Page 103 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

In fiction we use the term ‘worldbuilding’ to describe the act of creating a convincing

imaginary setting. Yet in truth, all writing does worldbuilding. Whether fictional,

academic, legal or corporate, our writing conveys a notion of reality, the frames and

nuances of which depend on the writer. Fiction is uniquely positioned to challenge and

enlarge those frames—to open up our human-privileged worldview, to imagine other

ways of seeing and living that we desperately need. The stories we tell can help us

reckon with what’s gone wrong in our world, and find a new sense of home in a grand

and luminous field of conscious creation

ALISSA YORK

Bio-Empathy

The results are in, science having once again trapped the moth of common knowledge in

a jar: stories build empathy. Tests have shown that reading the line “she leapt from the

branch” lights up the region of the brain used in leaping. “We knew it!” writers

everywhere exclaim. “Now what?”

Much of the world is coming to value diversity—a shift in perspective due in no small part

to the contributions of writers and other cultural workers. So while we’re at it, why not

adopt the prefix “bio,” thereby extending the empathetic impulse to include all life?

It begins, as communion so often does, with paying attention. In his haunting elegy-cum-

manifesto, The Once and Future World: Nature as It Was, as It Is, as It Could Be, J.B.

MacKinnon describes walking though grizzly country in what the naturalist John

Livingston characterized as a participatory state of mind: “As my senses reach outward, I

spread away from myself. . . . It’s the closest a person can feel, I think, to being a flock of