Snowflakes, laundry, and a physicist named Lyapunov; few writers would unite these seemingly disparate themes under the guise of one essay. James Glanz does it poetically and intelligently. His essay, "The Lyapunov Exponent," exemplifies the blend of ideas and emotion that Glanz likes to create in his writing.

"People don't think about scientific issues if nobody puts it in humanitarian terms," he says, a little matter of fact. His goal as a writer is to choose themes that convey the emotional side of science, which he feels most people are estranged from. He believes there is a hostility or an indifference toward science in the humanities field, which in turn, creates the extra task of proving to a reader that science is worth reading about, "that it might touch you. It is a tall order but it is what I do." Glanz is one of very few science writers who have the drive and the talent to write about science with heart and emotion.

He posits an interesting idea: "You can look at a washing machine in poetic terms, or in painterly terms, or you could even write a symphony about a washing machine, but what we lose or are never asked to consider, is the interesting physics of a washing machine."

When Glanz was in graduate school studying physics, he wrote fiction. After obtaining a masters degree, he left the science field for a couple of years to experiment with a more expressive life of writing. During that time he worked as a rototiller repairman, and apprenticed himself as a writer to learn the craft. He remembers "walls papered with rejection slips."

He is a big fan of revision, particularly when the actual writing is central to the piece and when the piece contains a lot of emotion, such as "The Lyapunov Experiment." He likes his self-proclaimed freedom to make connections "all over the place, hooking one notion to another as long as things flow in a literary sense." Much of this essay was written five or six times. When he got to the end he had already named the piece after a scientist, Lyapunov, who was known for his turbulence theories. He laughs as he tells me that, "I knew that I was going to eventually converge back on that theme: I had to because of the name." He wrote the end of the essay connecting snowflakes and washing machines, from words that had been in his head from years ago when he wrote a column on the laundromat in Tacoma Park, where he washed his clothes.

"Once I wrote the lines from the laundromat I knew what I was going to do and I had that luxury that doesn't often happen to me I suppose with really talented writers it happens more often where I knew exactly what was going to happen and I basically wrote the ending in one straight shot. It had an internal feeling of inevitability at that point."

His own dislike for discipline combined with his desire to convey ideas allowed him to create a unique style, based on reading Nietzche, and keeping writing journals. Like Nietzche, he structures his writing in "this quick, sectional format where you have to figure out the connections and in his case you get this feeling of overwhelming momentum as you go along but as you jump from idea to idea sometimes it is a little uncertain exactly what the connection was." He calls it a sectional, or modular, format: one that is both flexible, allowing him the freedom to stray from structural conventions, and intellectual enough to allow him to convey factual material, "but not be too pinned down to that dry literalness you often come across in nonfiction."

Science changed his life: "It got me educated and got me out of the river flats which probably would not have happened if I hadn't found science." His intention is to convey the fascination of science and the way science touches our lives in a way that coherently mixes emotion and intellect, allowing them to blend together. In writing strictly for science he aims to capture an interesting notion of science first and then possibly try to add an emotional twist to gather in readers. But in blending the two, as he does in "The Lyapunov Exponent," the emotional component has to permeate the whole piece. "So if it doesn't touch you to start with I think it's not worth writing an essay like that."

Writing, says Glanz, "on a practical level is just a hell of a difficult profession." He advises knowing what you want to write and why, and to distinguish the profession from the craft. He recommends maintaining a thick coat of armor to put up with the rejection, criticism, and competition, "because shrapnel will be getting in."

Glanz talks about the importance of holding on to an inner aesthetic and the "ability to marvel at new things like a kid." From a more literary or artistic perspective, he believes that "you have to keep asking the big questions." It's too easy to get caught up in the practical game of making a living, or where you are professionally.  Glanz realizes that it is easy to forget why you began writing in the first place, and perhaps the simple reason being the "ability to express ideas better than you could the day before, or the faculty that allows you take a big philosophical idea and illustrate it in something that a homeless guy says on the street or the sense of how it is you're going to express the impact of the fate of the universe."

Corinne Platt