Writing in the More-than-human World

These last two weeks, I have been taking part in a workshop on nature writing with Granta. With about ten other writers located around the world, I am learning about the genre, reading essays by Kathleen Jamie, Jason Allen-Paisant, and others, and experimenting with how I engage with nature in my own writing.

In a string of some of the hottest, sunniest weather we have had during my time here in Norway, I have been lucky enough to get to do much of this work outside on the patio. I look out at the water of the fjord and the green of the Håheia across the water. The sun chases me around the patio as the day wears on. It’s a good beginning to the summer.

A few weeks ago, we got the surprise chance to go out in the school’s rowboat. Last week, for the end-of-the-school-year party, we got another opportunity.

The truth is, this writing workshop is keeping me busy, and so I am trying to be efficient with my time, not belabor the exercises or the note taking too much but still take from them the learning that I desire. We’re here in Norway for about two more weeks, and then the plan is to head south, by ferry and train this time rather than flying, to reach Italy in the first part of July.

One idea I came across this week in the course was a new term: “more-than-human.” In the way it’s being used in the course, it takes the place of “nonhuman” to refer to plants, animals, bacteria, or even nonliving things like stones or water. The idea with “more-than-human” is that it pushes back against hierarchies in thought and language that center human beings, promoting instead a more ecological consciousness that emphasizes humans’ interlinkedness with other beings and natural phenomena.

Purple columbines, so blowsy!

I believe that the language we use both reflects and influences the way we think, and so I feel interested in new terms that might push our thinking to more ecologically-conscious places. At the same time, “more-than-human” feels odd to me, because to call a birch tree more-than-human seems to imply that it is human, as well as something more. Adrian J Ivakhiv’s much more detailed analysis of the term suggests that the “more” might really be a value judgment–a suggestion that the birch tree is better than a human, which Ivakhiv points out has been used by eco-humanists to provoke skeptical audiences (I imagine such a skeptic, first perhaps laughing, then angry, and finally thinking more deeply about inter-species relationships. That’s the goal, I suppose).

One evening last week, we found this frighteningly long leopard slug crawling over the patio. It was probably eight inches long. Luckily it was headed away from our kale.

For myself, I tried to rationalize the “more” in “more-than-human” as “beyond.” When we say that something is “beyond” the window, for example, it doesn’t include what lies on my side of the glass. Or, like my husband suggested when we were batting these ideas around during breakfast, like the “extra” in “extraterrestrial.”

To be honest, I wouldn’t have thought so much about the term if I hadn’t, just last night, encountered it in my bedtime reading. I’m reading Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, a Christmas gift a couple of years ago from my parents. It seemed the perfect book to be reading alongside this nature writing course. In the following quotation, Sheldrake is writing about hunting the infamously pungent white truffle:

We are ill-equipped to participate in the chemical lives of fungi, but ripe truffles speak a language so piercing that simple that even we can understand it. In doing so, these fungi include us for a moment within their chemical ecology. How should we think about the torrents of interaction that occur between organisms underground? How should we understand these spheres of more-than-human communication? Perhaps running after a dog hot on the trail of a truffle and burying my face in the soil was as close as I could get to the chemical tug and promise that fungi use to conduct so many aspects of their lives.

As an end-of-the-school-year project, my colleagues and I reorganized over 4500 books in the English department book room. We found all kinds of strange, miscellaneous items in that room, including this little gnome, which I brought home. Somehow he ended up in our herb tray.

In Ivakhiv’s blog post, linked above, I perceived just the lip of ideas I haven’t encountered before. I believe the way we think and talk about nature is an essential part of centering climate action, protecting and restoring biodiversity, and other environmental movements in human consciousness. I’m curious where this might go, and how we can write towards these changes.

For now, the sun has chased me off the patio entirely. I’m sitting in the grass, finishing up this post. It looks like rain is due back here next week, so I’ll enjoy this weather while I can.

Best wishes, and happy writing,
Jimmy

Red clover in evening light.