Instructions:
Locate your sense of what’s (im)possible for science, society, and justice in our zeitgeist by writing into the following prompt. This exercise offers an opportunity for both grounding and transformation. You might write in the first or third person. Don’t be afraid to take risks with form. You have twelve minutes.
Write/tell a story about (choose a number and a letter):
Numbers
1. The moment when you/she realized that _______ changed your/her life for better and worse.
2. How you/she felt in the room where _______ led to serious trouble.
3. The paper where you/he witnessed that _______ is/are going to transform your/his world.
4. The morning that you/they woke up and before they arrived on campus, you began to solve an impossible problem by giving up ________.
5. When you/she first noticed ________ had vanished, the experience of following the disappearing traces.
6. You/he fall/s ill the evening that you/he learned about ___________ at a fancy meal with your/his supervisor/chair/dean.
7. What if the beautiful, best way unfolds in the campus quad after you are reminded of the missing ___________?
Letters (noun phrases)
a. students
b. your/a big idea/an accepted theory
c. calling out BS
d. an exam
e. an archive
f. a prestigious award
g. a word
h. wild card (you choose a noun)
Written in 12 minutes on March 11, 2025 | Shared with Permission
What they do not know
by Josie
The morning that you woke up and before they arrived on campus, you began to solve an impossible problem by giving up your big idea. You had not come to this decision willingly. You had, in fact, been compelled to when you realized then it had all been in vain. All the hours of prepping, of reading, of consulting, of deliberating. All gone with nothing to show for it.
You were sad.
But then you begin to wonder if any of it mattered. Why does anything matter anymore if your life does not matter. Why should you go on when your very existence is being erased? They can try to act like we do not exist. They can attempt to expunge the very essence of us. What they do not know is that there is no future without us.
One of many
by Ameli
It started with a text message from my cousin. We don’t talk much; not because there’s any conflict there, just because we don’t need to. He said he was sure I’d seen the news about his friend and classmate- I hadn’t. It was big, national news, but I’d been so inundated and swamped with other travesties that it just didn’t make it through the noise. Apparently the man had vanished from his own home, and his wife hadn’t been able to find him for two days. She’s late in her pregnancy, and while it’s not unusual for a man to vanish in those circumstances, this was different. He was taken.
It’s interesting how we go numb to injustice. It becomes too much, too fast. We hear rationales and justifications and we almost believe it. More insidiously, we almost believe that they believe it. We want to have empathy for human error, we want to believe that nobody would be so cruel deliberately, no matter how much evidence we have to the contrary. We want to believe that nothing so egregious could happen to our loved ones, our friends, our peers. That there is some rhyme or reason beyond cold calculation.
I should be clear that it didn’t start with my cousin’s friend- Malik, I think his name was? Others had gone missing, others had been taken just like this. This one was just public, and politically motivated, and all of the things that scream, “Pay attention!” This is an exhibit, an example, this is a dare and a demonstration of power and a test of limits. And I am, now. It might be too late and I don’t know how to help, but I am at least paying attention. I wonder what is being done behind my back while my attention is forced elsewhere. I wonder if the outcry and the outrage and the protests will save this one man and doom others, as we tacitly give ground- you can take people, but not out of university buildings. You can take people, but not if they have his level of documentation. You can take people but not because they protested, not out of state before a trial, not for this, not- not— Never realizing that the end of that sentence is nowhere near as powerful as the beginning. “You can take people.”
How could this be?
by Lisa
She felt ill the evening she learned about calling out BS from your dean. The state’s congressional delegation had turned its back on higher education and was twisting and turning the truth of what scholars at the university did. The dean talked about how four prominent cancer scientists went to their town hall and called out their BS. The crowd turned on them and said they were elitist and not worthy of a voice. It felt like struggle sessions during the Maoist Revolution and attacks on the educated during the Cultural Revolution. But this was the United States in 2025? How could this be?
Missing data fields
by Brandon
She noticed a couple at a small table at the coffee shop getting up as she was ordering. “Thank God,” she said to herself, “I was afraid I would have to take this coffee back to my office to work.” Her office reminded her too much of the stressful months she had spent analyzing data on the rare disease that had caused her to spend most of her teens in and out of the hospital. The disease that promised to end her life by the end of her 40s. The disease that had motivated her to study science in the first place, to focus on the racial disparity of the US healthcare system, to focus on the ways that this disease—her disease—had gone unresearched and undiagnosed for decades—centuries—because it affected black women like her at a rate 10x higher than the US population as a whole.
Once she settled into a seat, she opened her terminal and ran her code to bring in the latest data from the CDC. Data that would propel the final chapter of her dissertation. The results of new federal research focused on rare diseases among marginalized populations was scheduled for publication this morning. The code came back in error. She scrambled to check for bugs—this code had worked on a different repository last week. She quickly went to the website and downloaded the whole dataset to her computer. Five stressful minutes of downloading the file. What had gone wrong with the code? Was the API overrun with requests? Thank god this cafe’s internet was so good—this should take at least 15 minutes.
She filled with dread as she opened the file and scrolled to the right. Where were the data fields she needed for her research? Where was the demographic information that made this research useful? How could she learn how to treat her disease if she couldn’t tell who it was impacting? Which genetic markers to target? Which sociocultural factors made the disease most deadly? This information was now banned.
Are we ever outside the archive?
by Temi
Special collections are stuffy spaces, exclusive spaces, places where it can feel your every thought – every breath, every stomach rumble, every itch – can be heard. The strangest things are precious here. Things from other people’s junk drawer. Things that you sometimes want to tear up or set on fire – at least in the rebellious parts of the imagination.
This slow science is so unforgiving. Nobody cares that you have been close to these archive boxes, that you have touched the past. There is no key performance indicator for a day spent chasing dead ends and finding new threads that may never return to. You just know a bunch of things obscurely; and sometimes they haunt you and run you ragged in your sleep. Other times they steal the tears you have not even found the courage for in your actual life – outside the archive. Are we ever outside the archive?
And sometimes when you tell people that these things are there and they are warning us to take another path, sometimes when you wave your hands and sigh and grimace and say this has happened before …. you notice in the corner of their eyes a decision that unravels you. A mirror in which you cannot help but see yourself. You see their decision to stay healthy and say no.
Smells ominous
by Leah
It wasn’t obvious at first. When her sniffles began, and she noticed her co-worker making the sign of the cross, she didn’t think anything of it. Later that afternoon, when she sneezed, his “Bless You” could have been nothing more than the phatic communication typical on such occasions. If it had a bit more fervor in it than usual, well, maybe he was just unhappy that her sneeze had interrupted his work. Later that afternoon, when she came down with a fever and told her supervisor that she would like to leave early to protect others from getting whatever she was coming down with, he looked at her with a puzzled expression. He declined her request, telling her to make sure to consult his favorite health influencer; he’d recently been feeling poorly, but was feeling great now after completing a course of aromatherapy. She knew something was really wrong when, after work, she went to the last remaining pharmacy in town and discovered that it too had gone out of business.
Her lights went out
by Monika
The lights were out. She slowly packed the equipment alongside the doctoral students and research scientists. Everyone was silent, discomforted, sunken; the shuttering had come upon them like a sudden illness. Not unlike the dementia they studied—the quick tide. She felt heavy with responsibility, telling her lab she couldn’t pay them any longer, that the university couldn’t pay any of them. Her savings would last six months.
Though she’d been a scientist for many years, she had never known exactly where truth lived, for science was a method, not an object to hold. She’d excelled in the profession, following directions, trusting the process, documenting and formulating, carefully using the tools to isolate, isolate, isolate the tiniest phenomena until possible scenarios for forgetting could be dilated so as to fill the whole room, the whole year, all the grant cycles that lit the lab.
She’d been so focused on precisely circling each experiment that she didn’t see the shifts in perception—the hysteria, the anger. At first, she thought the problem was people wanted a magic pill. A shiny object. Then she realized it was something else.
Erasure came quickly for her mother, she was forgetting—losing her place, disappearing into the recesses of her unreliable memory—her lights went out. She, the daughter, felt hysterical, angry. Her mother, a shell around a terrible mystery.
The day the silence on BS ended
by Anonymous
It was a dark but typical Seattle afternoon and everyone seemed already ready to be home. But we were compelled to be in the largest classroom in the building together, locked in by tension. This would be the day the silence on BS ended.
The leader – one who goes first – and I’ve forgotten already who it was other than a brave one – announced that they could no longer hold it in and suggested that it might be easier to release what had become an unbearable pressure cooker if we all did so together. That way, no one had to do it alone or with too much-unwanted attention on them.
They argued that with all the BS release, the mayhem would prevent anyone from pinpointing a single source and pointing fingers.
We all just wanted to go home, so we agreed passively to this silly trick. On the counting of 10 backward like a New Year’s Eve [countdown], the energy swirled up inside each of us so unexpectedly that we had to hold on to the conference tables and chairs to steady ourselves.
At 0, the room erupted in a string of indecipherable voices, one from the other, and so very loud that we covered our ears to be able to listen to know our own BS was coming out of our mouths. It surely was.
After many minutes, we all dropped to the ground, exhausted and delighted with an overwhelming sense of relief. How light we were! Another leader’s voice broke into the giddy laughter and said, well, we now know it’s possible. …
What is the word for missing words?
by Anonymous
These words were spoken in meetings.
Meetings where people ate their lunches and looked at their phones.
And now, there were upheavals.
The trouble was that the room and the words were no longer available. The meetings had stopped. The words spoken out loud were now only said silently, with eyes.
And you hadn’t thought much of it when it was there, but now, you are thinking about that room, those meetings, those sometimes stinky lunches and a sort of melancholy overtakes you.
What does Freud say about melancholy? It’s different from mourning because it’s about grieving for a loss that is unable to be fully comprehended.
Maybe it’s a ‘postscience’ melancholia, maybe it’s a ‘postmeeting’ melancholia.
He cut his heart open
by Tim
That young African-American gave me a piece of his culture, and I couldn’t be more delighted. Only hours ago, he cut his heart open in front of my colleagues and a chill washed over us: he just spoke so well, and we had never heard anything like what he said before.
Our questions were so clever: “Couldn’t you have done more?”“Aren’t you overstating this?” “Haven’t you read that one thing in the monocle gazette?”
Dinner was just as lovely. They sat the negro with me, and I was so lucky. I assured him that I was an ally, but I’m sure he could tell by the way I licked my lips. He shared his worries for the future, and squirmed when I told him mine. His body became tender with cortisol and sweet with glucose.
I’m still hungry, and his flesh was so well-seasoned. I hope I can sleep tonight.