Green encounters: critically creative inter/actions with-and-in ecologies of crisis

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to ongoing dialogues in creative writing research relating to three areas of inquiry: writing as a way of knowing; collaboration and communities of practice; and writing in response to environmental crises. We connect these areas by articulating insights from a collaborative arts-based research project on the theme of green encounters. We associate green with what is often problematically referred to as nature – plants, trees, animals, fungus, landforms, waterways, weather, and more, as well as rawness, naïveté, the unknown, rottenness, death, and the unworldly. Through methods of poetic inquiry, we produced ethical, creative, and critical texts demonstrating a diversity of responses to environmental crises made available through creative inquiry. This article offers a distinct articulation of the pressures and tensions inherent to humans’ relationships with the more-than-human, while interrogating our own precarity as early career researchers as linked to the contingencies of living things. With reference to Félix Guattari’s ecosophical theory, we recognise academia as a part of the mental ecology wherein need currently exists to nurture diversity and evolve praxes for sustainability. Towards this end, we highlight the value of creative arts-based collaborations for generating knowledge about ways we can face multiform ecological and other crises.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative research
• creative-critical research
• environmental writing
• writing as research
• higher degree by research
• ecology

Section 1: introduction

The opposite of green is striking. A clock. Deadlines. Stacking. Forever. Unmet. Unmeetable. Saying No to demands on time and energy constantly demands time and energy. The opposite of green is red. A light. Stop. Don’t go. Grey smoke flooding from once-green hills. Homes destroyed again before even rebuilt. The opposite of green is a warning. Flashing. Ignored. Stop Stop Stop. Don’t go. The opposite of green is ignored. Just like green has long been ignored. (by Amelia Walker, sample text for Green Workshops writing exercise)

Contemporary creative writing research reflects increasing interest in writing that responds to the Anthropocene – a complex of contemporary human-driven ecological crises including climate change, pollution, extinction, and more (White and Whitlock 2020, 2). For instance, Jessica White signals the rise of ‘ecobiography’, a sub-genre of life writing that destabilises the historical anthropocentrism associated with writing about one’s own life for deeper explorations of the ‘other-than-human’ lives (evident in ecosystems, plant life, and animal life) that support and sustain it (2020, 14). Indigo Perry meanwhile advocates the ways ‘slow writing’ and performance art can ‘speak the Anthropocene’ (2019, 251). Dan Disney similarly raises poetry’s capacities for ‘naming’ – for coming, through writing, towards ‘a newer way of seeing, arising through coming to terms with newer ways of saying and stating’ (2022, 54). Common to these examples (Perry 2019; White 2020; Disney 2022) is the idea that writing can facilitate generation and sharing of new knowledges to inform modes of response to contemporary problems, including but exceeding environmental problems. Through this emphasis, contemporary creative writing research on eco-writing connects with a longstanding set of scholarly conversations in the broader creative writing research field regarding writing’s relationships with knowing and/or methodological potentialities for generating fresh insights and understandings (see Wise 2004; Rein 2011; Kroll and Harper 2013; Magee 2016; Southward 2016; Sempert et al. 2017; Rendle-Short 2021).

This article extends the existing connections between contemporary eco-writing and writing-as-knowing towards two additional sites of interest – the value of writing groups and collaboration (Lunberry 2010; Aitchison and Guerin 2014; Mountz et al. 2015; Beasy et al. 2020; Webster and Shankar 2023), particularly ‘communities-of-practice’ (Nelson and Cole 2012), and Elizabeth Adams St Pierre’s (2017, 15) challenge to researchers to ‘think with’ the concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. For us, responding to St Pierre involves turning to Felix Guattari’s work on ‘ecosophy’ (ecological philosophy), which outlines three interdependent ‘mental’, ‘social’, and ‘environmental’ ecologies under threat by expanding industrial, technical, and cultural powers ([1989] 2008, 32–37). Informed by Christopher Hanley’s Deleuzo-Guattarian practices of ‘writing as assemblage’, we have used ‘writing as a form of thinking’ (Hanley 2019, 414) in a co-creative writing workshop context wherein we produced an anthology of ‘green’ writings (ed. Dunkin 2022). Assemblage-based group writing processes are in line with contemporary eco-writing scholarship that asserts ‘the human is not – and never has been – a unified, isolated subject’ (White 2020, 15), signalling the need to confront the shared materiality of human and more-than-human selves, including questions of how this interdependence dovetails with a logic of care, responsibility, and action (see Gifford 2002; MacKenzie 2016; Perry 2019).

By describing our co-creative writing processes and learning, this article contributes to knowledge about ways in which writers, particularly creative arts practitioners in higher education, produce ethical, creative, and critical responses to the contingencies of living things in the face of environmental crises such as climate change, pollution, overpopulation, and the depletion of natural resources (Matthews 2020, 39). As Gillian Whitlock and Jessica White contest, ‘the scale of ecological devastation and collapse’ we currently face demands ‘new modes of storytelling’ that ‘convey our interconnection with, and responsibility to, things other than humans’ (2020, 4). We demonstrate how the anthology can figure as one such mode that emphasises the creative possibilities emergent from experimentation, collaboration, and variation, in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the assemblage as a constellation of fragments that can exist singularly or be re/formed of and with other elements in various combinations.

Discussion unfolds across three main sections. The first describes our context and methods, which includes exploration of how our project took up and evolved practices of poetic inquiry (Prendergast, Leggo, and Sameshima 2009; Galvin and Prendergast 2016) and collaborative writing-based inquiry as described in scholarly literatures (e.g. Lunberry 2010; Cannell et al. 2020; Di Niro et al. 2020; Gou et al. 2021; Walker et al. 2023). The second and third provide samples of writing and analysis. Putting the life cycles of nature into contact with the cyclical nature of human life, the second and third sections are themed around two key crises that exist in tension and in tandem across a selection of twelve creative works from the Green anthology: writing the environment and the writing environment. Following these, we offer some concluding thoughts that position our findings in the broader scholarly conversations regarding eco-writing, writing-as-knowing, and collaboration in academic spaces. We also signal thresholds and new directions for ongoing inquiry.

Section 2: writing to know through anthology/assemblage in a community of practice

As already noted, this article arises from a group project in which, informed by Elizabeth Adams St Pierre (2017) and Christopher Hanley (2019), we used ‘writing as a form of thinking’ (Hanley 2019, 414) in workshops through which we co-created an anthology of ‘green’ writings (ed. Dunkin 2022). This section describes, first, the background and context of our writing collective, and then, the methods we deployed, including how our project took up and evolved practices of poetic inquiry and collaborative writing-based inquiry as described in scholarly literatures.

We write as fourteen members of an academic reading and writing group called the Critically Creative Reading and Writing Collective (CCRWC). Based within a university context and formed primarily of early career researchers, particularly doctoral candidates, the CCRWC provides a space for collaborative exploration of writing and arts-based practices for research and knowledge generation, for instance, those of ‘creative criticism’ (Hilevaara and Orley 2018), poetic inquiry (Prendergast, Leggo, and Sameshima 2009; Galvin and Prendergast 2016) and creative writing research broadly (Kroll and Harper 2013), especially work on writing-as-knowing, as noted in this article’s previous section (Wise 2004; Rein 2011; Kroll and Harper 2013; Magee 2016; Southward 2016; Sempert et al. 2017; Rendle-Short 2021). The CCRWC deploys ‘co-authoring as mutual aid’ (Gou et al. 2021, 220) and can be considered a ‘community-of-practice’ in the sense Anitra Nelson and Catherine Cole evoke: our group ‘consciously creates and maintains a communal environment’ wherein we discuss ‘practices and products’ through activities including but exceeding ‘workshops and meetings … involving reading and feedback’ (2012, 401). Nelson and Cole position communities-of-practice at the nexus of ‘creative habitats’ and ‘the specific creative domain, which humans co-create within their creative habitat’ (396), evoking Graeme Harper’s (2010) theorisation of creative habitats as ‘physical/metaphysical locations adopted or created by human beings for our creative action’ and ‘the creative domain’ as ‘as way of approaching, interactively, the fact that human beings are creative creatures, creators of a range of actions and artefacts’ (3).

Harper posits the ‘creative domain’ as ‘mostly to be made rather than found’ (2010, 3). However, ‘as with our habitats it is frequently a combination of some elements of the natural and elements of the humanly refined’ reflecting dynamic interactions between ‘creative action’, ‘individual creative habitats’ and ‘our wider sense of existence’ (3–4). As members of the CCRWC, each of us brings experiences and insights reflecting our different-yet-related individual creative habitats. We come together in the space of the shared creative habitat that is our university; together, we operate in dynamic interaction with and through the co-created domain of creative writing practice and research. Both the university and creative writing in the broad sense represent, for us, aspects of a ‘mental ecology’ that interacts in complex ways with the ‘social’ and ‘environmental’ ecologies (Guattari [1989] 2008, 32–37); for instance, via the ways in which knowledges generated and disseminated through universities and research as well as poetry, narratives, and performance can inform responses to the Anthropocene among other problems of contemporary life.

The context and theoretical understandings articulated above steered the focus and methods of the ‘green encounters’ project upon which this article reports. Having recognised a shared interest in and concern for issues of the Anthropocene, we generated and analysed creative writing data in the form of our differing responses to green-themed creative writing prompts. Our data was generated and collated through ‘green’ workshops held in 2021 which were compiled into Green: A Blue Feet Anthology (ed. Dunkin 2022) the following year. Educator and poet Dr Amelia Walker alongside group mentor and publisher Dr Alex Dunkin co-facilitated these sessions. The first prompt ‘re-calling green oceans’ invited participants to consider when, how and what colours and shades the ocean can be, or alternatively, use this prompt with any ‘eco’ place like forests. While exercises were designed for writing, participants could interpret them in other creative mediums like visual art. In the activity ‘green objects in our lives’ we used a worksheet to associate objects with times, places, people, events, senses, and metaphors, before freewriting on its meaning in our life. Throughout the creative responses we were reminded that ‘green’ did not necessarily need to be a colour; it could symbolise the environment, emotions, senses or be symbolic of something that uses the colour green, or any other interpretation. Walker’s response to the prompt ‘opposite of green’ produced the work we’ve included lines from in our opening to this article.

Our use of poetry and writing prompts to explore the topic of green was informed by Paul Magee’s argument that new knowledges arise through creative writing composition processes wherein ‘We do not know exactly what we are going to say until we have said it’ (2016, 434). Joseph M Rein advocates similar benefits of inquiry through writing in his account of why he encourages university students to ‘write what you don’t know’ (2011, 96, original italics). That poetic processes can generate new insights relevant to research is indeed a foundational principle of ‘poetic inquiry’ (Prendergast, Leggo, and Sameshima 2009; Galvin and Prendergast 2016), a set of research methodologies developed in the social sciences but now used across multiple spheres including healthcare, education, and the arts. Processes of poetic inquiry are diverse, but an approach particularly relevant to our project is that of gathering poems from research participants to analyse for themes (similar to the gathering and analysis of interview data) (Galvin and Prendergast 2016, xiii). In our project, everybody was both a researcher and a participant: we analysed our own poems as data.

Poetic inquiry provided useful tools for our project because in addition to the accounts of writing as a knowledge-making process provided by Magee (2016), Rein (2011) and others (Wise 2004; Southward 2016; Sempert et al. 2017), it offered methods for analysing the data and drawing the knowledges out. Narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly 2004) offers similar possibilities in the form of coding techniques for analysing stories and other narratives as research data, and this did also inform our processes to some degree, but poetic inquiry seemed most suitable for us because of its emphasis on assemblage, for instance through the creation of polyvocal poems from acts of bricolage or cut-up poetry (Maarhuis and Sameshima 2016; Quinn-Hall 2016). Assemblage pushes beyond categorisation by pursuing rhizomatic connections, which aligned with our broader paradigms (Guattari [1989] 2008; St Pierre 2017; Hanley 2019). For us, assemblage as a set of methods for analysing creative writing data meant sharing and comparing our writings as we developed the anthology in order to recognise similarities as well as differences in the diverse ways we all responded to the same prompts. These processes allowed us to recognise many ‘truths’ (Byrne-Armstrong quoted in Hunter 2010, 44) revealed in interpreting the data (Wiggins and Monobe 2017) and to co-construct new narratives as a collective while respecting our voices as individuals (Hunter 2010, 45, 50). Analysing the data was intertwined with the writing up process as a ‘method of discovery and analysis’ (Richardson quoted in Hunter 2010, 48) and our dialogic reflections offered further insights on the themes of the data (Gou et al. 2021; Walker et al. 2023). Some pieces were also in conversation with each other, as they were produced in response to others’ work in the review process. For instance, in an editing workshop with Dunkin in early 2022, participants provided interpretations, editorial and creative suggestions on submissions optioned for inclusion in the anthology. We interacted with each other’s work through drafting creative responses inspired by submissions we reviewed.

There are precedents for the analysis of poetic data through assemblage in the field of creative writing research (see Cannell et al. 2020; Di Niro et al. 2020). While our work builds on and learns from these and other past instances of collaborative creative writing research (e.g. Lunberry 2010; Gou et al. 2021; Walker et al. 2023), there are some crucial points of difference via which we evolve established practices and methodologies. Our deployment of anthology co-creation processes, as already discussed, was a longer-term, more intricately engaged set of collaborative processes than those involved in simply writing and sharing work for a single article. The complexities of the anthology’s ‘internal dynamic’ (Hanley 2019, 414), positioned our separate creative writings in proximity and, therefore, in conversation – a conversation uniquely invested in ecological approaches to apprehending the world. In other words, the Green anthology offers a distinct articulation of the pressures and tensions inherent to humans’ relationships with the more-than-human that may not be possible had these works appeared in isolation rather than in composition and our analysis within this article reflects those complexities. Furthermore, our use of Guattari’s ‘three ecologies’ ([1989] 2008) provides a different theoretical angle from previous projects steeped in paradigms including those of ‘Freudian dream work’ (Lunberry 2010, 411), rhythmanalysis (Walker et al. 2023) and ludic or games-based approaches (Gou et al. 2021).

Guattari’s account of how the ‘mental ecology’ interacts with ‘social’ and ‘environmental’ ecologies provides, we pose, a valuable means for appreciating how writing-as-knowing within university contexts can connect with and inform issues of life in the Anthropocene. We furthermore pose Guattari’s theoretical framework’s value for speculating on the precarities of arts practitioners who not only creatively engage with contemporary environmental crises, but who are installed themselves in crises associated with ‘becoming an academic’ (McAlpine and Åkerlind 2010, 1). In regards to the latter, we consider the writing ecologies of creative arts practitioners, many of us current doctoral candidates, participating in an academic reading group amidst balancing aspects of our lives and academia (Vacek et al. 2021). While our group was not exclusive to doctoral candidates, we share several benefits with doctoral writing groups such as social connection, supporting wellbeing, sharing disciplinary knowledge and collaborative working (Aitchison and Guerin 2014; Verlie et al. 2017; Beasy et al. 2020; Vacek et al. 2021). Thus, following Timothy Morton’s (2010, 28) understanding of the ‘enmeshed’ relationship between humans and the world, our anthology illustrates several dynamics and connections between the human and more-than-human, between the natural world and the world of work and labour.

Section 3: writing the environment

In this section, we analyse a selection of creative works which pay particular attention to the questions and themes underlying ecocritical discourse that resonate with force in the Green anthology. How can collaborative methods help us navigate and test the boundaries of the Self? How can creative writing establish dialogues between environmental, material, and personal crises? How can human and more-than-human connections help us interrogate ways of knowing and being in the world? A recognition of the role arts-based practice can play in responding to and engaging with nature dovetails with Guattari’s ([1989] 2008) three ecologies in specific and important ways. Here, we posit interconnections between mental, social, and environmental ecologies as a mode of thinking through the responsibilities, pleasures, and pressures inherent in engaging with more-than-human lives. We begin with excerpts from four works which use domestic scenes and human relationships as a backdrop for exploring complex environmental thresholds and limits.

Excerpt from ‘Of Simpler Times’ by Eugene Tabios

Short, subtle taps. There’s a sort of rhythm as they drop. I

wonder if that’s why I’ve always loved the rain. The rain is me

smelling the blooming moist grass. The rain is me running

through the greenery towards the house. The rain is me warm-

ing myself on the fireplace as Ma brings over hot chocolate.

The rain is … maybe I wasn’t really thinking about the rain.

    ‘Black coffee, please.’

    The barista nods and turns his back to the counter. The

café, in all its gold-like shimmer, caught my eye among the

spectres of white and red dancing around me as I ran for

shelter. Maybe the huge ‘Grand Opening’ sign also helped.

    I didn’t mind getting wet, but my tool of the trade needs

care – and this laptop is the one thing that keeps me close to

home. Rachel and I did bring a few more things to the city

while moving, but for the most part, I am as new and as lost

as this shop is within this grey metropolis. I sit down around

the corner table, right behind the brick wall adjacent to the

door. I take a sip from my coffee. (39)

Excerpt from ‘If Only Fences Kept Us Apart’ by Belinda Lees

My house also has a lovely gumtree which attracts native

birds: wattle birds, magpies, and lorikeets. On the downside,

a rail line runs behind the house which exacerbates my ten-

dency towards insomnia. Tony, always the pragmatist, said

that before long I wouldn’t even notice the train and I’d be

sleeping like a baby.

     ‘Which baby?’ I demanded to know. Daisy, my sister’s

infant, is renowned neighbourhood-wide for her nocturnal

screaming sessions. Don’t even get me started on the environ-

mental impact of babies! Snapshots of Daisy make Munch’s

‘The Scream’ looks like an indolent yawn.

     I often wonder, isn’t everyone experiencing sleeplessness

with the state of the world these days? Maybe Daisy is preco-

cious for her age and is already attuned to the zeitgeist. I try

to self-soothe by reminding myself that I’m doing my best.

I’m contributing my bit on my tiny square of Earth. Separate

your recycling items into cardboard, plastics, glass, and soft

plastics, Celia, and all will be well with the world. (109–110)

Tabios’ ‘Of Simpler Times’ and Lees’ ‘If Only Fences Kept Us Apart’ demonstrate the diversity of approaches to ‘green’ as a creative writing prompt by imagining the quotidian contexts and scenes through which humans always-already encounter the environment. Tabios establishes a sense of interiority through the intimate setting of a local café and the evolution of its customers, staff, and the busy metropolis that ebbs and flows outside its door. In this vignette, titled ‘Ablution’, a shifting register inserts the organic into the everyday, as the narrator recollects the primal joy of running through rain before seeking shelter from inclement weather to avoid damaging their laptop. Lees’ approach is similarly rooted in the domestic sphere, probing the limits of environmental awareness and responsibility through a tense neighbourly feud. Here, the preservation of the natural world is viewed in and through mundane suburbia – an apt backdrop for ruminating on the impact of human habits (e.g. home ownership and recycling) on the environment and the lengths to which these anxieties may be pushed when not shared by others. In their attention to everyday minutia – the acrid smell of bitter, black coffee (Tabios), the ritual of recycling day (Lees) – both writers consider how notions of ‘green’ can intersect and/or intervene with elements and experiences of modern human life, such as the ‘daily grind’ driven by potent capitalist consumerism.

Excerpt from ‘Emerald or Teal Green?’ by Chloe Cannell

    Ash and Barrow are placing bets on how many times Jo

curses and apologises for it in her speech. Makala stares up

at the bouquet. She counts the flowers and names the col-

ours, breathing deeply. Five large white flowers. Big breath

in. Three small white flowers. Big breath out. Four different

types of green leaves. Big breath in and out.

    The back of her chair is to the bridal table, so she must

turn around to prevent alerting Ash of her worry at his fam-

ily’s special occasion. She turns her chair around and pulls

at the thread of her dress, then slaps her own hand away. It

already looks so cheap, her mother’s hypercritical voice creeps

into her ear.

    The speeches begin but the sounds of people talking and

attendees clapping are distant. She focuses on what shade

of green her dress is. Is it teal? Or maybe emerald? Teal or

emerald? Emerald or teal green? My future bridesmaid party

could wear multiple shades of dark green. My mother would

hate that. Would I invite her? Would she show up? (35–36)

Excerpt from ‘Gold Dust’ by Anneliese Abela

    A well-trekked path maps our daily uphill climb, the pair

of us dragging our feet over uneven ground to the tree at the

top which we’ve claimed as our own, a stolen golden bauble

glinting on the highest pine needle branch. Our leather

school shoes were covered in dust—burs and nettles stuck

to navy woollen jumpers.

    You teach me to dance on your smooth concrete drive-

way. Your legs shuffle back and forth to electronic music

and your fluoro-yellow hoodie is pulled up over your sandy

blond head. Your freshly pierced earlobe, still swollen and

pink, wearing one lime green stud while I wear the other.

A pack of coloured earrings purchased after school, twelve

pairs split up so we each took six nickel studs home. Early

morning text messages to agree on the next colour. My lime

green stud still hides at the bottom of my jewellery box, the

nickel busted and bent out of shape. (166–167)

Similarly, Cannell’s ‘Emerald or Teal Green?’ and Abela’s ‘Gold Dust’ function at the interstices of human relationships, domestic lives, and the environment, interweaving allusions to and metaphors of the natural world to amplify scenes of great personal tension, loss, and nostalgia. Cannell presents the life cycle of relationships through the protagonist Makala, who is forced to confront recent contact from her estranged mother and news of a sudden pregnancy at a family wedding. In this climactic excerpt, the tension between old wounds and future healing is productively evoked through the shades of Makala’s dress (teal, emerald, dark green) that symbolise the rich tapestry of complex human relationships that can weave new prospects and simultaneously tether us to the past. Where the notion of ‘green’ may offer up themes of renewal and restoration in Cannell’s work, for Abela, it is tied to nostalgia and deep, personal pain. Abela works strongly with sensory details, particularly smell and sound, to tangibly illustrate the poignant heartache of lost childhood and friendships. In both writings, ‘green’ is expressed in and through a world built on industrial overproduction that limits our exposure to nature but that also produces an abundance of green things (i.e. jewellery, clothes) that provoke emotion and empathy. The intricacies of objects is a significant throughline connecting Tabios, Lees, Cannell, and Abela, where the more-than-human filters through the distinctly human domains of the hospitality industry, suburban streets, family dysfunction, and youth consumption.

Common to these works is the evocation of ‘green’ in subtle, yet generative, ways that enrich the narrative from behind and demonstrate how creative storytelling can ‘create and promote new ways of thinking about ecosystems and our place within them’ (White 2020, 14). By installing the intimate spheres of the individual into the environment, these writers draw connections with Guattari’s mental and social ecologies, both of which are pitched as ‘imperative to confront capitalism’s effects in the domain of […] everyday life’ ([1989] 2008, 50). The collective knowing that underpins the mental ecology, and the cultural-political precarity that present the problems of the social, are evident in the diversity of approaches to ‘green’ highlighted here, which take domestic, material, neighbourly, and ethical concerns as key themes. But the established ways in which creative writing can acknowledge and redress the environmental ecology also operate beyond the context of human relations. The following three excerpts explore the Self in relation to the o/Other, the foreign, and the strange and work towards understanding the sensorial nature of the ocean/s and its more-than-human inhabitants.

Excerpt from ‘What if I Called You Wally?’ by Simon-Peter Telford

    ‘I’m sorry, friend,’ he said, his voice croaking. ‘I don’t think

I’ll be able to help you … I can’t save you.’ He slumped down

onto the soft sand next to the stranded giant and heard it

make a low groaning sound. Vincent stared out across the

rolling waves and found that for the first time in a very long

time he didn’t know what to do. I suppose all I can do is keep

the old boy company. No one should have to die alone.

    The two of them sat next to each other in silence for

quite some time before Vin suddenly turned back to the

whale’s miserable eye and spouted, ‘You got a name?’ He

wasn’t quite sure how to continue, it was a very strange

feeling. It was an odd thing to be sitting next to a creature

that seemed larger than life and yet was dying. He knew that

whales had some sort of intelligence as far as creatures went,

and he knew that they were also quite social, but Vin had no

way to communicate with the poor animal. (177–178)

Excerpt from ‘Green Bay’ by Evan Jarrett

    He was on it. He was really on it. It had him and it was

moving him and there was no stopping it. He was a part of

it. He was on his feet. The wave started tunnelling from the

northeast and he was riding it southwest to west shoreward.

He did not miss a beat. Like a batsman on a purple patch or

a bass player locked in with a drummer, there was no miss-

ing this. He was not going to fall off—no way—impossible.

Dean screamed. He screamed gibberish. There was no one

who could hear him, and he wouldn’t have given two shits

if there was. Dean lived for this. The wave tunnelled over

him. He soared through. The sea spray filled his lungs and

his soul – delicious nurturing salt. The sun had moved a

long way to the west. Dean had been out a lot longer than

he realised. A lot longer than seemed possible. He didn’t

care though, not at all. (67)

‘(the ocean is the colour)’ by Lily Roberts

the ocean is the colour of God singing

God inside the water with the white sea foam and

crystals of light

spearfishing the blurry deep

she is married to electricity

suffused with Love

that’s Love with a capital L

reaching like the root systems of mangroves

spread out, search, seek or sumptuous smirk

shirk the dark carpet underwater, dead black silt

that rises to become the sandcastle moats of children

they squeal alongside raucous claps of thunder

that roll in with the feral tide

pebbles dash the shoreline like a grazed knee scabs over

curlicues of water reach out

asking for one secret at a time

to collect, to take back

to the deep green hive

where the true sound of the ocean is silence

a suffocating shroud spread softly out

nine thousand fathoms down

deep sea mist

sirens calling, crawling downwards

to the surface

swimming upwards in waves

to alight upon the ocean floor

light refracting through endless green

mirrors in the making and the sea forever

a window

beneath them

the octopus keeps itself safe, its three hearts

beating in tandem inside the quiet

amphitheatre dark (100–101)

Collectively, these works deploy ‘green’ to enact a deep relationship to place that engages with the sensory and spiritual as well as the unworldly and unknown. The vastness of the ocean/s underpins the creative responses of these writers and thematically coheres the diverse genres (literary fiction, magic/realism) and forms (short stories, poetry) in which they think with and through o/Otherness. Telford’s ‘What if I Called You Wally?’ renders the transience of human and more-than-human lives in the Anthropocene into an intimate conversation between man and whale both on the verge of death. Telford foregrounds the ethical and empathetic connections needed to confront extinction; a quality shared by Jarrett’s ‘Green Bay’ in its imagining of a mysterious place that holds and protects the secrets of the sea. Jarrett’s experimentation with temporality, evidenced through frequent flashbacks and fragments, emphasises the smallness of human lives against the spectre of external forces of nature. Roberts’ ‘(the ocean is the colour)’ continues these lines of flight, evoking the rich ecologies and lifeforms that coalesce underwater in ways that seek to reflect and preserve the fragility, strength and wonder of unknown depths. This work exemplifies the capacities of ecopoetry to stake out connections between nature and artistic practices (MacKenzie 2016, 184), and thus has some relevance to discussions around ethical practices of sustainability and consumption.

Unlike excerpts which weave more-than-human encounters in and through close attention to human lives, these works probe the spectral limits of the natural world and demonstrate the diversity of responses to environmental crises available to creative arts practitioners. Steven Langsford and Amelia Walker (2020, 1) argue that a mental ecology of diverse mind styles – such as those housed in the Green anthology – ‘supports environmental sustainability and collective survival because it enables the raising and consideration of a broader range of approaches to problems including but exceeding environmental crises’. By writing back to the disregard for more-than-human life through rich, diverse, and experimental works, this anthology supports environmental sustainability and regeneration in ways that espouse the benefits of Guattari’s interdependent ecologies for positioning collective arts-based practices as praxis. In the following section, we consider ways the Green anthology works as a developmental practice for its writers in the context of higher education, and signals ways in which writing within/beyond the academy can support collaborative methods of environmental inquiry.

Section 4: the writing environment

In this section we consider how the academic environment symbolises the three ecologies in the creative works of creative arts practitioners. Many members of our community of creative arts-based researchers are at the beginning of our research-writing careers or ‘green’. Our various positions within the academy as an Honours graduate and doctoral candidates, from the fields of linguistics, creative writing, cultural studies and education, influence and permeate our writings for the Green anthology. Here we read our work on green as reflecting our status within the academy. Our writings elucidate the newness of becoming academics and how the act of writing green articulates development, sustenance and (re)evolutions within the academic environment. We begin with four works speaking to our eagerness to learn and grow.

‘Life Cycle’ by Dante DeBono

beneath the soil,

the seed is hidden, buried,

biding time to grow

sprouting olive trees,

to passersby, look like weeds,

praying to survive

if you are patient

your tree will age and bear fruit

to share with others (19)

DeBono’s ‘Life Cycle’ illuminates the desire for time to grow as a researcher and nurture our writing abilities. The higher degree offers opportunities for further learning, but the external pressures for writing and research outputs alongside thesis completion neglects the time needed for us to develop. Growth is not always linear and forward; sometimes our roots spread vertically and help others up. DeBono promotes the benefits of developing ourselves as writers and researchers and fostering connections within the academy. She promises of what’s to come if we ‘survive’ and we’re ‘patient’ through our higher degrees. We may ‘bear fruit to share with others’ revealing the reciprocity among our community of postgraduates and early career researchers. Many doctoral candidates receive professional opportunities, such as teaching and research assistant contracts and/or engagement with journals and conferences, through the mentorship of supervisors (Kroll and Finlayson 2012). If doctoral candidates persist as researchers, we may pass on ‘fruit’ or chances to grow to those coming up after us. But in reality, patience and survival are not always keys to a career moving forward given the few and highly competitive career opportunities available to completing candidates (Rodgers 2019).

Excerpt from ‘Three Poems in Black Lines’ by Lyndal Hordacre Kobayashi

Poem 1.

ruminations

ruminating on green,

a creative linguist

watches images,

hurries away with words

into the banded malachite world they rush,

espying clouds circling the tips of majestic trees,

branches beckoning to distant realms

and prehistoric valleys,

condensing time

‘come back,’ she pants

and reaches

for the door of the sky parlour,

painted with emerald streaks

and layered with tiny reminiscent effervescing crystals

enticed by words’ unexplainable wisdom,

the images return

but are stealthily disunited from their friends,

subjected

to the room beyond

the sky parlour’s door

struck by the Gordian knot,

the linguist paints a picture,

words typed to explain

an unworded world … (134–135)

Excerpt from ‘Spark an Interest’ by Dante DeBono

‘Is it just about grass?’ she asks.

‘Yes and no.’

He laughs at her scrunched-up nose, confused and

displeased by his inadequate response. How could I answer

the child?

‘It’s a book of old poems,’ he offers.

‘Like Dr Suess?’

‘A bit, yes. Though there are many more words and far

fewer pictures.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Well, the words are the important bit. They’re the part

that makes the stories.’

‘The bit you read.’

‘Yes, the bit you read. But you also think about the words

while you’re doing it, feel things because of them. Your

imagination plays with them, can take them further than

what’s on the page. And they can mean something different

to whoever is reading them, even though they always say

the same thing.’

‘How do they do that?’ she asks him.

He leans in, conspiratorially. ‘It’s the magic of words.’ (54–55)

Hordacre Kobayashi’s ‘Three Poems in Black Lines’ and DeBono’s ‘Spark an Interest’ continue to interpret green through newness and yearning for knowledge. In DeBono’s work we see through the enthusiastic and hopeful lens of a child gaining knowledge and questioning the world. DeBono conveys green in the literal, through the colour of the book and the grass the child and grandpa read about, and whimsically, in the ‘green’ naïveté of a child open to the wonder of words. On the other hand, Hordacre Kobayashi conveys how words without images struggle to make meaning. Both excerpts show the beginning of knowledge journeys. The child and creative linguist are curious in different ways; the child is in awe of words while the linguist dwells on them before rushing to catch them. Hordacre Kobayashi’s poem demonstrates how her research is interwoven with her creative works. From the comfort of grandpa’s study to the fantastical world of words, our real and imagined interactions beyond the academy inform our curiosity and support the practice of writing.

Excerpt from ‘Fresh Inspiration’ by Aden Burg

The man had taught him everything

about Shogi: the rules, the movement, the strategies, the

formation, and the counters. So, every time they had played,

the boy had always played in response to the man. When the

man played defensively, the boy used an offensive strategy.

Conversely, such as with this game, when the man played

offensively, the boy played defensively. Because of this, the

opponent could always predict the boy’s moves. The man

could always see the limitations, counters, and openings of

the boy’s strategies and formations. The boy realised after

all that he was merely matching his opponent’s moves with

the corresponding opposite dynamic. As a result, the man

would take his time, he would carefully wait and observe

the boy. The boy always knew that his defeat was close at

hand in these moments, that was why he had convinced

himself of his limited options. (58–59)

The relationship between the characters known as ‘man’ and ‘boy’ playing Shogi mirrors a form of supervisor and candidate relationship. The process of becoming an academic in the doctoral journey involves managing relationships with supervisors (see Orellana et al. 2016; Currie 2019). Exploring interpersonal dynamics in academia through metaphors of games has been explored by co-authors of this paper (see Gou et al. 2021). Burg writes ‘he had always played in response to the man’ realising the need for initiative and creativity to compete, but more importantly to feel engaged and encouraged to keep going. The man encouraged the boy to learn through doing, much like supervisors can guide candidates to control their own learning (Chamberlin quoted in Currie 2019, 162). However, while the relationship Burg depicts has many ideals of respect and camaraderie, it is also problematic to suggest this hierarchical, competitive relationship be replicated in a supervisor-candidate relationship. The line ‘the man would take his time, he would carefully wait and observe the boy’ suggests the man has time to wait, much like many supervisors in stable full time positions or employed in long term, continuing contracts. The novice player’s rush to make moves suggest he does not have the same time to carefully think and develop his strategy, reflecting the status of many doctoral candidates often managing multiple roles to prepare themselves for the workforce (Kroll and Finlayson 2012).

Excerpt from ‘Landline/Lifeline’ by Heather Briony McGinn

Just in case it happens again. ‘It’ could be anything. Any flavour

of threat or danger or poverty that could be guarded against

by careful planning. Forearmed in the face of a multitude

of imagined forewarnings. Even though refrigerators are a

thing now, we can be without one and be just fine.

     At a moment’s notice, we can return to a way of being

that sustained us before. Before war. After war. Recovering,

with fabric, food, and family. Rejuvenating, seed by seed,

stitch by stitch, scone by scone. Ever ready. We are batteries,

fully charged and dormant. When the crisis erupts, we will

work. Industry is all we have ever known. Knowing is a new

language. Doing is our way. Busy-ness. Business is a foreign

land. Work is home. Home is work. Work isn’t a punch card.

It is everything, it is in our bones. It is bread and babies and

bathtubs and bitumen plucked from broken skin on knee-

caps, iodine stings, Band-Aids from the Band-Aid tin. (128–129)

McGinn’s prose depicts a content life of routines decades ago where preparedness and doing together could see a family through crises. Here, McGinn creatively engages with ways to sustain through any ‘threat or danger’ that could apply to contemporary higher education and environmental crises. While crises may be ongoing or close-by, the rhythm of the piece is comfortable, rather than an anxious precarity often associated with surviving. Labour and work in ‘Landline/Lifeline’ is communal and shared, and so too is the compensation. Sharing the labour ‘seed by seed, stitch by stitch’ also offers connection to both humans and more-than-humans. Connection reminds us our problems are not necessarily individual but symptomatic of a wider capitalist system severing us from each other and the environment. Academia reproduces wider neoliberal societal problems prioritising profits and individual gain of the few over the collective (Mountz et al. 2015).

Excerpt from ‘Three Poems in Black Lines’ by Lyndal Hordacre Kobayashi

Poem 3.

ChanGinG GREEN

It would only have to be small,

a tiny root system clinGinG

to the shallow crevice between rocks,

a few leaves forminG,

pullinG in the Goodness

the sun freely dispenses,

Gravity somewhere distant,

knowinGly watchinG the moment,

ready to play aGainst

the upwards pull of the sun

where do the roots start and end? (146)

‘Greening inquiry’ by Stef Rozitis

CCRWC has cast out rhizomes

barely connected, or clumping

where the turned soil still has goodness

the sun/shade/water in balance

falling between cracks

insistent greening

even in/through the academy

of interrupted dreams

green is a tenacious colour

cut grass and stained cricket whites

inner-city Melbourne

and vertical gardens with trickling water features

scampering about on the canopy

of other people’s words

creative hopes

and scramblings for a greater truth

ready to gather wisdom, glean meanings

“assist” and green with you

Both Hordacre Kobayashi and Rozitis convey hope and resistance through the images of roots coming up in the cracks and crevices. Hordacre Kobayashi and Rozitis describe finding and attracting ‘goodness’ that perhaps could be how our environment enables our writing practice and write back to it. The root system in Hordacre Kobayashi’s poem is just holding on until it can grow in other directions – ‘where do the roots start and end?’ (146) – finding and fitting into spaces where they can. While Rozitis describes those who do not fit the system, rising up, and finding their own perfect environment ‘in/through’ the academy. Rozitis highlights this desire to grow despite the academia pressure of ‘interrupted dreams’. Furthermore, Rozitis’s poem advocates for embracing being a ‘green’ academic and seeking out deeper knowledge and listening to others. The opening line of the poem explicitly names CCRWC highlighting how our collective offers chances to explore ‘other people’s words’ critically and creatively, and to seek ‘greater truth’, ‘gather wisdom’ and ‘glean meanings’. Our collective acts as a community that encourages researchers at different levels, positions and fields to exchange ideas, collaborate and encourage learning beyond your own areas of knowledge. In particular for postgraduate researchers, academic communities, like CCRWC, can promote positive wellbeing outcomes including a sense of belonging, contribution and support (Schmidt and Hansson 2018).

Section 5: concluding thoughts

Pursuing connections between creative writing research themes of eco-writing in response to the Anthropocene, writing-to-know, the value of collaboration and communities-of-practice, and Deleuzo-Guattarian theory, particularly assemblage and Guattari’s three ecologies, this article has described co-creation of the Green anthology as a composition of human voices that, through a range of creative outputs, articulate how our cultural, spiritual, and biological relationship to nature is often ‘overlapping, confusing and complex’ (MacKenzie 2016, 191). Despite the potentially problematic anthropocentric associations tied with this approach (White 2020, 14), the contributors to this volume use characters, language, and dialogue to envision dynamic scenes of rich imagery that interrogate the boundaries and parameters of the Self and the more-than-human. Moreover, they illustrate the importance of collective arts-based practices to capture and deploy the dynamism of natural ecosystems in ways that facilitate an ethics-based, optimistic approach to the complexities of environmental issues. This paper has proposed an ecological framework for its outcomes, based on Guattari’s ([1989] 2008) notion of ecologies, that attends to the interdependent mental, social, and environmental ecologies that are evoked through and across these creative writings.

To conclude, we return briefly to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of the assemblage to reflect on how encountering the Self and the more-than-human through fragmented, yet collected, writings facilitates new ways of addressing and troubling the notion of ‘green’. The twelve works selected from the Green anthology analysed here comprise a conscious mix of prose and poetry that experimentally deploy ‘green’ via two key modes of inquiry. Writings on the environment have thought through human relationships with the Self and more-than-human beings with complexity. Writings from the environment have activated ‘green’ as an identity-position that speaks to newness, development, and sustainability, especially for precariously-positioned early career researchers for whom co-authorship as mutual aid provides a means for collective survival in and beyond the academic environment as a mental ecology complexly connected with the social and environmental ecologies. How ‘everything hangs together’, to evoke a popular maxim of ecology (Naess 2005, 520), suggests that the anthology in this context also-already functions as an assemblage that coheres diverse dialogues, thinking, and expressions of the ecosphere. This provides new directions for creative writing research in the form of anthology co-creation as an ecological set of processes that occupies specific methods and technologies of knowing – ones suited to demonstrating the value of creative arts-based collaborations for articulating new encounters with the Self and o/Other and that highlight the breadth of possibilities available to face multiform contemporary crises including and exceeding the environmental.

Acknowledgements

We respectfully acknowledge the Kaurna People and their Elders past and present, who are the First Nations’ traditional owners of the land where CCRWC meetings are held. We recognise and respect their cultural heritage, beliefs and relationship with the lands and waters, and acknowledge that they are of continuing importance to the Kaurna people living today. We also acknowledge First Nations peoples across Australia where we wrote this paper, their Elders, ancestors, cultures, and heritage.

We would like to acknowledge the support of the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre at the University of South Australia. Authors Dante DeBono, Simon-Peter Telford and Chloe Cannell were supported by the Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarships.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shannon Sandford

Shannon Sandford is a casual teacher and researcher at Flinders University and the University of South Australia. Her PhD thesis, Drawing Digital: Exploring the Subjects and Spaces of Autobiographical Webcomics (Flinders University, 2022), examines autobiographical webcomics as an urgent and emerging form of self-representation that captures new trends in contemporary Life Writing studies. Shannon is the inaugural Transnational Literature Fellow at Flinders University, researching second- and third-generation migration stories in Australian graphic narratives. Her research has been published in On_Culture, TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, Textual Practice, and Journal of Australian Studies (forthcoming).

Chloe Cannell

Chloe Cannell is a completing PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of South Australia. Her thesis explores representations of intersectional LGBTQIA + characters in contemporary young adult fiction. She has been published in TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, hNiTRO: Non-Traditional Research Outputs, Writing From Below and Art/Research International. From 2018 to 2020 she worked on the organising committee for the South Australian Gender, Sex and Sexualities Postgraduate and ECR Conference.

Stefanija Rozitis

Stefanija (Stef) Rozitis (they/them) is a higher degree student researching the experiences of early childhood teachers and educators. Their work as a teacher and volunteer work in various activist roles have given them a passion for social justice, as well as the environment. It is Stef’s belief that education needs climate-humanities (literature, poetry, history) as well as STEM to create narratives of hopeful futures and explore the social and ethical implications of these. Their varied experiences and fluid social identity have given them a passion for transformative knowledge production.

Anneliese Abela

Anneliese Abela is a writer and PhD candidate at the University of South Australia. Her creative pieces and news articles have been published both in print and online, and her research focuses on WWI history, Australian war literature, and the power of fiction in recapturing the past. She has recently finished her first historical novel: a tale of friendship, grief, and survival amidst the futility of war.

Dante DeBono

Dante DeBono is a PhD candidate at the University of South Australia with the goal of promoting social inclusivity and equality through work focussed on diversifying queer representation in research and creative outputs. Her current thesis is focused on the queer potential of revisionist adaptations in fiction. She has been on the central committee for the Gender, Sex and Sexualities Conference since 2021, and is an advisory team member for the UniSA Oral History Hub.

Lyndal Hordacre Kobayashi

Lyndal Hordacre Kobayashi is a PhD candidate in the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures at the University of South Australia. She has worked as a visual artist for 30 years with 15 years in Europe and Japan, and is now using her background in the arts to encourage monolingual research participants to explore their lived experiences with language/s. Lyndal lives in the Adelaide Hills, where she writes, works as a transpersonal art therapist, and cares for her youngest daughter with Down Syndrome.

Simon-Peter Telford

Simon-Peter Telford is a writer and poet from South Australia. He is a PhD candidate and teaches Creative Writing at the University of South Australia, where his research involves writing existential fiction for the Anthropocene.

Heather McGinn

Heather Briony McGinn is a PhD candidate at the University of South Australia with a research focus on Beat Studies and feminist literary criticism. In the first year of her postgraduate research she developed l’écriture kinesthésique, a corporeal-based creative writing methodology.

Belinda Lees

Belinda Lees is a PhD candidate researching screenwriting under the supervision of Prof Craig Batty and Dr Amelia Walker through the University of South Australia. She previously completed an MA in screenwriting at Cornwall’s Falmouth University. Since then, she has had short films and a feature titled The Clearing produced by John Finnegan’s screenwriting podcast The Script Department. Belinda has contributed around twenty comic children’s plays to Australia’s leading children’s literary magazine The School Magazine. She is a past winner of the Todhunter Literary Award, which she won for a one-act absurdist play. She works as an educator in a secondary school, teaching media and literature to senior students, where she draws on her credentials in performing arts, literature, media, and screenwriting.

Aden Burg

Aden Burg is an Adelaide-based creative writer who graduated from the University of South Australia with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Creative Writing. His detective short story, ‘No Return’, was published in the 2018 edition of the University of South Australia’s creative writing anthology series Piping Shrike. Aden’s passion is reading and writing fast-paced stories with unusual characters, a proclivity that bleeds into his research specialty of creative writing and visual storytelling in manga.

Evan Jarrett

Evan Jarrett is an Honours Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of South Australia. His work explores how fictional world-making can communicate the complex intersections between climate change, class, and the multiplicity of place. Evan was born in Adelaide, South Australia, and has long been fascinated with how places impact him, physically, emotionally, and, on a deeper level, spiritually. He frequently wonders, with the multitudes of ways in which climate change is impacting on places across the world, how people from different backgrounds and in different situations will be shaped by climate change themselves, and how they may respond to this.

Lily Roberts

Lily May Roberts (she/her) is a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours) student at UniSA focusing on auto-ethnographic poetic practice. She was born and raised in Adelaide and her work concentrates on recovery from trauma and addiction through an engagement with the sensory and the spiritual. Lily is especially interested in exploring how poetry crosses over with mindfulness, the phenomenology of the embodied poet, and the development of an ecological method of relating that encourages systems-thinking for situating the self. Further down the track, she is interested in cultivating her own poetry therapy approach for recovering addicts and sexual assault survivors. Lily was awarded the Cecil Teesdale Smith Literary Award in 2021.

Eugene Tabios

Eugene Tabios is an emerging writer currently undertaking his Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and Linguistics at the University of South Australia. In 2016, his 100-word story, ‘Christmas Eve’, won fourth place in Sobrang Short Stories and his later, even shorter piece, ‘The Fateful Day’, written under his penname Placido Penitorpe, received publication in The Best of Sobrang Short Stories. When he moved from the Philippines to Australia, Eugene decided to pursue a career in humanities. Since then, he has dedicated himself to discovering new things, studying their intricacies, embracing their fleetingness, and putting them in writing, guided by his self-coined mantra to ‘observe and preserve’.

Alex Dunkin

Dr Alex Dunkin is an author, publisher and academic in professional and creative writing. His novels include Coming Out Catholic, Homebody, and Fair Day. He is the founder of the micropublishing label Buon-Cattivi Press, primarily publishing emerging writers and experimental forms of literature. He currently runs the new Green: A Blue Feet Anthology mentorship programme that develops for publication short creative fiction by higher degree research students. He tutors undergraduate courses in professional writing and creative short-form writing with a focus on preparation for writing in professional industry settings. He has worked as a journalist and reviewer with ongoing contributions to publications such as Glam Adelaide. He is passionate about creating pathways and lasting connections between the worlds of academia and creative industries.

Amelia Walker

Dr Amelia Walker is a poet and lecturer in creative writing at the University of South Australia. She is the author of four poetry collections and three poetry teaching resource books in Macmillan's All You Need to Teach series. Her research writing operates across the nexus of critically creative, embodied and collaborative research methodologies. She is chief investigator on ‘Invisible Walls’, an Australia-Korea Foundation funded project focused on building intercultural connections between Korea and Australia by pairing Korean and Australian poets for fly-free literary exchanges using interpreted video-conferencing and poetry in translation.