Page 89 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

KYO MACLEAR, CATHERINE BUSH, SHARON ENGLISH, ALISSA

YORK

Bio-Empathy: Writing to Re-See the World. A Discussion

In the spring of 2016, a group of women writers gathered over a kitchen table in Toronto

to discuss how, in an era of ongoing and oncoming ecological crisis, we might use

narrative to reimagine our relationship to nature. Much of the literature around us

remains profoundly de-natured, and yet as beings and as a species we are entangled for

our survival with the natural world. We reconvened on a panel a few weeks later at the

Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs conference in Toronto where we

presented short talks designed to open up a conversation. The pieces that follow have

been adapted from those talks. In the largest way, we contemplate what the vocation of

literature might require at this time, while noting narrative’s incipient perils: the way a

story creates a frame; the impulse to make the world over into metaphor. How can we

interact with nature on the page without co-opting it to our own designs?

— Catherine Bush

KYO MACLEAR

Diorama Thinking

We want the new pristine. We want the reclaimed wild. We want California

Closets. We want to file everything in small display cases. In drawers... bits of
leaf fragment. Pouches of dried marigold. Pouches of iris. Pouches of wax. We

love our pouches. We are encased even as we move through the air. We move

and compile. We are an economy of women grieving.
—Sina Queyras, “Of the Hollow” in MXT