‘A shared commitment … not to be miserable’: a Posthuman Artists’ Laboratory to explore writing collaborative climate fiction

ABSTRACT

This paper continues ongoing research, by the three authors, into possible ways to write climate fiction, a subgenre of literature that focuses on depictions of climate change. Curious as to whether climate fiction has become fixed as a negative genre, most frequently mired in dystopian landscapes, we posited that writing fiction collaboratively might be one method to help us imagine a future in which we have agency and are not simply helpless victims of the inevitable. To explore this hypothesis, we ran a two-day Posthuman Artists’ Laboratory with six other professional writers, all based on Kaurna and Permangk country in Tartanya/Adelaide, Australia. In detailing the setup and findings of this experiment, the paper looks towards artistic practice that does not focus on the capitalist individual and details the thrill of collaboration. We propose that there is a strong (posthuman) argument for writers to abandon the desire to be identified as one singular being with a ‘unique’ voice and reimagine their creative subjectivities as a sticky web of connections.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• climate fiction
• posthumanism
• hope
• collaboration
• Artists’ Laboratory

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which this work was undertaken. We pay respect to Elders past and present.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘Artists’ Laboratory’ was first encountered by one of the authors at ‘The Posthuman & New Materialism Summer School’, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, 2021. Dr Rachel Hennessy would like to acknowledge the influence of this summer school on her thinking and the ideas generated by the many artists who provided short labs at the end of each day, particularly Petra Lilja (‘Mineral Mattering(s)’) and Shelley Simpson (‘Storied Matter Speaks the Future’).

2 Etherpad is an open-source online editor which allows users to create a ‘pad.text’ that can be added to/edited in real time. This was the tool we used in the Artists’ Laboratory. Unlike many other collaboration tools, it does not require sign-ins; participants were sent a link and were able to immediately contribute to the document without identifying themselves.

3 Ed Finn and Ruth Wylie detail writing projects which bring together science fiction writers and scientists, in an active attempt to ‘create technically grounded, optimistic tales of the near future’. Our issue with such a project is the underlying (humanist) assumption that technology is the way to ‘save’ us and the problematics of aligning creativity with institutions of deep capitalism, such as the World Bank and NASA. As Julie Doyle writes ‘central is the need to go beyond technocratic solutions circumscribed by the symbolic imaginaries of late-capitalist societies … to encourage interconnected and socially transformative understandings’ (2020, 2479).

4 This research project was approved by the Flinders University Human Research Ethics Committee (Project ID 5256).

5 We note that the participants in this laboratory all held PhDs and were ‘literary’ writers rather than commercial genre writers; there was a marked tentativeness to their engagement with more commercial genres, which were foregrounded in the book cover exercise, as the covers were suggestive of YA romance, sci fi, fantasy, and other kinds of commercial genre fictions. We are curious, in future iterations of the laboratory, to test the exercises on a diversity of writers, including diversity of genre, background, race, ability, ethnicity, education, age, sexual and gender identity, professional experience and more. It is possible that with a cohort of writers already working in commercial genre fiction that this particular exercise would be received with more enthusiasm and yield different results.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Flinders University Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts Research Grant Scheme.

Notes on contributors

Rachel Hennessy

Dr Rachel Hennessy is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne's School of Culture and Communication. She is the award-winning author of four novels: The Quakers (2008), The Heaven I Swallowed (2013), River Stone (2019), and Mountain Arrow (2020). She also publishes short fiction and creative nonfiction. Rachel's research interests include creative writing pedagogy, posthumanism, and climate fiction.

Alex Cothren

Dr Alex Cothren holds a PhD in creative writing from Flinders University. He is a winner of the Carmel Bird, William van Dyke, and Peter Carey Awards for short fiction, and his writings have been published in Meanjin, Island, Overland, The Griffith Review, and Australian Book Review. His short story manuscript, Let's Talk Trojan Bee, was shortlisted for the 2021 Speculate Prize.

Amy Matthews

Dr Amy Matthews is an award-winning author who publishes under the names Amy T Matthews, Amy Barry, and Tess LeSue. She is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Flinders University and deputy director of the Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts. Amy has two books out in 2023: Amy T Matthews' Someone Else's Bucket List and Amy Barry's Marrying Off Morgan McBride. Amy's research interests are in genre fiction: popular romance, historical fiction, and fiction of climate change.