Change Form – and Die!

Zeena Nackerdien, a scientist with dual South African-US citizenship, has recently forged a second career as a creative writer both in poetry and prose.

Her latest book, Butterflies**, is a collection of four conjoined short stories that attempt to capture the beautiful landscape of her Paarl, Western Cape childhood while revealing the petty ugliness of the lives of the coloured community who lived on the physical and figurative wrong side of the town’s rail tracks.

The plot of one of the stories is reminiscent of Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace. But paying homage to the great Frenchman is not the author’s intent. Instead, she acknowledges ‘with gratitude’ Robert D Reed and colleagues at Cornell University, New York who used the gene-editing technique, CRISPR-Cas9 to repaint butterfly wings and whose work partly helped her to create her character Sarah/Zuleikha.

Nackerdien possibly has an excellent track-record in her original field. But she and others following the current fashion of moving from science and maths into creative writing must understand that penning academic essays is a quite different discipline from telling stories and that fiction is also distinct from creative non-fiction. In the first instance, I advise Nackerdien to ‘show’, not ‘tell’; to avoid devising a clumsy storyline that ill-fits a theory; to give her characters real depth and not to interpolate explanations of unusual terminology within the body of a story – those should be confined to a glossary.

** Butterflies is available from Amazon on Kindle @ $6.50.

© Natalie Wood (19 January 2018)