Instructor Spotlight: Julie Lunde

Tell us about your background and what inspired you to teach this course

I began studying creative nonfiction as an undergraduate at Northwestern University and was immediately drawn to formally playful and genre-hybrid works which experiment with the possibilities of language on a page. I’ve always loved math, and I often feel that the main project of writing, for me, is linguistic problem-solving; my undergraduate project was a longform essay which performed a kind of personal interpretation of the Collatz conjecture.

After graduating, I worked in the marketing department at Penguin Random House (another role which combined my love of language and numbers). A few years later, I moved to Tucson, AZ to pursue my MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona; my application essay modeled itself on the forms of Einstein’s writing on the theory of relativity. I’ve since written pieces inspired by mathematical riddles and puzzles, and my final thesis project braided lyric memoir with the harder logics of math and science.

This class comes from a place deeply personal to me. In large part, I designed this class to create a home for the kind of undergraduate student I used to be. I also wanted this class to honor the creativity of students who are more STEM-oriented in their studies; my two triplet sisters occupy more traditionally analytical and STEM-informed roles, and I have a deep respect for their creativity (an aspect of their work which is too often overlooked).

To some, creative writing and math may seem like oil and water. How would you describe the nature of their intersection? What can students focused on one discipline learn by studying the other?

Many people do view these disciplines as opposite ends along some false spectrum, and that restrictive philosophy often (and unfortunately) can become a limiting script that we get told or that we tell about ourselves. On our first day of class, nearly all my students admitted that they had heard or said some form of the following: “you’re not a ‘math’ person” or “I’m not a ‘writing’ person.” That story bleeds into the ways we conceptualize who we are and what we’re capable of; it also minimizes the hard work and ambitions involved in both math and writing.

It’s really freeing to break loose of that binary ideology, and one way we have begun to do so in my class is by scrutinizing the commonalities and supposed differences more closely. Both are rigorous pursuits concerned with problem-solving, language, form, pattern, invention, innovation, analysis, and beauty. In class, we’re looking at writing which is produced using mathematical constraints and/or is informed or inspired by mathematical concepts and language (see, for example: “Math 1619” by Gwendolyn Wallace). We’re also studying how narrative and style manifest in mathematical proofs.

What do you hope that students will take away from your course?

My hope is that this course will empower my students to challenge and dismantle those popular and limiting beliefs–that mathematical work isn’t creative or beautiful, that creative work isn’t analytical or rigorous, etc. At the end of the semester, my students will each be creating a final project which in some way expresses their vision of the intersections of these two fields. We’ll be plotting these final projects, along with our class readings and their class presentations, on a graph of Math/Writing. I’m excited for students to reconceptualize where (and how) they might situate themselves along these axes.