Rooting our creative practices in our ecological entanglements.
How can our writing, reading, and creative practices connect us to the many beings who share our world? What if the ways we write could bring us closer to the more-than-human? What would our writing be if we let it entangle with nature all the way down through its roots?
Writing Toward Nature
Writing Toward Nature is a newsletter about using the craft of writing to cultivate a deeper relationship with the more-than-human world. I’m interested in ways that we can bring nature, with all its nonhuman agency and awareness and beingness, further into the very elemental building blocks of our writing both on the page and in our practice. I want tree roots breaking up the foundations of our forms, mosses infiltrating the cracks of our tidy sentence sidewalks, fungal networks intercepting and intersecting our plot points.
The name of this project comes from a key aim of my writing practice. I often feel as if I’m reaching toward a multi species communion that is never quite holdable but is always worth that impossible attempt. So much comes out of the reaching toward. And I’ve seen many other writers, in our time of ecological devastation, working toward similar goals in beautifully unique ways. I want to explore that with you.
As you’re getting acquainted with Writing Toward Nature, here are some good places to start:
Craft in Emergence(y): My mini newsletter manifesto
Three Years of Writing Toward Nature: A newsletter history and what’s coming next
Slow Growth and the Novel: My first book comes out tomorrow
Writing with the Moon: Letting your creative work move to lunar rhythms
