Page 101 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

and intelligence are the only ones that matter, or even exist, and our achievements and

desires take priority over the integrity of all other life.

I no longer bought this. I wanted stories that called out our misaligned relationship with

the natural world, that showed us the way back home. I felt that fiction could contribute

enormously to this task—an essential one, it seemed to me, for healing ourselves and

restoring life on this planet.

My goal, then, became to write a novel that conveyed the atmosphere of imminent

ecological catastrophe in which we live—yet also took the reader through a breakdown

of the civilization/nature split. I wanted to explore what the end of our separateness

might feel like—and how it might happen, that beginning of deep reconnection, return.

What might it take to reawaken to the field of earthly relationships in which we exist, to a

sense of kinship with the community of non-human presences that have been always

with us?

Novelist’s Notes: Strategies and Risks

Setting. It was crucial to me that the book be set in a city because most of us live in

them, and thinking of nature as ‘elsewhere’ is part of the civilization/nature split, the

psychosis that needs to be healed. I wanted to show that reconnection to the natural

world happens right where we are, not by touching the wild on vacation. Part of fiction’s

magic, generally, is that it opens the reader to the complexity, beauty, mystery and

sorrow that accompany us every day. So I set the book in Toronto and made use of the

less urbanized spaces like Toronto Island, which is central.

Plot. By immersing the reader so intimately in other perspectives, fiction can subvert our

prejudices, self-obsession and myopia. In my novel I decided to focus on three

characters, their stories told in alternating points of view. The thematic connection is that

each character becomes obsessed with something in the natural world. In this way,

personal and ecological were linked, and I also could show that the journey to

integration/reconnection is unique for each individual.