Craft in Emergence(y)

My Mini Newsletter Manifesto

Emergence is a mystery, a coming into being, a shifting into shape. It can take on many forms. It moves through many disciplines. 

Amidst our ecological crisis, we see the emergence and re-emergence of modes of thinking and modes of being that embrace our entanglements with the nonhuman. We see science speaking to us of the mutualism and symbiotic networks that govern our ecosystems. We see long ignored and suppressed Traditional Ecological Knowledge influencing popular conceptions of nature, interconnectivity, and our human responsibilities. We see artists and writers drawing inspiration from the more-than-human and reaching for deeper engagement.

Art is adaptable. It evolves to become what is needed.

What emerges from emergency? What do we craft in catastrophe?

As a writer during ecological emergency, I feel that intense urgency toward adaptation, toward shapeshifting. 

My writing has always been connected to the more-than-human. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who writes with nature— a person who finds my best lines under trees, who hears stories in the calls of crows, who feels themes in the soft greens of moss— but, as we hurtle ourselves into the ever increasing disasters of species extinction and ecosystem collapse and climate catastrophe, writing with nature just hasn’t felt like enough. 

Sometimes I feel, in every word I write, in every narrative path I follow, the way the tools of our writing craft have evolved through eras and systems of destruction and severed connection. Gregory Normington writes about this in regards to the novel’s rise through our human-centric industrial age. Matthew Salesses writes about craft as rooted in the history of Western empire. Ursula K. Le Guin writes about our enculturated expectations of narrative structure as exclusionary forms of patriarchy.

When the tools and expectations of our writing craft have solidified through forces of destruction and oppression, how do we use them to do the opposite? How do we loosen them, shift them, change their shape, so they can be forces of inclusive generation? How can we grow them to be what we need to engage honestly and fully with the world we inhabit?

What if we drew our writing craft, not from the linear plot arcs of conquering “heroes” but from the expansive and multidirectional branchings of trees? What if we wrote, not with the language of dominion, but with the spontaneously coordinating murmurs of mushrooms? The rivers know stories we don’t. What if we listened? What if we harmonized our tellings to reverberate alongside the nonhuman, to reach toward our interconnectedness, not simply in subject, but also at the bone level of craft?

I’m calling this newsletter Writing Toward Nature because it chronicles an act of reaching. It exists in an unsettled space, a liminal space of movement from one thing to another. I don’t have the answers to these questions. But I do have some thoughts. And I’ve read many remarkable writers who have many wonderful thoughts that I hope to gather and share with you here. And, I suspect, you have thoughts as well. Perhaps, in sharing these thoughts, in twining them together, we can reach toward something necessary. Perhaps we can craft something magical.

Some Thoughts on Terms

As a writer, I think a lot about the words I use. But I also know words are imperfect. They have different associations and connotations for different people. And, more abstractly, words attempt to capture things that move beyond them. Words are very human things. 

I’ll be using two words quite a bit in this newsletter, so I want to clarify how I mean them.

Nature

I use nature alongside terms like nonhuman and more-than-human. I see nature as including the human. When I use the term nature, I don’t mean something that is out there and separate from our human world. I mean something that we are a part of, that is a part of us.  We are inextricably interconnected with the nonhuman beings who exist around and within us. I love nature as a term that can hold that.

I also love the precision of increasingly popular terms like nonhuman and more-than-human. I’ll tend to use nonhuman when I mean quite literally species that are not human and more-than-human or beyond human when I’m reaching for something slightly more ambiguous, mystical, and harder to hold fully in language.

Craft

I think of craft as an attempt at naming the magic we make when we write, and how we make it. Like every act of naming, it’s imperfect and imprecise and limited and limiting. Anyone who’s ever talked to me at length about writing can tell you that I don’t believe in writing rules. I believe in writing experiments. 

Craft, for me, is flexible. It’s intuitive. It’s very very hard to describe. Like every magic, you have to look at it slantwise. It doesn’t like to be pinned down. The moment you think you have caught it is the moment it slips through your fingers. The moment you think you have named is the moment it changes its shape.

The Spell

(otherwise known as a writing exercise)

In each letter, I plan to include an exercise/practice, or spell. Here is the first:

A Spell for Connecting

Choose a nonhuman being to do this exercise with. This could be a creature as large as a forest or as small as a pebble. You do not need to be outside for this exercise. You do not need to be in the countryside or wilderness (though you certainly can be). You can do this exercise with a cat or a potted plant just as easily as with a river or a redwood.

Sit with the being you’ve chosen for awhile. Try to be with them with all your senses. Listen to the breathing of your cat. Feel the contours of your pebble. Smell the river water. Just let yourself observe, notice, absorb. Feel the way your body changes with observing.  Experience what happens to your mind. Take notes if you like.

When you feel ready, now or later, try writing from the place you found. Perhaps your cat’s purrs guide the rhythm of a poem. Maybe the chirruping of birds suggest a dialogue. Maybe your stone tells you a secret. 

This is a very open ended experiment. It’s guided by you, your nonhuman partner, and the experience that comes from being in observation. It’s something you might try many times. It’s something you might make a practice of if you find some use in it.

Roots

(also known as further reading, sources, and what has inspired this letter)

The Dark Mountain Project - I love their series on Rewilding the Novel

Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses - a must read on rethinking craft

“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” by Ursula K. Le Guin - an absolutely formative essay for the way I think about craft, and one that is endlessly relevant

Thanks for reading the first edition of Writing Toward Nature. Expect another letter with next month’s full moon.

Write well,

~ Miranda

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