Thing 10: Communicating complex ideas

I recognised much in the podcast for Thing 10.  I am married to a science journalist whose work is precisely about communicating research in field X to workers in field Y.  The part of my own life where I come closest to using such things is as an activist with Global Justice Now, often gathering signatures for petitions.

Yes, I know an activist isn't a researcher.

Glad to see the importance the podcast attaches to questions from the person one is communicating with.  I had once to write a piece about a part of the Haddon Library's collection with which I am not very familiar.  If you have experienced the symptoms of imposter syndrome at any time, you will have some idea how that felt.  I described the pain of this in a phone conversation with my brother.  He was most interested in the story of the collection, and plied me with questions.  When I'd answered several of these, he said: "Write down what you've told me, Aidan, and you've got your article."

It worked.  I have good sibs.

Another thing the podcast mentions is the elevator pitch.  An opportunity to practise that came recently, when a writers' group to which I belong solicited 50-word gobbets of individual news from members.  What do you think of mine?

Instead of a minute

On 18 May I posted my 'Radio poem' -- my entry in the 2009 CV2 Two-Day Poem Competition .  Today's post was my entry in the equivalent competition for 2013.  It's now found publication in the journal Writers' forum 165, 2015, p. 51.  Many thanks to WF's poetry editor, Sue Butler, who asked me to let her have it for her 'In my own words' slot and has given me permission to reproduce it here.

WF also has a poetry competition, but monthly and without the stringent specifications of CV2'S challenge (see below).  Top prize in the WF competition is £100.  I might yet have a go.  And you?

INSTEAD OF A MINUTE

Neon, the new one, with New Latin name.

We call it noble for its non-reaction,

but garish for its red-light energy,

like one jumped-up, pulling a bogus rank

into trapeze rococo, gambit after gambit

to take the place of record, and we fall

with a sententious relish on the story.

Please don't kick me, being no Stedman expert

(John Stedman, that is, maverick slave-fighter,

not Stedman as in church-bells and bob-changes),

starting to write as if I knew at all

his archive with its scraps and pots and bones

jangling reproach to mine, likewise chaotic

but less alive. His pictures were the draw.

I wrote the Stedman piece, a scrubby growth

unfed by knowledge, but, with help from kin,

meeting the questions, and it went online

to universal silence. In relief,

reporting to Committee, I admitted

imposter syndrome and the agonies

it had imposed on me. Not for the minutes.

  

The CV2 Two-Day Poem Competition required a poem produced in 48 hours and including, in 2013, all ten of the following words: neon, relish, scrubby, bob, gambit, rank, sententious, record, trapeze, and rococo. The competition weekend included, for Clare and me, a journey to Birmingham. The poem was written on trains and in a room of the Premier Inn.

One elusive word got placed when I told Clare I was including a reference to John Stedman. Clare, an aficionada of Dorothy Sayers' novel The nine tailors, thought first of the Stedman whose name is attached to some of the campanological terms in that book – and I remembered enough of those terms to see that this would fit the word 'bob'.

The Brum trip was for a memorial service to a friend, Jo Austen. My mind was in the right place during the service. The poem didn't distract me from the tributes to Jo.

Nothing from the memorial service appears in the poem.  At one level, what that means is that the first draft was probably completed before Sunday afternoon. But the poem's closeness to Jo's memorial does make another point become obvious.  Jo had cerebral palsy from birth. The poem's boasts about an occasional sense of professional inadequacy on my part are in perspective alongside what she had to work with in living well.