“The greatest scientists are also artists,” Albert Einstein said.

At the AWP conference in Seattle, I attended a fascinating session that got me thinking about what happens if we turn the great physicist’s statement on its head.  

Could it be that artists – writers – are also scientists?

Often, we think of scientist and artist as polar opposites – the one driven by logic and the other by imagination. But the AWP session, called “Writing Nature in a Scientific Age,” showed me that the divide between the two may not be so wide after all.    

Eva Saulitis, author of “Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas” (Beacon Press, 2014), began her career as a marine biologist. Over a period of years, she studied a family of orca whales in Prince William Sound, recording their heart-breaking struggle for survival in the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

When it came time to prepare her conclusions for publication, though, Saulitis felt “dissatisfied with the objective language and rigid methodology of science.” The prohibition on using the pronouns “I” and “we” seemed intolerably constricting, emblematic of a crippling detachment. 

So Saulitis reached out to creative writing, hoping “to develop another language with which to address the natural world.” 

That’s when she discovered something surprising. Her work as a scientist and her work as a writer turned out not to be nearly so disparate as she had expected. 

“The poet collects data like a scientist,” Saulitis said. A sense of awe and a capacity for wonder are vital to scientist and writer alike.  Open-mindedness and curiosity are essential in both fields.

Saulitis found herself building a home in two disciplines at once. And, she decided, she didn’t have to “choose only one way of knowing.”

Whether peering into a microscope or hunched over the draft of a novel, both scientist and artist pay close attention – as close as we possibly can. For both, the goal of our intense observation is to describe the world with accuracy and precision:  

This is what I see. This is what I hear. This is what I smell. And this is what it means. 

Writers and scientists both ask the big questions. Both set out in search of the truth without knowing exactly where we’re going. Both make our way forward through experimentation. We bumble around, trying this and that, uncovering new uncertainties as we go. 

Saulitis became both a scientist and a creative writer. The result, her memoir, communicates significant scientific information in an uncommonly lyrical style. The first page begins with a dream: “a dream for me of blue-white tundra…a dream of emptiness, silence.”  

First-person pronouns and all, Saulitis’s lovely sentences made me think in new ways – about whales, about science, about writing.  

Speaking with Saulitis at the AWP conference were two Pulitzer Prize-winning poets, both renowned for their vivid descriptions of nature. 

Robert Hass, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, suggested that writers have not only an ability to add to our knowledge of the natural environment in which we live, but an obligation to do so.

“In the US,” he said, “poets are just getting started describing the natural world.” His native state of California has been described in English for only 150 years, he noted – a short time indeed compared to China, where poets have been describing their natural surroundings for millennia. 

To illustrate the relative infancy of California’s literature, Hass pointed out that the region’s poets (like Californians in general) all too often tend to employ a European template to describe the weather, “even though it doesn’t have much to do with our place.” 

Winter, spring, summer, fall – these don’t accurately describe the climate of America’s West Coast, and Hass pushes himself to use his craft to help correct the record. “Every so often,” he said, “I try to write a poem making sense of the weather.”

A case in point is Hass’s well-known poem, “The Problem of Describing Trees,” a lovely lyrical work that may teach you some new things – scientific facts, you might say – about the hows and whys of aspen leaves. The poem comments on just how difficult it can be to capture the natural world in words. “There are limits to saying/ In language, what the tree did,” Hass writes. He ends by insisting on the imperfect: “the aspen doing something in the wind.”

The veteran Beat poet Gary Snyder closed the session. He, too, straddled the scientific and the literary world as he read from “Mountains and Rivers Without End.” The epic poem contains a giant dose of geology. And – it sings!

Join the conversation. Are you a scientist, a writer, or a bit of both?

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Ellen Cassedy’s book is We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2012), which has won four national awards, including the Grub Street National Book Prize, and the Towson Prize for Literature awarded annually to a resident of Maryland.  It has just been shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize.  Ellen’s first post for SheWrites was “Who Cares about Your Family Story? Ten Tips to Ensure Readers Will ...” Her [TIPS OF THE TRADE] series appears monthly.  See all of Ellen's Tips for Writers.