This post is a work of collaborative authorship: creative vignette by Anamaria Depner (Principal Investigator of W/L/F, Goethe University Frankfurt) and “Coal”. Foreword and afterword by Hannah Spruce (ECR and Science Communication Lead, Leeds Beckett University).
Creative Writing and Research
You might think creative writing belongs only to the fantastical worlds and characters of the novel and story. However, increasingly, academics in disciplines as varied as conservation science and public health are using creativity as a research tool.[i] Creative expression can help scientists and scholars identify patterns, engage in critical reflection, and investigate contemporary challenges, especially where uncertainty abounds.
The capacity of creative writing to generate grounded speculation makes it particularly beneficial for exploring possible futures.[ii] The ability to aid decision making, inform planning, and encourage new ways of thinking is one reason why organisations such as Shell have used creative scenario work since the 1970s.[iii]
For us, in the Waste/Lands/Futures project, creative methods are an essential mode of inquiry.
In the coming months, we will run creative workshops across our research sites in Austria, Germany, Romania, and the UK to generate positive, practical, and imaginative visions of the future in places shaped by industrial abandonment. We want to draw on the imaginative capacities of creative practice to generate new insights into the kinds of futures that both human and more-than-human residents might desire.
We have also been using creativity to think with, and about, entities that cannot speak for themselves. In this post, that entity is coal.
The human imagination allows us to return to a long-ago time (the deep, geological time of coal) and to thrust ourselves (figuratively) into possible future times way beyond our short human lifespans. We’re thus able to approach an object history and future from a unique angle in the hope that this might help us to make sense of the materialities of our world and create meaning in new ways.
In the vignette below, Anamaria Depner wrote as fossilised carbon. This particular piece of coal is from the Ensdorf mine, the last active coal mine in Germany’s Saarland which closed in 2012. The coal fragment now exists as a souvenir and museum object.
Anamaria wrote the vignette during a workshop organised by members of the W/L/F team at the science and technology conference (Before Ruins, 2026) held at the Ruhr-University Bochum. In the workshop, participants selected an object and together sought to discover what might be learned by approaching it through the lens of creative writing methods. The workshop was facilitated by the lead organiser Fiona Schrading (Goethe University Frankfurt), with planning and development contributions from Anamaria, Hannah , Andrei Mihail (SNSPA), and Rozemarijn de Kwaasteniet (University of Stirling).
Coal: A Deep Time Fragment
Immortality is not for everyone, they say. I did not choose it. And yet I’m here, shining black under the sun’s light. While those who brought me here are now where I once came from: beneath the earth. Perhaps they have become what I was meant to. Probably not—but still, it is more likely than that I will ever reach that state.
Those who brought me above the ground were many. Some had hands, others had wheels, and still others were sharp. Captured light was carried into the depths, where I rested as part of a grown mass since when the earth was younger.
I have lived many lives. In one, I was green and grew toward the sky, giving what the first beings who breathed needed. In the second, I lay on the ground, was damp, and nourished the green that came after me. As I sank deeper into the earth over time, I became denser. The roots of those who would no longer recognize me as their ancestor could no longer reach me, no longer penetrate me.
There was nothing on this planet that resembled humans at the time I finally arrived—black and heavy—where human hands found me 300 million years later. That was my time. My time to rest and wait for yet another existence as the hardest material possible. But then, creatures of the future intervened into my own future. They brought me back above the ground to nurture a great fire with me and create a hard material to serve their new purposes.
However: Above the ground, nothing likewise happened. Their fires went out and their transformation processes prevented mine.
I should not be here.
I can no longer become.
This is not a future.
My future was meant to be radiant, blazing, and bright—whether in the dark heat of the deep earth or in the fire of blast furnaces.
…and yet, I’m here, surrendered to infinite uselessness.
Has this prompted you to think differently?
This imaginative fragment animates the life and transformations of coal.
Readers move across vast geological timescales.
The vignette opens in an epoch before humans walked the earth, and there is our coal in its first form: a green earthy shoot, maybe a tree or a fern. Millions of years pass, and deep underground, it becomes the object that our generation of humans know now: fossilised carbon, coal.
Time passes and humans mine the coal transforming it into a resource and a source of energy. What did it power? The factories and forges of the industrial revolution perhaps. Then the time of mining and furnaces ends, foreclosing one possible future and opening others.
Finally, it is the present, and our coal is on a table in a university. Anamaria sits before it at the Before Ruins conference. Led by Fiona Schrading’s facilitation, she imagines it as an object disconnected from human or subterranean “use”. This coal is dislocated from either of the futures it may once have had. But the vignette has an open ending, and in structurally resisting closure, the narrative asks, what happens now?
Travelling across these vast temporal scales, as no human can, the writing situates readers beyond the ordinary human experience of time. In doing so, it opens a space for imagining futures through a hybrid human–coal temporality.
What comes next for this fragment of coal?
There are many possible answers, many possible stories, and many possible futures, with the above vignette exploring only one possibility. In this version, the coal encounters what we might call an un-future (“This is not a future”): a condition in which an anticipated trajectory has been foreclosed without a new one yet taking shape. By imagining those futures (or lack of futures), we are not simply telling stories about what might happen, we are also creating opportunities to reflect on the futures we value and those we don’t, the choices we make in the present, and the worlds we hope to bring into being.
Notes
[i] In conservation science: Stephanie R Januchowski-Hartley, Natalie Sopinka, Bethann G Merkle, Christina Lux, Anna Zivian, Patrick Goff, Samantha Oester. “Poetry as a Creative Practice to Enhance Engagement and Learning in Conservation Science.” BioScience 68.11 (2018): 905–911, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biy105. In public health research: Owen Bullock, McFarlane J. “Poetry And Well-Being: A Pilot Programme To Evaluate The Impact Of Creative Writing For Patients In Short-Term And Long-Term Rehabilitation.” Medical Humanities 51 (2025): 140-146, https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2024-013016.
[ii] See Ash Watson. “Researching Futures with Speculative Fiction.” Journal of Creative Research Methods 1.1. (2025): 55-71, https://doi.org/10.1332/30502969Y2025D000000005.
[iii] Check out “Shell Scenarios” to understand how Shell uses creative writing as a business tool to think about energy and the future: https://www.shell.com/news-and-insights/scenarios.html.
Leave a Reply