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Creative Writing for Environmental Science (Madhur Anand, Liane Miedema Brown, Laura Legzdin, Aisha Shaikh)

Delisted: a series of found poems on the stirrupshell

This submission is a series of found poems led by Professor Madhur Anand through Creative Writing for Environmental Scientists, a third-year course at the University of Guelph taught by Dr. Anand. Drawings, art, and curation by Liane Miedema Brown.

This piece is our response to an invitation from The Delisted Project to encounter, reflect, and co-create with members of the 32 species and subspecies recently removed from the endangered species list because the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA/NMFS have concluded they are extinct. We asked participants to learn about the stirrupshell, and use poetry to express the experience of learning about a species that no longer shares our earth. The chosen format was found poetry, taking words and phrases from reports and articles about the stirrupshell and transforming and rearranging them to find hints of this extinct species and share some of their story with the world.

Dr. Madhur Anand is a full professor and the director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability Laboratory at the University of Guelph, where she conducts award-winning research on climate change and human-environment modelling. She is the director of the Collaboratory for Creative Writing, Environmental Sciences, and the Arts where she leads various art-science. Her debut book of creative nonfiction This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her debut collection of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015) was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named one of 10 all-time “trailblazing” poetry collections by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Her second collection of poems Parasitic Oscillations (2022) was named a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. To Place a Rabbit (Knopf Canada), her first novel, will be published in 2025.

Liane Miedema Brown is a researcher, emerging artist, and interdisciplinary facilitator. As a researcher, her work focuses on ecology, plant communities, and human-environment relationships. As an artist, Liane draws inspiration from her observations of the natural world and its myriad interconnections. She is constantly seeking new ways to uncover the relationships between living things and their surroundings—through research, visual art and other forms of interdisciplinary work. She has been working with Madhur to build interdisciplinary connections between the arts and sciences, including the creative writing for environmental science course.

Laura Legzdins is an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph in the School of Environmental Science. She participated in the Creative Writing for Environmental Science course in Winter of 2024, focusing on environmental community, cultural care, and restoration work. Laura’s poem, Employees’ Catalog for American Mussels, is a found poem using words from the research article, Status of selected freshwater mussels (Unionidae) in Mississippi (1987), from the Journal of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences by P. Hartfield, and is a part of a broader reflection on extinction and human-environmental relationships.

Aisha Shaikh is an undergraduate student at the University of Guelph in Integrative Biology. She participated in the Creative Writing for Environmental Science course in Winter of 2024, focusing on environmental communications related conservation work. Aisha’s poem, 1: Error Percent, is a found poem using words from the research article, Status of selected freshwater mussels (Unionidae) in Mississippi (1987), from the Journal of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences by P. Hartfield, and is a part of a broader reflection on extinction and human-environmental relationships.

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