Page 100 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II
P. 100
SHARON ENGLISH
Making Room for World: Fiction as Wayshower
The Task
As a writer, I’ve long been drawn to place: how places inhabit us even when we’ve
chosen to be rootless, a people of transience, individualist and opportunist. My first book
of stories was about growing up in the suburbs, while my second was about the
Canadian west coast, that oft-romanticized, final frontier to which many have drifted
hoping for a better life. In writing these stories I came to realize that I was,
fundamentally, always dramatizing the same thing: our separateness, our lostness, our
angst and confusion in these communities of strangers and lands that are, at best,
beautiful yet mute, and at worst alien, damaged, hostile.
When I began thinking about the book that became my novel What Has Night To Do
With Sleep?, I’d become immersed in reading nonfiction writers like Barry Lopez, Annie
Dillard, David Abram, and Roger Deakin. These writers, whose works foreground the
natural world, helped guide me ever further away from a human-centred worldview. They
revealed a different way of living in respect, celebration and deep relationship with the
world and all its diversity. At the time I was increasingly gripped by the reality of
ecological devastation; the social alienation I’d explored through stories seemed to arise
fundamentally from our broken relationship to the natural world.
I wanted to write about this in fiction, yet could find few models to follow. Most literary
fiction, unwittingly or not, colludes with rather than challenges our culture’s dominant
stories—the master narratives and myths that fuel the engine of our civilization. Such
stories include the notion of a ‘natural’ split, even an opposition, between humanity and
nature—which our unique evolution and glittering techno progress and even fate are
pulling us away from at lightspeed. Under the myth of human exceptionalism, nature
exists to service us, our pool of things (‘resources’) to commodify; our consciousness
