Episode 93 – Interview with author and illustrator Sarah Firth

Welcome to Season 13 of Let’s Talk SciComm. We’re so thrilled to be kicking off another season as we head towards our 100th episode!

To get the season off to a fabulous start, this week we’re thrilled to talk with the incredible Sarah Firth (she/ her).  Sarah is based on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne, Australia. She is an artist, writer, cartoonist, graphic recorder and animator, originally trained as a classical sculptor. She has received a Talking Difference Fellowship from the Immigration Museum, was a finalist in the Incinerator Gallery Award For Social Change and her comics were part of Eisner Award-winning and Ignatz nominated comic anthologies. Her debut graphic novel Eventually Everything Connects was shortlisted for The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2024, selected as The Age’s Non-Fiction Pick of The Week, ALIA’s Notable Graphic Novels of 2023 and one of The Best Graphic Novels Ever by Refinery29.

You can buy Sarah’s brilliant book Eventually Everything Connects in Australia/ NZ here: http://booktopia.kh4ffx.net/daGy9Q
And in US/UK/Europe here: https://www.graphicmundi.org/books/978-1-63779-068-7.html

You can follow Sarah and learn more about her work here:

Transcript

Michael (00:00:20)
Hello and welcome back to a brand new season of Let’s Talk SciComm. We hope you’ve been enjoying our short five minute Listen To This If episodes, which we will be continuing over the holiday period.
But until then, we have another great season of our regular episodes for you with some fantastic interviews that we can’t wait to share.
We talk to a visual science communication superstar. We talk to someone who was trained by Al Gore to be a climate change communicator. And this season also contains our 100th episode.
So we have exciting plans for episode 99, which I’m dubbing our party episode. We’re going to have the full science communication teaching team.
And for episode 100, Jen and I will be interviewing each other. So you may think you know us, but wait until you listen to episode 100. You may learn a thing or two about us that you didn’t know before.
So keep those headphones on, go for a walk and enjoy the first episode of this season, our chat with visual science communication superstar, Sarah Firth.

Jen (00:01:43)
Hello, everybody. I am absolutely thrilled to welcome you to another episode of Let’s Talk SciComm, one of my very very favorite places to hang out.
And that’s mostly because I get to hang out with my friend and colleague, Michael. Good morning, Michael.

Michael (00:01:58)
Good morning, Jen. How are you doing this morning?

Jen (00:02:01)
I am really really well because we have an awesome guest lined up for today.
Are you excited, as excited as always?

Michael (00:02:08)
I’m very excited. We have a very interesting guest that I cannot wait to chat with.

Jen (00:02:14)
Yeah, so let me tell you a little bit about her before we bring her into the conversation.
So we are talking today with Sarah Firth, who also lives here in Melbourne where we live, which means she’s also enjoying the glorious sunny day we have today.
And Sarah is a multi-award winning artist and cartoonist and writer and speaker. She’s an internationally renowned graphical recorder.
And for anyone who’s thinking, Ooh, I’m not exactly sure what quite that is. You’re going to find all about what a graphical recorder is shortly.
And one of the things I find really interesting about Sarah is that she works across a huge variety of industries and sectors.
So someone who’s got a lot of experience in grappling with different sorts of information and how to communicate different sorts of information.
And she’s described herself as someone who draws for both work and pleasure, which I think sounds pretty awesome. I would love to be someone who could draw well enough to do that.
But Sarah, in terms of going back, we always talk a bit about our [guest’s] background. So Sarah’s got a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours from the Australian National University focused on sculpting. And then also spent time at the Victorian College of the Arts here in Melbourne, studying animation and video graphics and stop motion and claymation and special effects, all of those cool things.
But she’s also been running her own business for nearly 15 years, offering some of these skills to people out there in the world doing interesting things.
So she’s offering graphic recording, facilitation, animation, event design, all sorts of stuff. So using her storytelling and visual skills to help her clients get their work out into the world.
And when I went through the list of her clients, it’s really long and impressive, Michael. I’m not going to list them all. But some of them are Google, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Red Cross, Zoos Victoria, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Oxfam.
She’s had her comics and illustrations published by a heap of different people, including Allen & Unwin and Penguin Australia and Black Inc. and Picador Australia. She’s received tons of awards. I’m not going to list them all. The podcast will be over before we start.
But she was named one of Australia’s top 25 artists by Art and Australia Magazine. And one of the things we really want to talk about today is her new book.
So she was very recently shortlisted for Creative Australia’s Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for her debut, drum roll… graphic novel, which is called “Eventually Everything Connects.” And I am super pumped to learn more about the book.
So thank you, Sarah. We know you’ve just got home from a big trip promoting your book. We know you’re exhausted and we’re really thrilled you’ve made time to talk with us today.

Sarah (00:05:04)
Thank you so much for having me. That was such a lovely introduction.
I sometimes forget what I do and it’s like, Oh, I’ve done all those things, like who is that person?
So that’s very reassuring. Thank you very much for that. It’s very nice. Really great to be here. Thank you.

Michael (00:05:18)
So great to have you. You know, in all of the things that you do, all of those creative activities, things are just, I have no idea about how they work. So I’m really excited to chat about some of them.

Jen (00:05:29)
Michael and I kind of want to be artists.
We love the way artists work. But I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn Michael, in lumping you and I together as not being hugely talented in that realm, so…

Michael (00:05:40)
Some of my drawings have been mistaken for the drawings of a 5 year old. So…

Sarah (00:05:47)
Well, I would say that I actually love the drawings of anyone under 10 because there’s a, a lack of self consciousness. So you might still have the child spirit in your drawings and that’s a compliment.

Michael (00:05:58)
Ah, yeah, OK.
Maybe that’s what it is. Yeah. Yep.

Jen (00:06:03)
Don’t you love anyone who can turn something into a compliment, Michael?
I think we’re going to have a great time talking with you, Sarah.

So Sarah, I do want to start by asking you… So obviously you’ve got you know, extensive experience, training. You know, you are a proper qualified artist.
But I get the impression you also have a love of science. Like I’ve looked at quite a lot of your work. Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with science and I guess how technical knowledge and art have come together in your life and in your work?

Sarah (00:06:35)
Yeah, sure. Look, I guess I’m just always been a very curious person. Like even to the point where when I was little, I would get little Petri dishes from my mom’s university and run off into the bushes and collect poop.
And then I would be there with my little Petri dishes. You know, putting the poop in water, pulling it apart to see what animal it was and what they’d eaten and what berries were in there, what insects. And I remember being made fun of as a kid for doing that. It was like, “Oh, what’s wrong with you playing with poop?”
But I was always just so curious about what are the ants doing? What are the birds doing? What are they eating? Just wanted to get to know people, but also the animals, plants and environments around me.
And that’s just I guess of like, foundation stone of me as a person. I’m just curious to know what’s going on around me and also how it works and the different kind of lives of different organisms and creatures.
And even today, like that’s just such a wellspring of joy for me. Like, I can’t wait for the bird count that’s coming up in two days. I do that every year, the Australian bird count.
You know, where you sit down and you just count the different birds that you see and you do your citizen science. Half of the books that I read are science communication ’cause I’m just curious about eels and lobsters and trees and you know, you name it.
You know, ’cause it’s just like… To me, it’s really exciting. It’s like entering into other worlds. Like some people might read or watch science fiction to enter into other worlds.
But I’m like, you could just read about lobsters or eels and it’s like, you know, fascinating in the same way to me.

Michael (00:08:11)
Yeah, I mean, lobsters are so bizarre, aren’t they?
Like when you, if you think about it. It’s kind of like a spider. It lives in the water.
What does it do? I don’t know.

Sarah (00:08:19)
Well, I actually…
Exactly! Well, this is the thing. I actually have a part in my book that is about busting lobster myths because I grew up with the incorrect idea that I got from Phoebe on “Friends” that lobsters mate for life and they hold claws and walk around with their partner. And it is fake news, guys. Sorry.
They have very complex reproductive behaviors that I will… It’s so complex, we don’t have time to go into it. Fascinating, bizarre. There’s a lot of wafting of urine. Anyway, you should read my book because it’s pretty great what they actually do.

Michael (00:08:57)
So you know, I think it’s, it sounds like you’re interested in everything.

Sarah (00:09:02)
Yes.

Michael (00:09:02)
You know, you’re a really really curious person. And also you have this ability to understand all of those things that you’re curious about, but understand it and help other people understand it through art.
And you know, Jen mentioned a lot of the creative activities that you do at the start, which I’m really curious about.
You know, especially graphic recording. I’ve never seen it in real life and I really would love to see it. And I’ve had to look at your website and seen some of the fantastic work that you’ve done there.
It’s really incredible, the level of detail that you go into. And just knowing that this is something that’s done under, you know, presumably a high pressure situation. I mean, you’re absorbing a lot of information and it’s like flowing through you onto the page.
I would just love you to tell us a little bit more about that process. How does it work and how do you learn to do it in the first place?

Sarah (00:09:54)
Yeah, well, for me, I began doing graphic recording as a kid. The main reason being that I was, you know, an undiagnosed neurodivergent as a child back in the ’80s and I struggled to sit still in class and also to read.
And the one thing that I always loved was drawing. And my mum figured out that if I could draw in class that I would sit still and listen. And it was a bit of a backwards and forwards with my teacher because they thought I was doodling and not paying attention.
So my mum made me this little note saying, “Please let Sarah draw in class, it helps her listen.” And from that practice of when I was younger, essentially drawing in class, I was able to pay attention, start to create these kinds of visual maps that use words of what was said with images and colour that are represented spatially rather than just dot points or a list or whatever.
And that for me, again, has been a kind of process that I just naturally came into to be able to get through school. And I ended up having friends at school go, “Oh, these are so cool, look at your cool drawings,” and that gave me some extra self-confidence. And so I continued with it and did it for years just for myself, for note-taking.
But then I found out through my husband at the time that this skill was actually really useful. He was working in IT and at the time I was driving trucks and I had my art practice, had no idea about this as a thing.
And he just said, “Hey, come on in and do this with us in our IT session, where we need to explain to a client how an IT system works.” And I’m there going, “I know nothing about this, but okay.”
And it was a you know, it was just a, how do you call it? Like baptism by fire, just went in there, felt embarrassed, did a terrible job, what I thought was a terrible job.
People were talking so fast, I just made lists of words with arrows and it was, I felt bad. But people came up and said, “Oh, this is really helpful actually.” And I’d done the bare minimum, other than just, you know, just structuring the information in a way that was a little bit clearer.
And from there, I just started doing more and more work. I originally started off working with consultancies, I learnt everything on the job.
And basically graphic recording is live visual notes. So it’s done live as people talk. They’re all watching you. It’s a little bit of a nightmare for someone who’s dyslexic, but I kind of just tell people and they enjoy helping me. I say, “Please pick up on any spelling mistakes, let me know and I’ll fix it.”
And so that’s 15 years ago now. So I originally started out in corporate land and moved more into social, environment, legal, creative. I work across all sectors.
Like I’m a very intellectually promiscuous person. But yeah, graphic recording is quite intense. It’s a little bit like being a translator or an Auslan interpreter where you have to listen really really attentively.
So from a brain perspective, it’s very taxing. I can get very tired. Usually by the end of the day, I’m non-verbal. And if someone tries to talk to me, I just can’t make words ’cause my brain’s just been, you know, going…
And it can also be used in a, what’s called a graphic medicine context where for example, you might be at the Royal Children’s Hospital with a doctor communicating to a younger patient about their cancer treatment.
And it can be very scary and clinical.
But if you’re able to draw pictures and make it, I don’t know what the correct language is now, patient. I don’t know if they use patient or consumer. The language is a bit funny, but person-centered. It can make understanding of treatment and process much less daunting and scary and also kind of age appropriate as well. So there’s so many applications that are really beneficial.

Michael (00:13:48)
Wow. I mean, that seems really powerful, right? Because that is something that kids are familiar with and it’s I suppose about meeting the kids where they are. And you know, explaining through drawing sounds so powerful.
It’s a great idea to… Or I suppose everyone to try and make their notes a little bit more visually appealing. I find like, it helps me remember stuff in the moment. But then I come back to my notes and I’m like, who even wrote this? They’re absolutely useless. So yeah, I think…

Sarah (00:14:16)
That’s a really great point. Yeah, and I’m just going to do a little pitch here for, I actually have a free online course that is like the top four tips for how to improve your visual note-taking.
And even if you’re not a drawer, even just like writing the words clearly, using colors to cluster things, having some little images, even just stick figures in there will massively increase your kind of memory retention. You can create, learn how to create mnemonics. So you have memory anchors in there where you’ll go, Oh yeah, I remember that. And it takes you right back to the situation.
So I’ve got that online that anyone can access. You don’t even have to sign up. You can just watch it for free.

Michael (00:14:57)
Wow.

Jen (00:14:57)
I can vouch for that. I spent some time on there this morning, Sarah, having a look. And I’m absolutely going to make the time to do the whole course because it looks amazing.
And you know, if there’s someone listening who’s like, Oh my gosh, that sounds amazing, but I don’t have you know, the money or the time or the capacity or whatever to come and work with Sarah.
Like, can someone really learn to do this on their own? I mean, I know that not everyone’s going to ever have the artistic skills that you have. But like, can someone watch your course and invest some time in practicing and really do you think develop those skills?

Sarah (00:15:29)
The… Like with the beginners course that I have for free, it gives you some very clear distinctions, that even if you are not a drawer and don’t feel particularly confident doing this stuff, it will still improve your visual communication to a level that it is really helpful.
So for example, my husband who works in IT, he uses graphic recording all the time. All he does is he writes really clearly in black ink and he just includes really simple icons like a cloud for when he’s talking about things in the cloud. Or if he’s talking about team collaboration, he’ll draw five different faces. Really really simple stuff. It makes a huge difference.
And also clustering things using particular colors, particular spatial relationships, that kind of stuff. Really really simple. Makes a huge difference to just like lots of bullet points written in handwriting you can barely read and you don’t know what connects to what, all this kind of stuff.
And also just skills of like when you’re presenting your work as PowerPoint slides. You know, learning things like less is more, having some kind of novel visual that relates to what you’re saying helps a lot.
So there’s some definite kind of basic visual communication skills that anyone can absolutely learn. And they really do help with communicating the work that you’re doing.

Michael (00:16:51)
Yeah. I suppose you know, when it comes to visuals as a form of communicating. You know, it seems like a very powerful way of conveying complex ideas, but there’s lots of different ways that you can do it.
Do you have a favorite? Like, do you think there’s one that maybe is the best at communicating complex ideas? You’ve got everything from graphic recording to infographics to you know, even comic books.
There’s lots of ways that you can do visual communication. But do you have a favorite or one that you think is the best?

Sarah (00:17:23)
Oh gosh, that’s a great question. I guess as someone who’s interested in system… This is just my personal preference. As someone who’s very interested in systems, I always love really well done interactive modeling. I find that so helpful and interesting.
And I actually think that moving away from kind of drawn pictures, I’m thinking of some really great science journalism that’s been done recently that has these kind of interactive scrolling interviews that use videos, images, graphs, texts.
They have a whole mix of things there that help to, particularly with a complex system, illustrate the kind of different facets and ways of understanding it.
You know, because you have kind of emotive… Like for example, if you’re looking at a piece of journalism on bushfires or something like that, you have the emotive, like photos of animals, photos of sites before and after. But then you also have graphs showing CO2 outputs, showing impact to animals, that kind of, the data.
So you have the kind of qualitative and quantitative addressed. And I love it when that kind of whole thing is done. And that can be done in all kinds of ways, with videos, with infographics, with…
I’ve seen really great things with graphic recordings and infographics that have kind of interactive 3D elements where you can like scan a QR code and it will sort of have a holographic image that kind of further goes into the research or the ideas that are in there.
So they become like a, almost like a adventure or something. And it’s very immersive. Like I love that kind of multimedia stuff.

Jen (00:19:05)
Yeah, those, they’re so powerful. Sometimes I’m shocked at how those sorts of new forms of journalism, I guess are a topic that maybe I’m not even that interested in. But because of the way the information is presented, it’s pretty, pretty captivating.
You’ve just given us some indication of the huge breadth of topics that you are interested in or that you engage with in your work. And that’s why I just love the title of your book. And I do want to talk about your book now.
I mean, what better title could you have? “Eventually Everything Connects: Eight Essays on Uncertainty”. I just think that’s the best name ever as someone who’s very interested in connections in the world. And as I said to you before we started recording, I’ve just ordered my copy because it just looks so good.
So if anyone hasn’t heard about Eventually Everything Connects, this is a description of the book. And as you can see, anyone who is watching, we have a beautiful picture on our screens now of the gorgeous book.
So this is the description. “A delicious mix of daily life, science, philosophy, pop culture, daydreams and irreverent humour, Eventually Everything Connects is a work of graphic non-fiction that is comforting, confronting and mind-expanding in equal measure.” How good does that sound?
And one of the reviews I read described the book this way, which I think… And there’s so many good reviews out there Sarah, you must be delighted, but this is beautiful. “Underpinned by a sense of playful humor, philosophical engagement and appreciative wonder, this book is a hymn to the delightful entanglements which join us to the natural world and to each other.”
I mean oh my gosh, I just feel like this is a book about every single thing on the planet that I care about. Tell us about it. I know this is years and years of work and thinking and imagining and drawing. I just love to hear about yeah, this book, Sarah.

Sarah (00:21:03)
Yeah, so this is eight years in the making, which for a graphic novel is pretty quick. Like a lot of graphic novels that are written and drawn by one person can take around 10 years.

Michael (00:21:12)
Wow.

Sarah (00:21:14)
So I feel happy that it only took eight. So yeah, this is very much… I guess it starts with lived experience. Like every chapter in the book starts with lived experience and then kind of expands through into how things work, why are things this way. It’s all proto-synthesis. It’s not you know, arriving at answers. It’s more you know, this is the best of our understanding. This is the best of my understanding as a flawed and fallible human where I am situated.
And it’s very much driven by this sense of concern about what’s happening in the world, how complex and difficult things are, but also the desire to be what I would call collapse aware, but also to hold on to delight and care and community and love and the idea of custodianship and repair. And that those are things that I personally think are important to live at this time and not go mad.

Jen (00:22:17)
That’s quite the aim, right? To not go mad.

Sarah (00:22:21)
You know, ’cause things are pretty dire. And so it’s just like, what do we do in the face of what we know? What do we do in the face of things not changing? What can we change? How can we work together? What are the actual barriers and challenges there?
And it plays a lot with different factors of memoir, science communication, philosophy. A lot of natural science in there, some physics. Actually, one of the great compliments I got was from a quantum physics fellow who looked at the section that I had written and I wanted to check that it wasn’t completely wrong.
And he said, “Ah, look, you’ve got it right. But the way you’ve drawn it makes no sense ’cause at that level, things don’t actually coalesce in any way.”
And he’s like, “We’re not entirely sure how to model it in a way that makes sense to space-time beings.” But you know, that was a great compliment to me that you know, I hadn’t completely fudged that.
But yeah, the book is eight essays on uncertainty. What that means is it’s not knowing and the desire to try and know. And to me, essays are about attempts. Like the word essay comes from the original word “to attempt”.
So these are attempts at making knowledge. And I feel like that’s what science is. It’s always these attempts to prove and disprove what we do and don’t know.
And it’s also very much about this idea of how you ask a question shapes the answer. And that’s something I’m really interested in is kind of epistemology and the science of, the philosophy of science and how what we know is very much tethered to our metrics and how we measure and how we understand.
And that that is a thing that can be consistently kind of improved upon or shifted or changed. And to me, that’s very exciting and kind of a message of hope, I guess. I need a better word for hope ’cause I feel like hope is a bit immaterial.
But yeah, this book is very much trying to confront and comfort, as it says, because I feel like that’s kind of the boat that we’re all in at the moment.
And you know, I want to talk about the hard stuff, but with a level of kind of generosity and compassion and grace for the fact that we are very imperfect and most people are trying their best.
Yeah, and it’s eight essays, but they all connect together as kind of a meta narrative, I guess you could say. And I also, from a science communication perspective, I was hoping to kind of show how the different sciences do actually interconnect.
‘Cause often the different sciences and ways of thinking and measuring can be in a certain box. And I wanted to expand out of those boxes into the kind of uncomfortable synthesis spots, including synthesizing with you know, lived experience and having a body, you know, and all these kinds of messy, messy things. Yeah.

Jen (00:25:15)
All the imperfect things.

Sarah (00:25:18)
Yeah. Yep, Yep, Yep.

Michael (00:25:19)
I mean, it sounds absolutely wonderful. And eight years of work, just incredible to reflect on that for a moment.
You know, all of the topics that you have in there and all of the different approaches, I guess, to understanding those topics.
It seems like this is a book that everyone would be interested in, but I would imagine that perhaps different people get different things out of the book.
I’m curious to hear, what have other people said to you about the book and what they’ve gotten out of it?

Sarah (00:25:49)
Yeah, so it’s been quite interesting having the book come out in Australia and then also coming out in the UK and Europe and then in the US that I was just on tour for recently.
So in Australia, the main kind of feedback that I’ve had from people is that it was a tonic, that it was an emotional balm and a tonic for them.
For you know, a lot of people have climate anxiety. You know, anxiety about housing, like all of the things that are happening. And it can be really hard to think about and talk about that stuff without falling into [an] abyss of doom.
And particularly in Australia, I’ve had beautiful messages from people saying that you know, they were feeling like what’s the point in living? And that reading this book gave them a little bit of, bit of extra in the tank and you know, made them feel like okay, I’m going to put on my boots and you know, keep going and connect and care because what else is there?
Whereas in the UK and Europe, the interest has been much more around the philosophy side of the book and people going like… A lot of people roll their eyes at philosophy as a thing and it can be a bit navel gazey. But people said that the philosophy aspect of this book was really yummy and enjoyable and it was great to finally see kind of embodied practical philosophy in a relevant and I guess female or feminist way.
And then in the US where I was just on tour, so many people were like “This is science communication. This is great. I love the way you’ve got all of these science stories in here. It’s so relevant. It’s so exciting. It’s so fun.”
You know, so people’s experience of the book depending on where they are can be really different. And it has quite a few different tones in the book.
So you know, different people enjoy different parts. So it’s been really exciting to see how varied the response has been.

Michael (00:27:51)
Yeah, it sounds incredible, the depth of variety that you have in there. And I feel like we could continue talking for forever and ever with you, Sarah.
But we are moving to that point in the podcast where we would like to shift gears a little bit. And we would like to ask you some quick questions just to round out our chat today. So quick questions, quick answers.

Michael (00:28:27)
Now, the first question that I would love to ask is if you could pick an alternative career to the one that you’re currently doing, what would it be?

Sarah (00:28:36)
I would love to just magically be Merlin Sheldrake doing mushroom adventures around the world. That would be so fun, I would love that.
Look, if I hadn’t been an artist, I might’ve become some form of biologist, I think.

Michael (00:28:51)
Yeah. Wow.

Sarah (00:28:52)
Yeah, yeah.

Jen (00:28:54)
Well, it sounds like you kind of are a biologist if you know as much about lobsters as you do. So I’m going to give you the credit for that one.
And next question is, if you could choose to have one superpower, what superpower would you choose?

Sarah (00:29:09)
Oh gosh… Magically fixing dying ecosystems?

Jen (00:29:15)
Oh my gosh, imagine if we could do that.

Michael (00:29:16)
Yeah.

Sarah (00:29:18)
Magically refreezing glaciers.

Michael (00:29:21)
Yeah.

Jen (00:29:21)
Just to be picturing having a wand and just you know kind of yep, just fix that over there…
Yeah, wow.

Sarah (00:29:27)
That would be, that would be my ideal superpower.

Michael (00:29:30)
Yeah. That’s a great one. Haven’t had that one before.
OK, if you could go back in time and give yourself a message at the age of 21, what would you say to yourself?

Sarah (00:29:41)
Stop drinking so much.

Michael (00:29:47)
I feel like we have had that, a version of that before, so you’re not alone.

Jen (00:29:56)
Seems like things have turned out pretty well in spite of that.
So maybe because of that, maybe that’s where some of your creativity stemmed from.

Sarah (00:30:01)
Yeah. Maybe.

Michael (00:30:05)
Maybe. Social interaction. It’s very good, you know, important for you so…

Jen (00:30:12)
Next question, Sarah.
What do you think makes a good leader?

Sarah (00:30:17)
Oh, the ability to listen and empower other people to lead.

Jen (00:30:24)
Beautifully said.

Michael (00:30:25)
Yeah, great answer. And final question then, Sarah.
What would be your very top tip for communicating effectively about science?

Sarah (00:30:35)
Oh, okay. I would say that I don’t have one top tip, but I have a few.
One is when you’re communicating science, thinking about what is relatable or compelling about, basically the why. Like why are you communicating? Why is it important? Why would people be interested?
The other thing is to create a kind of mirror, so that… So for example, if you’re talking about ants, what are things that ants do that are similar to what humans do? So that can create a sense of kind of relationship and empathy. But then also to explore the kind of dissonance of how are they different? Because that can be really fascinating and compelling as well.
So to me with science communication, there’s the why. Why is it important? Why is it compelling? Why does it matter? And how does it fit into bigger things? What’s similar and then also what’s different? Those kind of three things can be really great as sort of hooks to get people interested.

Michael (00:31:31)
Yeah. And I’m just thinking now about lobsters and how are they similar to us? I can think about how they’re different. But I know what I’m gonna be Googling later.

Sarah (00:31:42)
Yeah, but definitely everyone Googled lobsters ’cause it’s so interesting.

Jen (00:31:50)
The other thing that everyone should Google is you, Sarah. So obviously we’ll put a whole lot of links into our show notes. But just go straight to sarahthefirth.com. Firth, F-I-R-T-H.
And not only is there the free course to give some of us who desperately need some guidance about how to record information more visually, but there’s also incredible examples of your work. And of course, links that people can learn more about your fantastic book.
And I’m really looking forward to receiving my copy because I think right now all of us need that tonic, that balm.
I’m very grateful that you’ve put so many years of your beautiful creativity and thoughtfulness into the book. It sounds absolutely marvelous. And hot off your book tour, jetlagged and exhausted.
Thank you so much for making time to chat with us today. It’s just been absolutely delightful.

Sarah (00:32:38)
No worries.

Sarah (00:32:40)
Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Michael (00:32:42)
Yeah. Thanks so much, Sarah. It’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you.

Sarah (00:32:46)
Thank you.

Jen (00:33:04)
Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Let’s Talk SciComm from the University of Melbourne Science Communication Teaching Team. I’m Associate Professor Jen Martin and my brilliant cohost is Dr Michael Wheeler.

Michael (00:33:18)
And if you’ve enjoyed listening to this episode, we’d love you to share it with your friends and family. We’d love you to share your favourite episode online. And you can find us at LetsTalkSciComm on X, formerly known as Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Jen (00:33:32)
And this season, we are asking for your help to spread the word so that more people find out about our podcast.
So if you enjoy listening, we would love you to tell a friend, but we’d also love you to think about taking a couple of minutes to write us a review.
Whatever platform you listen on, there will be a place for you to leave a review. And we’re going to keep track and award our favourite reviewees some prizes.
We’re thinking about some merch. And we’d also love to reward our favourite review with a free science communication workshop that we will run for you in person or online, depending on whereabouts you are.

Michael (00:34:07)
Ooh, prizes. And if… They sound great. And if you’d like to get in touch to suggest a guest or a future topic, we’d love to hear from you. Please email us at lets.talk.scicomm@gmail.com. And as always, a huge thank you to our production team Stephanie Wong and Steven Tang.