Wired to Write
Dr Sue Woolfe and Dr Nicola Redhouse on the neuroscience of creativity | Introducing our 2025 Young Writing Fellows! | Indigenous Futurisms, Blueprint for Being + more!
Cognitive Conversations #8 Wired to Write: On the Neuroscience of Creativity
This week on the SWN podcast, Bianca chats with Drs Sue Woolfe and Nicola Redhouse about the neuroscience of creativity and what makes us ‘wired’ to write.
Sue Woolfe has often turned to the world of science to construct her fiction as a way to comprehend what exactly is happening in the minds of writers as we enter into the ‘realm’ of imagination. Sue introduces us to the concept of ‘loose and tight construing’, and how these processes map onto the brain’s functional networks. But is the writing process anything like the scientific method of conducting an experiment?
In her in-depth investigation of the brain and the mind, Nicola Redhouse draws on both neuroscience and psychoanalysis to explore writing practice as a relational experience from which affective content might be used to extend and enliven a writer’s conceptual and craft choices. She shares some of these techniques to imbue writing with ‘wildness’ through reverie state, associative thinking and noticing.
Throughout this special two-part episode, we discuss Sue’s work of creative nonfiction, The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady, and Nicola’s memoir, Unlike The Heart. Links to the authors’ websites, publications, interviews and research are detailed in the show notes, along with further reading on creativity and neuroscience. Enjoy!
Meet our 2025 SWN Young Writing Fellows
Thanks to funding from Engaging Science QLD, we are working with four young writers on short pieces connected with Quantum science!
Bianca Orazio
With 15 years of dedication to ballet, I bring discipline and creativity to all that I do. As a University of Queensland Science Ambassador at my school, I enjoy educating others about STEM and inspiring curiosity in young learners. My writing explores themes of compassion, growth, and community, reflecting my love of helping people and connecting with others through storytelling.
Clancy Angow
I love film and television and am planning to pursue it when I finish school. I also play multiple instruments and am currently studying aviation and aerospace!
Radhika Nansi
I am currently studying Year 11 at St Rita’s College, with my favourite subjects being physics and drama. After graduation, I plan to do a Bachelor of Science in hopes for a job in physics research. Space has been a passion of mine since I was a child, my favourite nights being ones stargazing with a telescope bigger than I was. I am an aspiring poet and an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction.
Jessica Mupenzi
With African roots and a journey shaped by relocation, my creative work explores the tensions of cultural dualities, of belonging, language, and adaptation. I use writing, theatre, advocacy and science as forms of expression, to question, express, and reclaim. I’m drawn to the in-between spaces and the quiet nuances that shape how we belong.
Editor’s Pick | Indigenous Futurisms
Spotlight on Indigenous Futurisms with Palyku writer, artist and academic, Dr Ambelin Kwaymullina - Cybernetic Imagination Resident (ANU)
In 2023, Ambelin undertook a creative residency with ANU’s School of Cybernetics. Her creative challenge? To apply Indigenous futurist thinking to what is termed ‘artificial intelligence’ through the medium of visual art (acrylic on canvas). But her starting point was to question a cultural viewpoint held by Indigenous peoples the world over – in Indigenous systems, is there such a thing as ‘artificial’ intelligence?
More art-meets-science reads…
Transforming patient journeys through digital art interaction: how ecological soundscapes and immersive digital art is helping young chronically ill patients.
Decentralised Networks as Resistance Infrastructure: reimagining creative praxis using systems thinking for social justice in UCL’s Centre for Humanities Education.
The tiny Aussie bat the size of a matchbox that flies 150km in search of food: inside the nocturnal foraging flights of the critically endangered bent-wing bat.
On Trial: How volunteering to become a lab rat paid off for a science journalist.
Future Fables: On literature, evolution, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence.
SciArts writing prizes + opportunities
Varuna Writers House workshops
Mastering Structure through Character Arcs (closes 12 August)
The Art of Dialogue with Mary Anne Butler (closes 26 August)
The Sum of its Parts - Short Story Collections with Julie Koh (closes 26 August)
New masterclasses have just opened including Crafting Knockout Scenes with Brooke Robinson and Recharge Your Poetry Practice with Felicity Plunkett, and there's still time for writers with disability to join The Writer's Space Writing Group.
Indigenous languages creative arts residency | hybrid mode | Closing 31 July
Are you an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander creative with a cultural connection to a Queensland Indigenous language? Create something powerful with an Indigenous languages creative arts residency and $8,000 cash payment. The Indigenous Languages Creative Arts Residency is a part-time, flexible 8-week program designed with you, the artist, at the centre.
The Suburban Review | Submissions open for #39: Climate | Closes 3 August
What's the forecast? The Suburban Review is heating up for issue #39: CLIMATE, which is open now for submissions across fiction, poetry, literary essays, comics and art. Calling for glacial essays, hot and humid fiction, scorching poetry and arid art and comics that radiate long after reading. Submissions are open now. Shower them with your thoughts!
The Next Chapter Program 2026 | The Wheeler Centre | Closes 8 August
The Next Chapter program elevates Australian stories that aren’t being told and nurtures a new wave of writers to tell them. Participants will receive the opportunity to stay at Varuna, and attend an end-of-year publishing intensive at The Wheeler Centre.
Woollahra Digital Literary Award | Innovation in Literature | Closes 14 August
A national literary award supporting innovation in Australian literature and publishing, encouraging writers producing work in a digital medium. Find out more and submit.
SciArts events, workshops + exhibitions
National Science Week is coming up! | Various locations | 9-17 August
This year, National Science Week's school theme is Decoding the Universe: Exploring the unknown with nature's hidden language. Enjoy in-person and online events, virtual tours, DIY science and more across Brisbane, Southport, Toowoomba and Magnetic Island in Far North Queensland. Keep an eye out for our special NSW newsletter!
Symposium: Disabled Peoples’ Creative Writing | Online | 28-29 August 2025
This free online symposium aims to highlight the myriad ways in which disability engenders creative writing. Papers will explore the influence of impairment and disablement on writing techniques or topics, and how these are entangled with characteristics such as race, gender, age, and class. This two-day event will take place on Zoom. Each day will run from 10am-4pm, AEST. Live captioning and Auslan will be available for all sessions.
Presented by Drs Jessica White and Amanda Tink, from Creative People Products and Places (CP3) at the University of South Australia.
Congratulations to SWN friend and contributor A/Prof Helen Marshall on the publication of her new novel The Lady, the Tiger, and the Girl Who Loved Death — if you’re in Brisbane, please join us for the launch at Avid Reader on 24 July!
Find Helen’s short story Do Not Feed the Monkeys!! here in Edition 2 and her craft essay The Rivets for the Trees: Crafting Resonant Settings in Hard Science Fiction here in Edition 10.
READ | SWN recommends…
July marks the release of Deep History: Country and Sovereignty, edited by Ann McGrath and Jackie Huggins – a landmark anthology exploring Indigenous histories of caring for Country across millennia. With contributions from Brenda L. Croft, Anna Clark, Lynette Russell and more, Deep History shows how stories of the past and future are written into land, waterways and skies.
If you’re partial to strolling a city to learn its secrets and stories, keep an eye out for Walking Sydney: Fifteen Walks with a City’s Writers, (1 Sept 2025). Based on walks taken by Belinda Castles with fifteen writers, including Michelle de Kretser, Gail Jones and Ngọc Phạm. Walking Sydney invites you to see the city in a new light.
LISTEN | SWN recommends…
Mongabay NewsCast: Listen to Nature with thought-provoking podcasts on a wide range of topics including, most recently, Kim Stanley Robinson on how his novel Ministry for the Future holds lessons for the present; author Robert Macfarlane on rivers having rights as living entities; and something to brew on: soaring coffee prices are fuelled by deforestation, but solutions do exist. Co-hosted by science journalists Mike DiGirolamo and Rachel Donald. Subscribe to Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, or on the Mongabay website.
Why Are We Like This? by science writer and broadcaster Zoe Kean will soon be available as an audiobook, narrated by Zoe herself. But also: why not grab a hardcopy from your local bookshop and indulge in the pleasure of the page?
Thank you to our generous readers who continue to support SWN through paid subscriptions and via our donation platform, Chuffed. Your contribution, no matter how small, will help us to publish more creative writing inspired by science and, importantly, to pay writers, poets, artists and arts workers for the work they do!
— the SWN team
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