Writing de/extinction with James Bradley, Donna Mazza & Chris Flynn

In this episode, Jessica White chats with James Bradley, Donna Mazza, and Chris Flynn about the inspiration for and writing of their recent novels Ghost Species, Fauna and Mammoth—all of which consider the implications of de/extinction and, in one case, talking megafauna.

James Bradley OAM is widely recognised as one of Australia’s greatest critics and climate fiction writers—including the multi-award-winning, science-inspired novels Ghost Species(2020, Penguin), Clade (2015, Penguin) and Deep Field (2000, Henry Holt). Donna Mazza writes fiction and poetry, and is author of Fauna (2020, Allen & Unwin) and The Albanian(2007, Fremantle Press), which was a TAG Hungerford Award winner. Donna teaches at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. Chris Flynn is the author of three acclaimed novels—Mammoth (2020, Text), The Glass Kingdom (2014, Text), and A Tiger in Eden (2012, Text). Mammoth was shortlisted for the 2021 Indie Book Awards Fiction prize.

The Science Write Now (SWN) Podcast is a 3x/monthly podcast for people who love science and the arts. If you’re interested in learning more about great books, plays, and films; writing, research or editing; the lives of scientists; and creative insights into contemporary science … then you’ve come to the right place!

The SWN Podcast is hosted by Amanda Niehaus and Jessica White and produced by Taylor Mitchell with funding from the Australia Council for the Arts.

You can also find and follow us online - on Twitter - on Instagram - and on Facebook! 

Our opening song is 'Balmain' by Pure Milk: https://www.triplejunearthed.com/artist/pure-milk.html

Transcript

[Jess] Hello everyone, and welcome to Science Write Now, and today we're going to be talking about poetry and science, and I've got two fabulous poets that I'll be in conversation with - I've got Trisha Dearborn and Benjamin Dodds. Trisha is an award-winning poet, writer and editor with Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Biochemistry and a Master of Arts. Her latest books are 'Autobiochemistry' - that's published by UWA Publishing - and it's named for a long autobiographical sequence in which each poem links to an element in the periodic table - it's very cool - and she's also um written a chap book called 'She Considers' - sorry 'She Reconsiders Life on the Run' and her previous collections are 'The Ringing World' and 'Frankenstein's Bathtub.' Her work has been widely published in literary journals and it's represented in anthologies, including the 'Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry' that's just come out, 'Contemporary Australian Poetry,' 'Australian Poetry Since 1788' and the 'Best Australian Science Writing,' and she inaugurated and was a judge of the Quantum Words Science Poetry Competition - that was in 2018 - and she's guest editor of 'Rabbit 31 The Science Issue' and that's coming out - soon? 

[Tricia] It should be soon, it was actually originally coming out mid-October but um Jess Wilkinson couldn't get back to Melbourne.

[Jess] Oh! Okay. 

[Tricia] Because of Covid, so, soon, hopefully soon.

[Jess] Ok, uh and Ben Dodds is our other guest, he's a Sydney-based poet who grew up in the Riverina of New South Wales and his work has appeared in 'Best Australian Poems,' 'Stars Like Sand' - that's Australian speculative poetry - Meanjin, Southerly, Cordite, Rabbit, The Sun Herald and The Australian, and it's also been broadcast on ABC Radio National, and he co-developed and co-judged the inaugural Quantum Words Science Poetry Competition with Trisha.

[Ben] Yes with Trisha. 

[Jess] Yep, yeah that's great, and he's a poetry reader for Overland, and Ben is the author of 'Regulator' and a new collection which we'll be talking about today, 'Airplane Baby Banana Blanket.' So welcome both of you, we're very pleased to have you talking about science and poetry, um, I know a little bit about poetry but not a whole lot so I'm looking forward to you guys telling me about it. So just to kick off, I was wondering if you could give me an outline of your recent work, like your books, and, and a rough synopsis, so we have an idea of the things we'll be talking about. Trisha do you want to have a go - yours is 'Autobiochemistry.' 

[Trisha] Yeah. Here it is. 

[Jess] Oh fabulous, you've got a copy there. 

[Trisha] Yeah, so 'Autobiochemistry' is a poetry collection, it's uh named for one of the - it's got five main sections and it's named for one of the sections - 'Autobiochemistry' obviously, which is a long sequence, a sequence of 22 poems that are mainly autobiographical but each poem links to an element of the periodic table, because I'm nuts about chemistry and the elements. 

[Jess] Okay. 

[Tricia] Um, so, and there are four other sections in the book, um, there are two other sequences in there, like there are two sections that are sequences, and, um, but each, all the poems in the book I would say - the name of the sequence that became the name of the book came about because, well, it just kind of sprang into my head and I thought 'Oh yeah!' because it's like autobiography and chemistry and I just mash them together, and then you also get biochemistry which is a, which is a bonus - I've got a double major, my degree is double major in chemistry and biochemistry and then I did Honours in biochemistry, but chemistry is my first love. 

[Jess] Okay. 

[Tricia] Um, I don't even know where I was going with that but - yes - so oh yeah everything in the book I would say relates somehow to either the autobiographical component of the name or the chemical component of the name, sometimes in a sort of a practical way, a kind of down-home laboratory way, and sometimes more like the chemistry between people, sometimes in a more metaphorical way, um, and that's probably - uh there's one poem that actually begins the book that kind of falls outside the five sections called 'A Chalk Outline of the Soul' which I think is really about being a writer and seems to kind of not really fit within one of the sections, it's sort of, it's its own little overarching thing [Jess] Yeah, great, I think um, that kind of makes sense in a way - writers stand outside and observe [Tricia] Mmm, yeah. 

[Jess] And Ben, ah, your most recent book 'Airplane Baby Banana Blanket', yeah. 

[Ben] Weird name. 

[Jess] I've got a, I've got a, I've got a one here so people can see it, okay. 

[Tricia] I've got one too! 

[Ben] Um, so yeah 'Airplane Baby Banana Blanket,' uh, it's um, an odd title for I guess it's a kind of an odd book too, it is all about a chimpanzee, a chimpanzee called Lucy, and Lucy was raised in the home of an Oklahoma psychotherapist in the 1960s and 70s, a man called Dr Maurice Temerlin and he wrote this book here, 'Lucy: Growing up Human' which is a really bizarre book, but it's a book that I used as sort of the jumping off point for writing my book. I turned a lot of the, a lot of the strange anecdotes, a lot of the, a lot of the goings on from this memoir - I turned it into, into poetry, um yeah it's, it's, I've had to explain the title to a lot of people but I don't think I'll explain it here - if you read the book you'll find out what the title means. 

[Jess] Yeah, no I want to come to the title later on, I think it's some really, yeah I'm really interested in the sign language part of it, yeah, and the book - how did you come across the book, this biography, about this bizarre setup. 

[Ben] Well, everything seems to come to everyone these days through podcasts, um and that's how I came to to write this book - I was listening to Radio Lab, a really excellent uh podcast that they produce in the US, and there was an episode about Lucy the chimpanzee and there were excerpts in that episode from, from this memoir and I thought, 'Well that sounds really interesting,' and I found a copy of it - it's long out of print - and when I read the book I just thought, 'Wow!' It just opened up this strange world and I just needed to write about it. 

[Jess] Yeah, and what was the context for the podcast, why were they talking about that book? 

[Ben] I think, I think from memory - it was a long time ago - but I think possibly it was something to do with parenting, I think it was a parenting themed episode and you know as a point of interest they talked about a chimpanzee that was parented by, by these people in Oklahoma in the 60s and 70s. 

[Jess] Yeah. 

[Ben] And how she was raised as a human, I mean that's why it's called 'Lucy Growing up Human. 

[Jess] Wow, yeah and Trisha, what - can you - did you have a light bulb moment for putting your book together? I mean you talk about this lovely synchronicity with biochemistry - was there a point where you thought, 'Okay, I'm going to write this book,' or did it just kind of mesh together and work? 

[Trisha] No, my my usual process - so far, so this is my third full-length collection - and my usual process has been write poems and accumulate, you know, send them out get them published in journals or wherever, and accumulate them, and when it gets to a sort of a - there's, there must be some kind of tipping point or something where I think, um, you know is there a collection there and then you kind of have to look and see, well is there enough um, you know, is there a theme, is there something that draws it together as a collection? This one got I think restructured a couple of times in the process, so there was a tipping point of thinking 'Yes, I'm going to put this together into a collection' and probably quite, it's quite likely that I was applying for grant or something, because that can be really useful to set your mind to - what do I want to do, what am I actually doing, what do I want to create here, and then in the process of actually doing it, then there's, you know, a lot of revision and, and I was writing new material and restructuring and that kind of thing, um, I think when I got the title then it sort of came together in a new way, or when I realised that that part of it was going to be the title, because then it gives you a sort of a standing point to look at the rest of the poems and see, well, do they still fit in, if this is my kind of overarching uh title how, then how is it going to work? And, and the way it worked was that it ended up in these five sections and what I did was when the book was launched in Sydney I had five launches, each launcher launched one section - Ben then launched 'Autobiochemistry' - the section which was lovely and, and a separate person launched each section because even though they all kind of can be seen as relating back to the Autobiochemistry thing, uh like there's one, there's a sequence in there called um, 'The change: some notes from the field' which is about perimenopause, so someone launched that, so they're sort of, they're quite individual as well as, you know, linking to that larger theme 

[Ben] I've got a quick question, am I allowed to ask a question?

[Jess] Yes, yes, please do. 

[Ben] I remember, uh, hearing one of the first poems that are, at a reading, Tricia, years ago and thinking, I think it had, it had the title of one of one of the elements and I think you joked about writing, you know, writing more poems that, that you know, follow the periodic table of elements, were you, how serious were you about that when you started, I mean you, you haven't got a poem for every, every element. 

[Tricia] No, no and I, I never planned to have one for every element and I remember writing the first one. 

[Ben] Yeah. 

[Tricia] It would be huge. 

[Ben] A lot of them would be kind of tricky, I guess. 

[Tricia] I know, well I think at the moment there are like 118 elements in the periodic table but they keep, at the end of the periodic table they keep synthesizing new ones. 

[Ben] Yeah. 

[Tricia] Like you can't keep up, but the thing was okay, I remember writing the first one I wrote was iron, and I remember that fairly soon after that - because I actually tracked back - I was curious about my own process in retrospect - and I tried to find, where is my initial file that began this sequence that then is the sort of backbone of this book, and fairly quickly I had notes for a sequence that with different elements in, it I think about six elements, but I never thought of doing all of them partly because I'm not interested in the radioactive elements, I just have no interest and I - that's probably partly because one part of my fascination with the elements is that they're, they're indivisible, they're immutable, you can't uh, it's like you can take a compound like uh sodium chloride say, and you can melt it and put a current through it and you can split that into sodium and chlorine, you can't split sodium, you can't split chlorine, and there was something about that, um, the essence of that concept that really uh fascinated me and with, with radioactive elements they can actually transmute to other elements because they're shooting off protons and all this kind of stuff, so I wasn't interested in the radioactive ones, and also I only wanted to write about the ones where I felt there was some particular link to my life, so for example there's a poem in there called 'Chlorine' which is an element, most people will know chlorine from pools because there's a chlorine compound in pools that, you know, kills bugs, so the poem 'Chlorine' is actually about having my life saved at the age of nine by um, a fellow nine-year-old or a sister nine-year-old, my friend Susie Garner whose pool I was swimming in, I nearly drowned, I was drowning and she had fortunately, ah had done the um, the lifesaver training and at nine she very calmly and capably and competently rescued my ass, so that's what chlorine's about. So there's, there are, each poem there's some particular link to my life, that was the other way that I chose the elements and why I didn't write about them. 

[Ben] That reminds me also of, um, I don't know if you know that musician Sufjan Stevens. 

[Tricia] Oh yeah. 

[Ben] who has set out to, to make an album um named after every one of the US states uh, I think he's really gotten around to doing two or three, yeah, but yeah I, I think he should probably, yeah, he shouldn't make any bold claims that he's going to cover all of them. 

[Tricia] No, well, although if a bold claim gets you going, make the claim and then do what you want. 

[Ben] That's true. 

[Jess] Yeah, well that's really interesting, so um you've got quite a background in science, Trisha, and a lot of the poems are about school science as well, um, and working at school so, is that where your love for science started? 

[Tricia] No, actually, I um, I remember being really into science, I was very interested in science and in some ways thinking scientifically from about five or six. I remember when I was about six I had, I've got books that I had then, I still have them on, uh, rocks which I still love, uh on dinosaurs, on light, like how light works, so I had an interest from a young age and I remember doing little, like I remember being in, in the bath when I was five and I was thinking, I was putting the hot water in the bath and I thought if I, um, push the water back with both hands, it's just going to go back and meet in the middle and bounce forward, and that doesn't seem very efficient, but if I scoop it this way uh, it will go, all go under the hot tap and it'll all get heated, so I decided that at five, and I still stir my bath that way, so I've been interested in science for a, a really long time and I started writing poems when I was seven so they've kind of come along, uh, together in a way and then a, but a defining moment for me as far as science goes is um, in Year Seven when I had my first chemistry lesson and we did - and it was about the elements - and I remember drawing, I've still got this too drawing the, you know, the little um diagrams with the protons and neutrons in the middle and the little electrons in the little shells in pairs or whatever, and I was just hooked, I was in love, I was totally transfixed, amazed, magnetised, it was like, I just loved chemistry from that absolute instance and I, and I just haven't stopped loving it. 

[Jess] Oh! That's pretty cool. How about you, Ben, do you have an enduring love affair with science? 

[Ben] I've always been interested in science, I guess like Trisha, I didn't really love science when I was in, in primary school, um, I don't know whether that's really what you just said but I'm telling you that that's what you just said. 

[Trisha] No no, but anyway keep going. 

[Ben] Um, I didn't really even like it that much at high school but then, um, I, when I finished high school I somehow fell into, um, a traineeship, I became a lab technician at the Department of Agriculture, so I grew up in Leeton and just outside Leeton, there's a little town called Yanco and there's a research station there, that everybody who lives there, you know, knows all about strange things happen there, turns out not all that strange it's all about rice and oranges, but when I started to to work there I, I was in labs and you know I'd never been in labs before, I didn't really know how a lab worked you know, I just thought it was crazy, crazy mad scientists in movies, and um you know suddenly I was, I was, I was able to, to do things that were quite interesting, um, but also in some ways quite boring and quite normal, you know, washing up um, glassware and you know, uh, doing Ph you know, balancing Ph, you know nothing all that, all that thrilling but, but it was still fascinating, um, you know it was a world that I had never really worked in and been part of, um, and I, I was really, I was really into it 

[Jess] Yeah, so just starting - I'm sorry, keep going. 

[Ben] interesting, lots of really interesting and eccentric people. 

[Jess] So did that start feeding into your poetry before you wrote these poems about Lucy? 

[Ben] Some of my earlier poetry is, it's a bit sciencey if you want to put it that way, um, but I, I think I don't know if I'm preempting questions you're going to ask later, but every poet is a bit of a scientist, um, you know you've got to observe the world around you and, um, you know you've got to look closely and I think, I think we're all, we're all scientists. You know I'm a primary school teacher and when we do science lessons I, I say to my kids you know, you are scientists and they giggle about that but they really are, you know if you're doing an experiment and you're observing and you're trying to see what's going to happen then you're a scientist. 

[Jess] Yeah, that's a perfect metaphor for writing, you make so many mistakes and then you go back and fix them and try again and just keep repeating that process over and over again, yeah you're right it is - we're doing science - it's very cool. Yeah, um, so when you heard this podcast about Lucy and um, what was it that resonated with you about this story, and about Lucy being brought up by humans? 

[Ben] I think initially it was the strangeness of the story, I, I had heard about um cross-fostering programs before but this story had sort of a dark, a darker side to it, um, that was hinted at in this interview, um, I'm sorry in this podcast, and it's definitely expanded upon in the, in the memoir that I found and read and based my book on, um the experiment was, look it wasn't very scientific, it was actually quite, you know some of the things that happened you know, that are inexcusable and, and, and cannot really be justified, but you know there were, there was an interest in what would happen to Lucy, uh, when she reached sexual maturity, who would she lust after, would she, would she be attracted to other chimpanzees or would she be attracted to humans, and because she'd never been allowed to mix with or to, or to see any other chimpanzees because she was taken from her mother the day she was born, or possibly that, I think it might be the day after she was born, um, she never saw another chimpanzee until much much later in her life and so she, when she, when she became sexually mature she was interested in, in human males, um and there's you know, there's, it edges on a lot of, it sort of verges on a lot of really dark taboo stuff, um, you know there's no bestiality in, in the story don't worry about that, but, but there are definitely a lot of curiosities that maybe some people might uh, you know that some people might not have gone as far or looked into it as, uh, deeply as as the people involved in the story did. 

[Jess] Yeah, um, I found it a bit creepy but I also thought that the way you dealt with it was very adept and you use humour, you used this phrase 'the good scientist' all the way through which is. 

[Ben] Yeah, I, I- 

[Jess] a double-edged sword. 

[Ben] I decided to call Maurice Temerlin 'the good doctor'. 

[Jess] Ah, sorry, yes, that's right, 'the good doctor'. 

[Ben] It might have even been in um, the first couple of poems, because I didn't really know what the collection would be when it was finished, you know it was just sort of branching out in all different directions, um but yeah I, that kind of stuck and I, and it's, it's repeated all the way through the book, that, I call him 'our good doctor' um, because you know he was, in some ways, he, he was in some ways he was a good father to to Lucy the chimpanzee but in other ways he was an absolute monster and he, he was embarking on something inexcusable really, um, and he was, he was involved in something that these days would not happen 

[Jess] No, no ethics approval! 

[Ben] That's right, ethics boards would, would run a mile from from Lucy the chimpanzee. 

[Jess] That's right, yeah, um so my question to both of you is like, you um, you have these subjects that you're, scientific subjects that you're very interested in, so how do you transmute that into poetry like, um, and I'm asking that question because I write fiction and non-fiction, and I've done poetry, but 20 years ago, and so there's some kind of alchemy that goes on I think in poetry, probably more so than prose, um, and I was wondering if you could speak about the process of writing science into poetry for both of you. 

[Ben] Um I guess, I guess for me all of the poems that I've written about science in the past have all started with a really cool fact or something that I really wanted to share or explore, um, you know a little factoid or or you know some, an element of something that people might not necessarily have heard or might not know. It could be something as simple as I tried to write a poem once that I ended up discarding about um, uh oh gosh now I've forgotten the name of it um, you know before it before it rains you smell that. 

[Jess] Oh, petrichor. 

[Ben] Yeah and I just thought that was a cool word but then I realised there were other poems about it and I, but I did some reading and I, I really you know, I was really fascinated in it, I ended up throwing away the poem because it wasn't very good, but you know it'll start with something little like that for me, something that I'm, that I'm fascinated by, something that hooks me, um that I'm, you know, there has to be, there has to be a hook to it for me, it can't just be a poem that's explaining what something is, um but that is part of it I think, yeah I do, I do like when I learn something new from a poem. 

[Jess] Yeah. 

[Tricia] Yeah, I think, uh for me the hook often will be some, um, something emotional, even if the poem, I don't really write poetry that's overly, well, that's sort of, you would it's not gushy poetry by any means, but often I think the hook and the the thing that begins it can be something that's connected to either my own emotional life or someone else's emotional life, and the little, the facts and things, I mean if I'm talking about poems that have science in them, um, there can be the little facts in there as well because I'm fascinated by those little facts. I was just actually thinking, uh, so in my, there's a poem in, uh, one of the elements poems is called 'Sodium' and it begins 'A metal so light it floats / a metal you can cut with a knife / a metal never found free in nature' and to me there are three fascinating little facts about this, um, interesting element, um, but the actual poem is about um, the way humans connect with each other and how that's built into our biology and our bodies and our brains and our neurons, so um, yeah and I guess I think poetry is a really in some ways an ideal, uh, medium for writing about science because as Ben said, I think there's a lot of crossover, there is that, um, the observation, the precision of observation, uh, the condensedness which a lot of poetry can have, and you know if you read a scientific report there's not a word extra, it's only you know just the facts just what you need to know. 

[Ben] Yeah 

[Tricia] So, yeah, so it's actually a really nice, uh form I think, but yeah for me that, it does tend to start and, and for me you know there's that question of why does this, why is this a poem, why didn't I write an essay about human connection or whatever and, I don't know how I'd work that in with sodium but you know there's probably a way, but for me which is not very helpful to other people, but I find poems just come through and I know they're poems, they feel like poems, I know a poem when it's coming through and I just have to get it down, I don't stop and think oh would this be better, nah, I'm just like I take every single thing down and then, you know, usually do a lot of revision after that but, um, but it comes through as a poem. 

[Ben] I, I agree, when a poem comes to me it's got a feeling or a shape to it and I have to get it down and it might be god-awful but, um. 

[Trisha] It doesn't matter! [Ben] the shape is there and then you can mould it, um, but yeah there's a certain feeling that I get a certain, um, sort of, I don't know how to describe it but it's almost a physical feeling that I get where I think okay, 'This one's got to be a poem' and, and you can, you can tell, you can tell that that feeling is one to trust when someone suggests to you, oh you should write a poem about such and such and you don't get that feeling, I was like, no I'm not going to write that poem because I'm not interested in that, it doesn't do it for me. 

[Trisha] It doesn't, yeah, I used to, I used to get really annoyed when people said that, because people know you write poetry they'll often say 'Oh you should write a poem about' and I usually say 'Write your own expletive deleted poem,' uh, so I, I'm not very suggestible but I have had it happen where once my, um, now wife said to me 'I could see that being a poem' and I, I had that initial reaction and I thought, hold on a second, and it became a poem, so occasionally, but it has I guess, it has, there has to be that confluence that person's suggestion has to work with the fact that the poem does actually work for you, that it's a viable thing and maybe that happens once every so often. 

[Jess] But the way your wife phrased that, she said, 'I can see that as a poem' not 'You should write a poem'. 

[Tricia] That's true, yeah, I'm not very amenable to 'you should' anything. 

[Jess] Me neither. 

[Ben] It's like when people recommend books for me and you go 'No, yeah I'm happy to read it, I'll read it if you've written it, um, but, but yeah if you recommend a book to me, I'm not looking to read it, sorry. 

[Jess] Yeah, okay, so but the poem comes to you - do you hear the sound of it in your head, or do you hear it as you write it down. 

[Trisha] Um, I think, some, I've had the experience, I'm not, normally I think I am hearing it in my head and it's just coming out you know the pencil at the other end. I did have an experience once where I was just walking along Oxford Street in Sydney and suddenly these words were just streaming into my head and it took me a minute to realise it was a poem, like the words were coming and coming and then I kind of went oh, and then I sort of, I was sort of scrabbling around for, I always had a pencil and paper I mean, I you know found a wall and I wrote, wrote it all down, and that actually became a poem that required very little revision, it just seemed to just there it was, um I've completely forgotten what you asked now. 

[Jess] Sound - the sound, the sound of it. 

[Trisha] Yes, I do, and actually one thing I've noticed is that sometimes this is not exactly about writing poetry, but sometimes I might be remembering a poem, I'm remembering a piece of a poem but I can't actually hear the words, but I can feel the rhythm, I hear the rhythm of the line and sometimes, and I, you often don't know, is it something I wrote, is it something someone else wrote, until the words slot into the spots in the rhythm, then I know, oh yeah this is a bit from my poem blah or this is a bit from someone else's poem such and such, so I think it is very aural in a way for me in terms of rhythm and, and sound, yeah. 

[Jess] Yeah, does it work like that for you, Ben? 

[Ben] Um, sound is important to me as a poet in in my work but it my poems don't always start as, as a you know I don't, I don't have a rhythm or a, or always even a line, um you know at the beginning of a poem sometimes I do, sometimes I'll, I'll think of a phrase that I really like and I think I have to write that down and build something around it, but that's probably not the way it happens as often as before when I was talking about that, just that feeling that I get that there's something coming, the shape of a poem coming, um, and, and I'll, I'll kind of look at the sounds uh later on, um, when I'm editing. 

[Jess] Yeah, oh that's interesting, well I asked that question because the book I'm trying to write at the moment is about Western Australia's first non-indigenous scientist Georgiana Molloy, a 19th century botanist and she, um, wasn't allowed to name the plants that she was collecting because she was a woman, so she had to write to a guy in England, send him her specimens, he would name them, they'd replace the Noongar names because they were colonial and send them back to her, and I think there was a real pleasure for her in the Latin names for the plants because that was poetic for her, um, and I think there was there was a pleasure for her in classifying, but also the sound of the words, um, and you could see her practicing science in her letters because she's learning these words and incorporating them into her letters, so yeah, I was just wondering how it worked for for other people, because I'm pretty deaf so sound, um, it's not the main consideration, it's pretty visual when I write things, but I guess poetry is like that as well, the visual part of poetry is really important and I noticed that with your book then, you play around a lot with the form of things, and there was the one about, um, where is it, Space Chimps, I'll just see if I can hold it up, oh gosh it's terrible, there we go this one here, yeah yeah, um, about a chimp it's, kind of put in a rocket, and the rocket falls into the sea 

[Ben] Yeah it's about it's about Ham, um the chimpanzee that was uh, sent up by NASA during their Mercury program, um yeah, do you know what I, I don't normally write very interesting looking poems, um I'm not really someone who had been all that daring with, with the way I lay things out on the page, um, until this book, I kind of gave myself permission to sort of experiment a bit, but if you look at my first book there's nothing very exciting to look at there, um, but that one sort of, when I, when I wrote that I kind of was thinking of, I, I started off thinking of um, a parabola, um, that the form that it ended up in is not a parabola, you know, it's a, it's a triangle, um, but it's kind of, it's, for me it was sort of, you know I started off with shorter lines and it was getting longer and longer and longer until the moment in the middle of the poem where, um, things you know, are really quite horrible for the chimp strapped into this rocket, and then coming back down, um into, into the ocean, um I just thought that it would be interesting to do something with the, with the shape of that poem, but as I said I'm not normally one to be that adventurous with, with laying things out on the page. I've become a bit more adventurous um, in recent years. 

[Jess] Yeah I thought, um, I liked it and also um, there's, there's one or two times you use a form where you just have a sentence and the next sentence, does that, you add a little bit more, to tell more and more of the story, does that form have a name? 

[Ben] Um, I guess you could you call it 'anaphora,' um. 

[Jess] Okay. 

[Ben] I'm not really sure. 

[Jess] Yeah. 

[Ben] I, I quite like when I find a poem, um, where somebody has, has written it as a whole sentence, one whole sentence, the whole poem is a sentence and you break it into, into little chunks and I was just experimenting with building a sentence, um, you know it became a very long sentence. If I were marking my kids' work and their sentences were that long I'd, I'd be, you know, putting red, red lines through it but, but I, I thought it was kind of fun to, to build from something really, really small into something into something much more significant as the as the weight of the events um, you know, was building, um the, the text. Every time I would add a new, a new phrase, um, or a new clause or just a new section of the sentence the, the poem was growing. 

[Jess] Yeah it seemed to mirror the book as a whole, you're just waiting to see what the developments are, getting more and more information, but then you also intersperse it with those three poems at the end of each section about the chimps that are experimented on, so what was your purpose in putting those three poems in there? 

[Ben] Well at one point before I really knew what the book was going to be, I was going to write about all different animals that are involved in scientific research, um, but then I, I moved towards just sticking  with the chimps, but, so I've got Lucy who the, the whole book is about, Lucy and the terrible things that she went through, she also had some good things happen to her, but yeah, overall a pretty awful, pretty awful life that she had, um, but to to break up, I broke the book into three sections and to signpost the end of each section I, I used those chimp poems, so I had I think, uh, so Space Chimps One, Space Chimps Two, Space Chimps Three, um, that tell the stories of Ham and Enos, the NASA chimpanzees who were, were living and around the same time, I mean they were they were going through what they were going through at the same time, roughly the same time as Lucy, and so I thought it might be interesting to, to use their stories in there, also as a break from, from the Temberlin, the Lucy storyline. 

[Jess] Yeah, I thought it was really effective. [Ben] Um well thank you because somebody today, uh, I, I shared the book with the leader of a writing group that I used to be part of years ago and he wrote a review, I thought, I didn't ask for a review, um, but he, it wasn't a published review, it was a review that he emailed to me and he said that everything's, everything works really well, some high quality poems, uh, but it didn't need the ones about the chimps, the space chimps, so thank you 

[Jess] I really liked it because it shows, like you said it gives you the context of the era, it shows you what else they're doing to these poor animals. 

[Ben] Well thank you for saying that 

[Jess] Yeah, um, so we're talking earlier about how you knit together science and creativity and um, writing and science and how science, sorry, writing a poem is a bit of an experiment, do you think there's something to be said for the way you, do the way you think about science as something creative, do you think that is true? 

[Trisha] Yeah I think science is very creative and you, you well, you know in a whole bunch of ways uh, I'm just thinking I've got a book oh, that I've had for ages and it's a collection of uh, essays I think or about, uh, it's called 'Passionate Minds' and it's about scientists, but it's looking at science as a creative endeavour, and I think there might be another, um I think that's like volume one and there might be volume two, that I haven't read yet, but really fascinating, so I think often, uh, you need an imagination to be a scientist, you need to be curious to be a scientist, and I think there's a certain creative element to curiosity. I can't really explain or justify that statement but I do think it, um, so this, and also science is, scientists are often very passionate about their own particular areas of interest and I think that's another thing that's common to other sort of creative fields, so yeah to me science does seem like a, like an intrinsically creative endeavour as well as, um, an endeavour which like other forms of writing and like poetry is explaining the world to us. 

[Jess] Yeah it seems ironic that the government is kind of pushing science at the same time that it's denigrating the humanities, they know they both work in concert. 

[Ben] I could not agree more. 

[Jess] Yeah. 

[Ben] I, I, you mentioned before that, um, Trisha and I worked on, we judged, um. 

[Jess] Yeah, yeah.

[Ben] a poetry competition together and from memory a lot of the, the entries were from people who were working in, in science, people who were dabbling um, in, in poetry, doctors and um, you know, uh, academics, so I, I think it's, I think there are some closet poets out there, um, who are scientists. 

[Jess] yeah. 

[Ben] Um they're really, really keen to to explore the creative side of, um, you know of the world that they work in.

[Jess] Yeah, yeah definitely, yeah, um and I learned about science through your books, so Trisha you wrote that poem 'Fluoride' and it starts off about people taking their fluoride pills when they're little, and that's what we had to do as kids because we grew up on a farm so we didn't have town water, we had rain water, but then you talk about it being, I think it's fluoride gas, um, as a really savage, dangerous. 

[Trisha] It's, it's one of the best, possibly the most deadly element, because the reason is that it's so reactive is that it combines with anything you give it, any, which means that essentially it destroys whatever you you give it, it makes it, it, uh so fluoride tablets are going to be like fluoride, fluorine, I don't know what would they, be but they're a compound they're not fluorine, but fluorine is the gas and it's so incredibly reactive that you can actually, you can take a a bunch of like, um, like steel wool and if you put a little stream of fluorine onto it just spontaneously bursts into flames, no, you're not lighting it or anything you're just going gas meets steel, it's, it's incredibly deadly, incredibly deadly, but fascinating because of that I think. 

[Jess] Yeah, yeah so I learned a lot about science through your poems, I thought it was really cool, but you start off - the first poem in your collection is about, um, religion. 

[Trisha] Oh yes, well it's, it's, it includes religion. I grew up in a very, my mother is to this day a very devout Catholic and her whole side of the family were beyond devout, my uncle on that side was a priest who later became a bishop and there used to be like masses in my grandparents' lounge room and rosaries in the car on the way back from the beach and mass every week of course and extra and holy days of obligation, and so that's, that's what I grew up in, so and I think because I'm writing in that poem about um, learning to read, and learning to write and getting a sense of how all that worked, but it was happening in that, in those surroundings and that atmosphere which was the, um, very intense Catholicism, so that's why there's so much religion in there and there is, I think there is some beauty sometimes in the language of religion, like I'm not a religious person now but I do think that in, in the language like when I was writing that poem I remember the seven sacraments and I thought 'Oh this is such a lovely feeling to that,' even if I don't believe in the sacraments there's, there's, it's very evocative, it's quite beautiful in the way it's expressed, so I think that that's probably in there as well. 

[Jess] Yeah, but you talk about writing being a religion for you by the poem's close, that's how, well that's how I read it. 

[Trisha] Yeah, I look, yes, it's totally up to you to read it, how, how you would, like I don't think of it as a religion but I do see it as uh, um, what does it say at the end, 'Quietly I married the word,' so it's like that becomes the um, the passion and the kind of organising principle, rather than this externally imposed word with a capital W of god and all the rules that came along with that and all the sins and the whole rest of it. 

[Jess] Yeah, yeah. 

[Trisha] So I wouldn't say it's a religion, I don't think of it as a religion but it's, it's that transfer from, to an internal, um, authority I guess. 

[Jess] Yeah, yeah, yeah, so are you guys working on anything new, anything sciencey, or have you moved away from science, or you're just having a break at the moment?

[Trisha] Do you want to go first, Ben? 

[Ben] I, I honestly, uh, don't have anything on the go right now, um, because I'm having a little bit of a rest and I'm also a teacher and I'm doing a lot of things to do at school at the moment, um, but I've got a few little ideas, um, that I, that I want to see, you know, see if they go anywhere and most of those do involve some flavour of science yes. 

[Trisha] Um I, I have, I haven't had an idea for a potential next collection which is unusual for me because usually i just accumulate poems and then I sit down and see how this could work, but so I am actually kind of working towards a next collection, I'm not sure, it's probably, I can't imagine, science feels like part of me in particular chemistry, and I can't imagine not writing about it sometimes, so I don't feel like I've done my dash, science is just, it's such a rich source of um, concept and metaphor and words you know, terminology, I can't imagine not having that well to draw on and because I take such pleasure and I mean I love it, so I imagine it's always to some degree going to be present in my writing. The thing that I'm working on, the poetry, I, I can't actually even remember at the moment how you know whether there's science in there or how much and the other things I've been working on like, lately, have been essays, are they sciencey, yes! One of them does involve science. 

[Jess] Great! That's great to hear yeah, um, and one last question for Ben because I forgot to ask you about it earlier, um, the sign language, um, which is the kind of the title of your book, 'Airplane Baby Banana Blanket' - why pick that as the title? Um, because sign language seems to be a pivot between human and animal, and in the history of Deaf education, Deaf people were seen as animals because they signed, because they didn't have language, spoken language, so I was really intrigued by that part of it. 

[Ben] That's a really interesting perspective and one that I would never have intended um, uh, but when when I was reading about Lucy, one of the things that she was famous for was that she was taught American Sign Language and she worked with some of the same people that worked with Washoe who was another chimpanzee who, who could use sign language, um, and and the reason that the book's called 'Airplane Baby Banana Blanket' is, is in, in the 'Lucy: Growing up Human' book there's a list of, there's a selection of her vocabulary and it's out in alphabetical order, um, and that's what it begins with - airplane baby banana blanket - and the reason that I chose that as the title, uh, is that each of those four words has something to do with an event in Lucy's life, so 'airplane' at the beginning - she's brought to Oklahoma um, in an airplane after she was taken from her mother, um, 'baby' for obvious reasons - she was raised as a as a baby, uh, you know in a human home, 'banana' because she's a chimpanzee and, and 'blanket' - there's also a part where, uh on, on the on the flight back to uh, well on the flight, the flight to Oklahoma she was in a bassinet hidden under a blanket, um and i just thought you know it kind of told different parts of, parts of her story um the airplane comes back in again because, uh, at the end of her life she was taken to Africa, she lived out the rest of her life in the Gambia, so there's the airplane again, um, very American term, I would call it an aeroplane but, um, 'airplane' um is, is the term that was used and that, and that's from the book, but yeah that's really, that's a really interesting perspective, um, I would never have, I would never have, have thought about it that way, um, it's an interesting perspective that that you've raised. 

[Jess] Yeah, um, I think, um, it's, there's a long history of Deaf people being considered like animals, um, and it's also because, um, in early um, uh Roman society they couldn't hear the word of god so they were thought to be unchristian and like animals, because they couldn't hear god speaking to them, so yeah, and if you hear someone who is inarticulate you can see that that prejudice at play, yeah, so that's why Deaf people are kind of encouraged to speak even though it's really hard for them, because they can't hear their voice, um, because of that long history of associating sign language with animals yeah. 

[Ben] Somebody uh, the other day asked me if the book was inspired by 'Deaf Republic' by Ilya Kaminsky. 

[Jess] Oh that one, yeah, yeah.

[Ben] I, I'm ashamed to say I'd never even heard of it, so I ordered it, just arrived today and I flicked through and it has, it has images, it has diagrams of some um, some signs, so I'm really looking forward to reading that. 

[Jess] Yeah it's a beautiful book, yeah, I've read bits of it, it's beautiful, beautiful poetry, yeah yeah yeah, that's good, um and just one last point um, Trisha you've been working on this issue of Rabbit which is about to come out and that's about science and poetry, so what was that like to edit and pull together? 

[Trisha] It was, um, well the first thing that comes to mind is that we had I think upward of 1200 submissions for the issue and I was told I could pick 25, and I think we actually ended up with 30 which is good because I had some sort of, it was so hard picking the 25 and then I had these little outliers that I really wanted to scrape in there, um, so that was good so it was, it was, um it was a lot of work I would say, uh, and it was fascinating and there were uh, it was really interesting to see how people use science in their poems. When I did the call out I said something like, uh, poems that are infused with science, that flirt with science and engage with science, that inhabit science, from the macro to the molecular, from the laboratory to everyday life, because I wanted to make it broad and I wanted people not to think, well, I'm not a scientist in a lab, I can't write a science poem, I wanted people to be aware that you know if you want to analyse anything, it can be science, you know how, how is this glass made, let me tell you about, um fusion and you know, blah, blah, so, so I wanted it to be broad, and a really lovely range came in, of course you know there were people who sent poems that had no science in, this always happens, it doesn't matter how specific you are with a call out, people will just go, I've got this one maybe they'll like that and it's about, you know, bananas or something and then there were poems that had some really fascinating science but actually they didn't work as poems, they weren't really poems they had some nice. some interesting, facts but there was nothing about, even with a broad interpretation there was not, you, they couldn't be seen as poems, so there were things that just went straight away, and also Rabbit is a journal of non-fiction poetry, so that was another kind of sieve that I was applying, um, but I think we ended up with a really nice, uh, mix and there, there are poems in there, um, Ben's got a poem in there actually, um, and I think this was all done blind, so this is no, and it's a, it's a lovely poem, um, and his is more like a lyrical poem and that, when you mentioned that station that you used to go to, is that where that poem was set? 

[Ben] Yeah, it was actually. 

[Trisha] There we go! 

[Ben] The right sampling poem. 

[Trisha] Yeah, so um, and then there are other poems, like there was not that much pandemic poetry which surprised me, but there was some, there's one in there that was like a diary form thing that mentions the pandemic where science is in there sort of glancingly, but enough that it felt important to include it, and then there's a poem in there that, I think, it was Ian Gibbons made and it was using a scientific paper but it was just using the captions in the paper not even the content of the paper, but the captions and the legends on the diagrams, and using that as found material and making that a poem and it sounds bizarre, but it's so, um, metaphorically rich and imagistic and, and quite beautiful, uh, and you know there's one in there about Indian arts and uh the cooking of the dhal, I can't remember where the science, is but there's science in all of them, uh, so it was a really interesting and demanding and quite lovely experience putting that issue together. 

[Jess] Well, so we'll look forward to that, yeah, we'll promote it once you have it, yes, yeah, sounds fantastic. Well, thank you guys, that's that's super. Thank you for talking to us today. 

[Trisha] Thank you so much for having us.