Encounter #7: A Collection of Poems by Megan
This week's Encounter is with 9 to 5'er artist, Megan Webster. Megan is a chemical engineering PhD student at a university in New York City. Outside of her PhD research, Megan is an avid writer who enjoys writing poetry and novels. Her stories range in genre from fantasy to historical fiction and she has even published one of her novels! For her Encounter, Megan has chosen to share a selection of poems taken from different points throughout her writing career. If you would like to learn more about Megan and her passion for storytelling, please check out her bio on The Characters page of this website.
Engineering and storytelling are not two things that one would immediately think go hand in hand, like peaches and cream or Mr. and Mrs. In fact, it is pretty rare, in my book, to find an engineer who can clearly tell the story of their profession, especially if it is to an audience with a non-technical background. Ironically, though, storytelling is essential to the scientific community.
As engineers and scientists, we live in a world dictated by equations, numbers, and theorems and we make great discoveries and innovations in our field by understanding our surrounding world through this language. However, as we become fluent in our numerical and scientific vernacular and begin to analyze our surroundings with a fine tooth comb at the most microscopic level of detail, it seems that we begin to lose our ability to communicate in a universal language; one that makes sense to the world outside of our scientific community. Our innovative and break-through findings can sometimes be swept aside if we are unable to effectively communicate what we are doing and why it matters to the general public.
Our stories need to be told because they are the ones preserving and advancing our society but we often struggle to tell them in a greater context that makes them relevant to the storyline of Society.
To the great fortune of the scientific community, Megan is one of those rare engineer storytellers who can translate Engineer into Laymen and can present technical findings as fascinating stories. Therefore, when Megan told me that she was a writer in her free time, I was not at all surprised. Megan looks for stories wherever she goes and as a result of that curiosity, I found her own story to be intriguing. She is a character that, as she describes, wears many hats, whether it is as a chemist turned chemical engineering PhD, as a musician, or as a writer. Megan's tenacious hunger for knowledge and her adventurous desire to explore is evident in her engineering and, as I have discovered recently, also in her art, reflected in the variety of poetic forms that she has chosen to share with the Encounters community. Megan is truly a 9 to 5'er artist following both of her passions in science and in art and I am so happy that she will now share her story with you.
Now, without further ado, I present to you a collection of poems by the engineer and poet, Megan Webster.
If you would like to read more of Megan's work, check out her novel, Mightier Than The Sword