We are survivors of immeasurable events,
Flung upon some reach of land

Rebecca Elson

The Life-Writing of Immeasurable Events collaborative creative writing project is named after a line from a poem by the late Rebecca Elson, from her collection A Responsibility to Awe. Elson was an astronomer whose scientific research into dark matter took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. Her poems, too, make inferences and speculate, always from meticulous observation, undeterred by how little we can know of the universe. ‘Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination,’ she wrote.

With this project I encourage people to share what they are doing, feeling, experiencing, through life-writing. I collect anecdotes, poems, journal or diary entries, essays, any form of life-writing that anyone would like to send, short or long. With the permission of the writer, I select some contributions to feature on the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing’s LIVE Writing page.