begins.

Neither are we paintings waiting to be finished by the next artist that passes.

And while I may be like a fruit spoiled by sun on a windowsill,

I hear my own cry beginning to rise from rubble,

baby girl, no one can ever steal your shine.

I still look upward as if the sky could exonerate me.

                                                                        ***

Imagine this: every time you come across something in life that you want to remember, you pull out a post-it note and scribble down details about it. You might scribble down a nice thing that someone said about you. Maybe you record a sentence or two about that one moment, when the sun shined on water so perfectly, you couldn’t help but think of the most recent conversation with your schizophrenic mother—when she didn’t sound crazy. Maybe you scribble about the first time you realized your best friend was no longer your friend, but you don’t write on the post-it that your friend isn’t your friend anymore because you haven’t learned that yet.

Instead, you describe the quick flicker in her eyes that you might have missed but didn’t. You don’t write anything more about the flicker either, you just write that it was there, and what it looked like, but not what it meant. You’re not ready to discuss such things yet.

            Eventually you start to color code your post-it notes. You scribble down the things that you remember fondly on the pink post-it notes. On the blue ones, anything that feels like tears, or anger, or all the times that a white person responded to the rolled r in your last name with: I have a good friend that’s Mexican. On the yellow ones, you write the things you haven’t quite decided how to feel about, like prep school, which ultimately equipped you with more words and more ways to use them to depict all of these moments, but also inspired more than a few of the blue post-it notes.

            Imagine now that your room is overflowing with post-it notes. They are on the walls and the bed post. They are on your desk and computer, and covering the whole window so that you can’t see sun, or rain, or people walking by. There are so many post-it notes that you’ve even filled your underwear drawer, so you resolve that you have to do something with them. You have to be able to open the window without fearing that some of your post-it notes will fly away before you can make them something beautiful. So you sit Indian-legged in the center of your room and start peeling away at the post-it notes that you can reach first. They aren’t necessarily the most compelling post-it notes, but they are the ones that you can grab without rising. You don’t know exactly what to do with these post-it notes, but you know you’re not ready to rise again and you don’t.

            Now that you’ve started to read the post-it notes, you begin to cry over them, making ink trails between them. Suddenly it hits you: you’re not crying over any single post-it note but at the joy of having them…to remember. The thing is, as you remember, you don’t look at the post-it notes the same way. You decide that they don’t do enough for the memories, and you need to record them in a way that surpasses scribbled, abrupt words. So you begin to string post-it notes together on a page. The page is longer and wider, so you weigh it down with words too heavy for post-it notes. You use words in a way that makes you ache so thoroughly that it doesn’t feel like pain; it feels like metaphors spilling from rooftops because the clouds got too heavy to hold them (that’s the best way you can describe it anyway). This is the joy of writing: deliberately placing post-it note memories onto a page so that those words don’t just sit where you stuck them. They fly now from mind, to mouth, to ear, to soul, and back again, and the movement is so great, so unsettling, and grounding, that you stay right there, on the middle of your floor, Indian-legged, and you breathe the breath of someone just trying to take it all in.

Prof. Roger Rothman on Fluxus, the creative excitement of starting a new project, and the need to rewrite.

Roger Rothman, Associate Professor of Art History

What writing project(s) are you working on right now?

I am writing a book on Fluxus. Fluxus was (and still is) a loose group of artists (Yoko Ono is perhaps the most famous) from around the globe (most from the US, Germany, France, and Japan) who sought to blur the boundary between art and life. Much of what they did was simple and silly, and I’m especially interested in exploring the complex and serious ideas that were hidden underneath. The book will focus on the American artists in the group and will examine the connections between their work and the ideas that drove the various social and cultural upheavals of the sixties. My argument is that the political dimension of Fluxus is far more significant than people have thought. At this point, I am still early in the writing process. I have been on sabbatical this year and have been collecting information on different artists as well as historical accounts of the sixties. I’ve also taken a few trips into New York to look through the archives at MOMA and meet with individuals who were (and still are) involved in Fluxus.

What do you love about it?

My favorite part of the writing process is the beginning, when new ideas hit me and the shape of things changes suddenly. As I take notes and concoct arguments and theories, the writing I do causes the various artists, artworks, and movements to rearrange themselves in my mind. Obscure events and concepts move into focus while other things and ideas that I had taken as central move to the periphery. It’s a period of creativity in which it feels like I am both the one who is moving the different parts and, at the same time, a passive witness to parts moving themselves. It’s very exciting and I think it’s this that keeps me hooked to writing because I have to admit that almost all of the rest of it is hard and painful and unpleasant.

What about it (if anything) is driving you nuts?

Indeed much of it drives me nuts. The first frustration comes when my words hit the page; they almost always lack the eloquence and clarity and conviction that they (seem to) have in my mind. As a result, it takes a long time for me to turn the mess of the first draft into something I can say I’m happy with. It’s also the case that my revision process is far from linear. My second draft is never a simply refinement of the first. It’s almost always a complete rewrite (and often that’s the case with the third and fourth drafts). In light of the messiness and non-linearity of my process, I’ve gradually come to recognize that I need to have huge chunks of uninterrupted time to focus on writing  (anything less than three hours is too short): it takes me at least an hour to clear my head and get to a place where the words will come out in anything resembling a coherent fashion. I suppose it’s a consequence of my monomaniacal personality. Doing more than one thing at a time is almost impossible.

How would you describe your writing process?

I begin by taking tons of notes—both data that I’ve collected and ideas I’ve come up with. Over time, I watch as the ideas shift and expand and contract and mutate. When I feel that the process has slowed down to a point where things seem settled and my time yields diminishing returns, I make a very simple outline. In fact, it’s really just a list. Each idea that I think is needed gets a single line. I’ll then move the individual idea-lines up or down the list so that they fall into an order that seems to make sense. Sometimes I’ll make a powerpoint to arrange the works of art that I plan to discuss so that I get a sense of how the text might flow. Then I start turning these idea-lines into paragraphs. Sometimes a few idea-lines will be clustered to make a single paragraph; sometimes a single one will grow into a handful of paragraphs. This part can be fun because it often yields up some interesting surprises. I’ll usually need to go back to do more research and will find that some of the ideas I thought were central should really be pushed to the background while others should be moved to the fore. As each idea-line is replaced by full paragraphs the writing mutates bit by bit into full draft. Then the rewriting begins. Things will be taken apart and new paragraphs added. New research will be done to supplement an idea that hadn’t occurred to me earlier. When it seems like everything that needs to be there has found its proper place, I play around with the sentences and individual words. I try not to over-polish, partly because I’ve seen how easily the shine of vibrant sentence can be scrubbed out of existence, but also because I just get tired and want to stop. The process ends when I can’t stand to look at it anymore. Then I send it to friend and hope I get a positive response. If I don’t get a positive response I usually cry a little, wait a little, and then start tearing it apart yet again.

What kind of feedback on your writing do you find most helpful?

The most helpful feedback I get on my writing comes in the early stages: I like to hear how a reader responds to the main argument and evidence. Often I learn that I’ve incorrectly predicted some key suppositions that a reader brings to the text or the sorts of questions that the reader is most interested in having me answer. Feedback at this point has a huge effect on how the draft develops. Since the text is still in its infancy, hearing that I should cut it up and move stuff around is not nearly as frustrating as it is after I’ve worked to get it into what I think is its final shape.

What would you like students to know about you as a writer?

I am not a natural writer. When I was a kid I was a poor and disengaged writer (and reader, too). It’s only after many years that I have become comfortable with a keyboard beneath my fingers; so I suppose I am a good example of how it’s possible to become an effective writer through nothing more than persistence.