PELLSTON, Mich. — The main message during a Science Fiction and Climate Change class Dr. Madeleine Wattenberg taught last year to college seniors was all about creating curiosity and the importance of an ongoing conversation between science and art.

“We need science,” the award-winning poet said. “But we need art to communicate what science knows and sometimes to question what science knows. They challenge each other.”

Wattenberg, an assistant professor of writing at Lakeland University in Wisconsin, is an Artist in Residence at the University of Michigan Biological Station from June 23 to Aug. 2.

Though she lives on the other side of Lake Michigan and was born in Kalamazoo, Wattenberg has never been to northern Michigan.

She comes from "a long line of life scientists."

Her dad is a biochemist. (She even wrote a few poems about him and being in his lab when she was a child.)

“My dad loves breaking things down to their parts, to the molecule, and investigating how things are working to the intracellular level,” Wattenberg said. “Me, I place things into a larger, broader context through connection and communication. Poetry is meant to be shared and create conversations with other people. I enjoy helping him and others share the joy of the scientific process and using language to reshape our relationship with the environment.”

During her UMBS artist residency, Wattenberg plans to teach several writing workshops.

“Poetry can be quite intimidating, but I have a very playful approach,” Wattenberg said. “I think everyone can write poetry. We all have an imagination, that’s what it comes down to. This opportunity for me at the field station is so fulfilling and exciting.”

Along Douglas Lake, she also plans to complete her book manuscript, currently titled “Apoptosis,” which she began during her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Cincinnati.

“It’s a book-length poetry manuscript that starts with how water connects all life on earth and incorporates research on industrial farming, slaughterhouses, and algal blooms resulting from farm runoff,” Wattenberg said. “It’s an unusual book that explores what it means to be a human who eats and consumes. The primary mode is poetry, but I became interested in adding visual components. For example, I erased congressional documents that were concerned with production of nitrate for war and agricultural production. It’s interesting to me that the same material is needed to destroy as to create and provide nutrition.”

She said the field station’s proximity to lakes and wetlands offers an ideal place to revise poems and write new ones.

“These waters and the research they enable will inevitably leak into my poems,” Wattenberg said. “I look forward to finishing the manuscript’s final section, a sequence of poems that take place in a futuristic world where humans’ relationships to water and waste have altered dramatically as the illusion of human separation from environmental outcomes disintegrates.”

Wattenberg’s scholarship focuses on ecopoetics, queer ecocriticism and feminist poetics.

The author of “I/O” from University of Arkansas Press, Wattenberg’s poetry has also appeared in journals including the Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Rumpus, sixth finch, Fairy Tale Review, Mid-American Review, Guernica, Best New Poets, and Poetry Daily.

Wattenberg’s artist-in-residence workshop schedule includes:

  • Sunday, July 7, 12:30 p.m. Meet in Gates Lecture Hall. “Writing Ecopoems: Noticing and Naming.” John Shoptaw argues that ecopoems must be "ecocentric, not anthropocentric." This workshop offers an introduction to writing ecopoems. We'll begin by discussing the aims and properties of ecopoems before using a variety of writing prompts to help us engage all our senses and write poems celebrating the nonhuman life and world around us. No poetry writing experience required.
  • Sunday, July 14, 12:30 p.m. Meet in the Seminar Room (second floor of Gates Lecture Hall). “Eco-Erasure Poetry.” Erasure poetry — also known as blackout poetry — takes a preexisting text or document and erases its language to leave behind a poem in the words that remain. In this workshop, we’ll use weather reports, environmental impact reports, and other public documents to write poems that reveal truths about climate change and environmental degradation. No poetry writing experience required.
  • Sunday, July 21, 12:30 p.m. Meet in Gates Lecture Hall. “Imagining Futures.” What will human society look like through a whale’s eye hundreds of years into the future? What if toxic algae blooms overtook the oceans? What poems would the dust write after humans are gone? Speculative poetry inhabits future worlds, visionary perspectives and alternate realities. During this session, our conversation will be rooted in the belief that a necessary part of advocating for our environment is imagining futures that offer new possibilities for life. We’ll read a poem that accomplishes this work and then write a poem from the perspective of an animal or plant in the far future. No poetry writing experience required.
  • Sunday, July 28, 12:30 p.m. Meet in Gates Lecture Hall. “Writing Poems Plants Can Read.” We’ll ask a simple question: What kinds of poems would plants want to read? We’ll begin by reading a poem to a plant to note its reaction. Participants will then discuss plant communication and consider how we might bring the language of our poems closer to the language of plants. Where will the poem take place? How could we construct a poem out of water, light, soil, fertilizer, microbes, wind? The purpose of the workshop is not to produce poems; instead, poems offer a way to decenter the human and think about how the best art may not be indestructible and timeless, but nutritional and compostable. No poetry writing experience required.

Workshop participants should bring paper and a writing utensil.

The public is invited to Wattenberg’s lecture from 7 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, July 3, at the U-M Biological Station in Gates Lecture Hall. Her talk is titled "Queer Clearings: Gender, Nature, Poetry.”

The public also is invited to Wattenberg’s poetry workshop, titled “Imagining Futures,” at 12:30 p.m. Sunday, July 21, in Gates Lecture Hall. No poetry experience required. The workshop is happening during the 2024 Open House when families are invited to visit the field station and tour the main research and teaching campus from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday, July 21, at 9133 Biological Rd., located off Riggsville Road.

Read one of Wattenberg’s poems titled “James River, Virginia” on the website poets.org.

Founded in 1909, the U-M Biological Station is one of the nation’s largest and longest continuously operating field research stations. For 115 years, students, faculty and researchers from around the globe have studied and monitored the impact of environmental changes on northern Michigan ecosystems.

The core mission of the Biological Station is to advance environmental field research, engage students in scientific discovery and provide information needed to understand and sustain ecosystems from local to global scales. In this cross-disciplinary, interactive community, students, faculty and researchers from around the globe come together to learn about and from the natural world and seek solutions to the critical environmental challenges of our time.