Page 96 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

While I balk every time I read the phrase “from man to not-man,” the underlying impulse,

to shift our emphasis from the wholly human-focused to an inclusive world that includes

human and nonhuman life, feels crucial.

Writing recreates the world through particular ways of paying attention. Our attention

informs every choice of word, rhythm, gesture, movement, subjectivity, thought. It’s a

kind of energy transfer, too. Poets have it easy. They can create a world on the page out

of their noticings and the synaptic links between them. For prose writers, there is the

thorny question of narrative, as in, How do we turn the world of our noticings into a

story? Narrative amplifies certain kinds of choice: the need for agents, for people, usually

people, to do things and be changed by them. Narrative is the choreography of change,

as the New Zealand writer Eleanor Catton said in a talk to my students.

As I work on my current novel-in-progress, whose title like the weather keeps shifting,

I’ve been attempting to make the nonhuman elements — weather, landscape, animals

—something other than backdrop to the human drama. I want to give them presence and

agency, to shift the balance of parts. How do I give the weather agency in a novel?

The novel takes place on a fictionalized version of Fogo Island, off the northeast coast of

Newfoundland. It opens in the midst of a storm, the remnants of a huge hurricane that

has surged up the East Coast of North America. Fogo Island is a place where “wind

decides everything,” in the words of Al Dwyer, one of its residents. Wind lives against the

skin, and people are in constant interaction with it. It pushes against the body, is

ferocious in the ears. People notice as soon as the direction of the wind shifts. Each

direction brings different weather. Wind isn’t wind it is winds, multiple. How do I make