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At this point, halfway through this essay, you may be shouting at the page: But what exactly was her PhD about? I’ll keep you in suspense no longer. When and why did I decide to do a creative writing PhD inspired by particle physics? First, I was surprised that I chose to do a PhD. I was 43 when I decided I wanted some sort of framework, wanting someone to be waiting for me to produce something. I liked the word “supervisor”. I liked the idea, for the first time in my writing life, of having to have a plan, however much that plan might shift and adapt over the three years. And it did. Spoiler alert: my whole approach to writing changed; how I approached my PhD affected, in the best way, everything I’ve written since. My initial idea was focused on a type of book-length work I’d become intrigued by: books made of parts (not chapters, something odder) that were intended to work as a coherent whole. For example, Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi has a main story running through it and standalone short stories embedded into this “primary narrative”. Bluets by Maggie Nelson is told in numbered sections. An Acre of Barren Ground by Jeremy Gavron is told in sections which don’t always seems to have any connection to each other or anything else! Because my thoughts tend to turn to science, I wondered if I could use particle physics to “interrogate” these book-length works, which I decided to call “particle fictions” (always good for a PhD to invent your own term) with the aim of producing my own work of particle fiction. I found two supervisors at Bath Spa who were intrigued by my proposal – and enlisted an external supervisor, a particle physicist, who was wonderful and clearly thought I was a bit mad. She wasn’t wrong. The primary product of a practice-based PhD is the creative work; writing the book is the research, something I didn’t quite understand at the time. I had no idea what my book would look like or be “about”. I thought it might be “about” particle physics. I knew it would be made up of parts. I didn’t know what those parts might be or how they might try and make a whole. “The way we see is influenced by the way we think.” (David Bohm) This is the main thrust of his concept, which was revolutionary when Bohm published his book in the 1980s, and is still controversial: The universe is actually a whole, but we see it as made of separate parts – such as physicists focusing on particles – because that's how we've trained ourselves to see it. Over time, I understood that my remit was wider than particle physics: it became about the nature of wholeness itself. What it might mean to be a part? What might it mean to be whole? I had no idea what an enormous field I was stepping into. It was at a talk I gave early into my PhD at a science and literature conference, after I told them what I wanted to do and asked for suggestions, that someone mentioned “mereology”. This is a “branch of logic that tries to clarify class expressions and theorizes on the relation between parts and wholes”.3 The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says: “Mereology: the theory of ‘parthood relations’”4. When I read the words “parthood relations” I knew this was going to get interesting, that I was moving into entirely unexpected territories. The woman standing inside the atom is taking notes. She looks and sees, she watches and measures. She laughs. Who knew about all of this? Just inside one atom. Almost every field of enquiry has something to say on the nature of wholes and parts – from philosophy and psychology to archaeology, art and maths (fractals!). I started following threads, reading and reading and reading, because that, surely, is what a PhD is. You gift yourself time to immerse, experiment, explore. There’s no room here to go into detail here, so I invite you to read the PhD if you’d like to see what I got up to http://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/10693/ . What I will say is that, after bombarding myself with ideas and theories, I began “experimenting” on my chosen works of particle fiction, with the aim that what I learned would inspire me when writing my own. When I say “experiment”, I mean that I approached the task as a scientist. I took the books apart – literally, in the case of a paperback of An Acre of Barren Ground, which I ripped into its constituent (and seemingly unconnected) sections. Then I took measurements, based on variables I’d come up with, and based on a hypothesis, which every science experiment requires. I chose what is known as a “null hypothesis”, which is the opposite of what you might think. Here it is: The following null hypotheses will be tested: 1. A work of particle fiction is not made of parts. 2. When a work of particle fiction is separated into its constituent parts, no relationship of any kind will be found between one part and another. 3. Within a work of particle fiction there are no references to its particulate nature. 4. A work of particle fiction is not a coherent whole. 5. A particle in a work of particle fiction cannot be broken down into smaller sub-particles. 6. These smaller sub-particles, if they exist, have no relationship to each other or to the particles. I gathered “data” on An Acre of Barren Ground and several other books that fell under my definition of particle fiction, deciding what I considered to be a “particle” in each book (for AAOBG this was a section; for Bluets it was a numbered part). I counted: how many particles in the book; how many words in each particle etc.... I assessed what the connection might be between one particle of text and the particle that followed. I measured. I plotted graphs. I had such fun! It turned out I was not the first to use scientific methods to analyse 69
page 69
literature (see Franco Moretti’s, Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History) but I did it in my own way, following my instincts. I played. I played for three years. And at the same time my own book of particle fiction began to take shape. Or shapes. 1. She has never done this before, never written a book-length work, never contemplated one. She has books, yes, but they are collections – of stories, poems – that were written singly, with no thought of coming together, with no thought of pages next to other pages next to other pages. With no thought of: Book. I sat in on some of my external supervisor’s undergraduate particle physics lectures and learned how much had changed and expanded since I’d been an undergraduate – in those same lecture halls – 25 years earlier. And something started to appear. 8. A story is emerging. One character has a name: Susy. This is directly inspired by physicists' nickname for the theory of Supersymmetry: SuSy. She keeps writing, to find out what happens. This is how it has always worked – she writes stories with no advance planning, no plotting, in order, first, to entertain herself. At the same time, she is feeding herself with all the other topics covered in these poetics, examining wholes and parts, wholeness. We’re coming to the end of our time together in these pages, so I will skip ahead to the end result. My work of particle fiction is a hybrid book of poetry/prose/fiction/non-fiction called and what if we were all allowed to disappear. I surprised myself constantly in the writing and the assembling of it. I had no idea that the films I was watching while researching the PhD would become such a major part of it. I had no idea what I was up to when I placed one of my pre-existing poems randomly somewhere on a blank page, began writing at the top of the page until the whole poem was fully incorporated into a block of prose, and then, over several iterations, began chipping away at the block to reveal the poem. I didn’t know that particle physics would be hidden deep underneath what was on the book’s surface, with only a few hints as to its influence. I didn’t know that there would be birds. Quite a lot of birds. It wasn’t until I’d almost finished that the title came to me. This happens with poems and short stories too, you just know when it’s right. And what if we were all allowed to disappear? Yes. I see this doctorate – which has changed my writing and reading in so many ways – as a beginning, an opening into a new way. Across these four years, I have become a writer of hybrid works, have given myself permission to break rules and cross boundaries, and all of this I will carry with me, whatever form my writing takes next. I was delighted when Guillemot Press offered to publish and what if we were all allowed to disappear as a limited edition, and came up with a creative way, using tracing paper, to reveal the poem hidden under the prose. It is a very odd book, exactly the book I wanted to write, and I hope, in its parts and in its wholeness, it says something different to each reader who picks it up. Also, the cover is gold. I know. Since it was published in March 2020, I have written two more hybrid books: a novel which I call a fictional memoir-in-collage (forthcoming from Broken Sleep in November 2022), and a creative nonfictional book on Time, which I call a chronomemoir. I set myself a PhD that gave me permission me to bring all the parts of me together – the physics nerd, the writer, the poet, the curious overthinker – on the page. In exploring parts and wholes, fragments and coherence, I found myself. The woman standing inside the atom puts away her notebook. Around her, electrons spin, protons and neutrons dance. The woman watches and grins, watches and grins. She is a part. She is whole. Tania Hershman’s second poetry collection, Still Life With Octopus, was published by Nine Arches Press in July 2022 and her debut novel, Go On, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep (Nov 2022). 1 F. Close, The New Cosmic Onion, Boca Raton, Florida, Taylor and Francis, 2007, p. 1. 2 F. Close, The New Cosmic Onion, Boca Raton, Florida, Taylor and Francis, 2007, p. 9. 3 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, ’Mereology’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, [website], www.britannica.com/topic/mereology, (accessed October 2014). 4 A. Varzi, 'Mereology', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, [website] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology, (accessed October 2014). 70

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At this point, halfway through this essay, you may be shouting at the page: But what exactly was her PhD about? I’ll keep you in suspense no longer. When and why did I decide to do a creative writing PhD inspired by particle physics?

First, I was surprised that I chose to do a PhD. I was 43 when I decided I wanted some sort of framework, wanting someone to be waiting for me to produce something. I liked the word “supervisor”. I liked the idea, for the first time in my writing life, of having to have a plan, however much that plan might shift and adapt over the three years. And it did. Spoiler alert: my whole approach to writing changed; how I approached my PhD affected, in the best way, everything I’ve written since.

My initial idea was focused on a type of book-length work I’d become intrigued by: books made of parts (not chapters, something odder) that were intended to work as a coherent whole. For example, Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi has a main story running through it and standalone short stories embedded into this “primary narrative”. Bluets by Maggie Nelson is told in numbered sections. An Acre of Barren Ground by Jeremy Gavron is told in sections which don’t always seems to have any connection to each other or anything else!

Because my thoughts tend to turn to science, I wondered if I could use particle physics to “interrogate” these book-length works, which I decided to call “particle fictions” (always good for a PhD to invent your own term) with the aim of producing my own work of particle fiction. I found two supervisors at Bath Spa who were intrigued by my proposal – and enlisted an external supervisor, a particle physicist, who was wonderful and clearly thought I was a bit mad. She wasn’t wrong.

The primary product of a practice-based PhD is the creative work; writing the book is the research, something I didn’t quite understand at the time. I had no idea what my book would look like or be “about”. I thought it might be “about” particle physics. I knew it would be made up of parts. I didn’t know what those parts might be or how they might try and make a whole.

“The way we see is influenced by the way we think.” (David Bohm) This is the main thrust of his concept, which was revolutionary when Bohm published his book in the 1980s, and is still controversial: The universe is actually a whole, but we see it as made of separate parts – such as physicists focusing on particles – because that's how we've trained ourselves to see it.

Over time, I understood that my remit was wider than particle physics: it became about the nature of wholeness itself. What it might mean to be a part? What might it mean to be whole? I had no idea what an enormous field I was stepping into. It was at a talk I gave early into my PhD at a science and literature conference, after I told them what I wanted to do and asked for suggestions, that someone mentioned “mereology”. This is a “branch of logic that tries to clarify class expressions and theorizes on the relation between parts and wholes”.3 The Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy says: “Mereology: the theory of ‘parthood relations’”4. When I read the words “parthood relations” I knew this was going to get interesting, that I was moving into entirely unexpected territories.

The woman standing inside the atom is taking notes. She looks and sees, she watches and measures. She laughs. Who knew about all of this? Just inside one atom.

Almost every field of enquiry has something to say on the nature of wholes and parts – from philosophy and psychology to archaeology, art and maths (fractals!). I started following threads, reading and reading and reading, because that, surely, is what a PhD is. You gift yourself time to immerse, experiment, explore. There’s no room here to go into detail here, so I invite you to read the PhD if you’d like to see what I got up to http://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/10693/ . What I will say is that, after bombarding myself with ideas and theories, I began “experimenting” on my chosen works of particle fiction, with the aim that what I learned would inspire me when writing my own.

When I say “experiment”, I mean that I approached the task as a scientist. I took the books apart – literally, in the case of a paperback of An Acre of Barren Ground, which I ripped into its constituent (and seemingly unconnected) sections. Then I took measurements, based on variables I’d come up with, and based on a hypothesis, which every science experiment requires. I chose what is known as a “null hypothesis”, which is the opposite of what you might think. Here it is:

The following null hypotheses will be tested:

1. A work of particle fiction is not made of parts. 2. When a work of particle fiction is separated into its constituent parts, no relationship of any kind will be found between one part and another. 3. Within a work of particle fiction there are no references to its particulate nature. 4. A work of particle fiction is not a coherent whole. 5. A particle in a work of particle fiction cannot be broken down into smaller sub-particles. 6. These smaller sub-particles, if they exist, have no relationship to each other or to the particles.

I gathered “data” on An Acre of Barren Ground and several other books that fell under my definition of particle fiction, deciding what I considered to be a “particle” in each book (for AAOBG this was a section; for Bluets it was a numbered part). I counted: how many particles in the book; how many words in each particle etc.... I assessed what the connection might be between one particle of text and the particle that followed. I measured. I plotted graphs. I had such fun!

It turned out I was not the first to use scientific methods to analyse

69

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