Wiki 1 Podcast: responses & feedback from Joan

This is the first podcast by Joan Fleming, the course coordinator and tutor for eco-fictions and non-fictions. The purpose of these podcasts is to respond and offer feedback on the work done in the course. The course is text-heavy, but these podcasts provide a verbal alternative. Joan encourages students to contact her if they have questions or want to chat. The reading exercise for the week was to contribute to a glossary of key terms related to the course. Some definitions showed an emotional tone, reflecting concern for the Earth and climate collapse. The course also explores the perspectives of non-human animals and the layers of influence that make up our identities. Joan encourages students to engage in conversation and respond to each other's work. Two examples of student writing are discussed, one exploring the emotional life of functions of weather and the other reflecting on human achievement and foolishness. Joan also mentions a metaphor about the rapid changes in human civi Kia ora tātou katoa ko Joan Fleming tōku ingoa. This is Joan Fleming. I am your course coordinator and tutor for eco-fictions and non-fictions. This is the first of a number of podcasts that I'll be recording throughout the semester. The purpose of these podcasts is to respond and offer thoughts and feedback on all the excellent work that you're doing in this course, the close reading that you'll be doing, the analysis, and of course the original creative work you'll be producing. As you will have figured out by now, this is a very text-heavy course. The course notes and the lectures are generally, apart from the videos, in writing. The readings, of course, are in writing, and your responses on the forums as well are in writing. I thought it might offer a nice alternative to have these verbal responses to the work that you're doing. We have precious little contact with one another in this course, so this is one of my efforts to address that. Speaking of contact, I am recording this on the Wellington campus. I am here pretty much every day during regular working hours. If you are on campus, please don't hesitate to come and drop in. I would be really welcoming of a drop in for a chat or questions about the course. If you'd like to email me to set up a specific time as well, that's also absolutely welcome. You can find my office details and my email and all of that info on the stream site. The reading exercise for this week was to start contributing to our glossary of key terms, so let's take a look at that first. I'm seeing a distinct emotional tone start to show itself in some of your definitions in the glossary. Adam defines climate fiction as fiction that seeks to incorporate some of the darker realities of climate change. Diane goes even further with that emotional tone by defining cli-fi as fiction that exposes the folly of humanity in its blind destruction of the world and beyond. I'm getting the definite sense from meeting some of you through your introductory posts that we're all here out of a sense of profound concern for this Earth that is our life support system that keeps us here, that keeps us alive. We are teetering on the edge of climate collapse and I can see a very profound and a dark awareness of that coming into the definitions that you're offering in the glossary. Graham started us off with a definition for the Aramacene. He's calling it the age of silence. I've also seen it defined as the age of loneliness. And I think this is something that we can keep meditating on throughout the course. What might it mean if throughout the ecological crisis we're living in, if we arrive at an era where we are the only species occupying this Earth, what might it mean to live without non-human others, without the plethora of creatures that also share space on this planet? What might that loneliness feel like and what impact might that have on the human experience? A lot of the readings that we'll be doing this semester engage with those ideas. I'm seeing a really interesting thread emerging in Isabel and Tara's definitions of human animals versus non-human animals. Isabel defines writing that engages with non-human animals as writing undertaken from the perspective that is not of the human but rather of the animal, organism or environmental feature. And she quotes Neiman saying, It is language that we chose to be the great demarcator of our specialness after our God-born genesis had been undermined by Darwin. And to keep us special, language had to become an exclusively human property. And I think there's an implicit challenge in Isabel's definition to this idea that language is this special thing that only humans possess. And Tara's picking up that perspective when she defines non-human animals as existing in their own right, having their own perspectives, their own languages and senses of themselves, which we humans can only speculate. Once we get to the week on non-human animals, I think this question of how can we get inside the perspective of a non-human animal, is it possible? And what's wrong with anthropomorphism? This is an idea that I'm really, really excited to pick up on once we get further along in the course. Lucy defines whakapapa with reference to the writing by Tina Nyata. She says that whakapapa is a sacred connectedness. It links present-day Maori back through generations of ancestors to the first ancestors which Maori regard as the natural elements. This is Lucy's lovely articulation of that idea. I've heard another definition for whakapapa which has really stayed with me. One of the etymologies of that word is to lie in layers. I think that's very profound and interesting to think about. What are the layers that you yourself lie in? What are the cultural, social, natural and metaphysical layers of influence that make you who you are and structure your entanglements, your connections? To lie in layers, I might add that one to the glossary myself. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who's had a go at building our shared glossary. This is an exercise that we'll be doing throughout the semester. As you read, as you come across terms that seem juicy and complex and inviting of further thought, do add them to the glossary. Now I'm going to move on from discussing the reading exercise for this week which is the building of the glossary. I'm going to take a look at some of your original writing that you've posted in the week one writing exercise thread. Now the prompt you were given was to write a fictional scene or a story from the perspective of a place, an animal or a season or a function of weather. I would be really interested to hear from you all whether you found this easy or difficult. What challenges came up for you as you were stretching the sinews of your mind to embody the positionality of something non-human like an animal and something that has no human characteristics whatsoever like a place or a season. If you would like to respond to one another's work in that forum thread, please, please do so. I would really like to encourage a sense of comradeship, a sense of conversation and response in that thread. If you feel strongly about something that a fellow student has posted, please take a minute to respond to their work in the thread and tell them what you thought about it. Isabelle's piece is a really lovely imagining of the life world and some of the internal thoughts and feelings of several functions of weather and of the natural world including rain, the wind and the earth itself. There were some moments in this piece that I thought were really, really affecting. I noticed the power and the kind of uncompromising assertion of that power that's written into this piece of some of these functions of the universe. For example, teho, which is the wind. Teho can become easily affronted by the colonized minds of those drenched with ignorance, those who dare to speak out of turn. And later on, Papatūnuku stands now through the all of ao that breathes as part of her. Ah, lovely sentence. And then the piece continues. A deep rumble begins. The rumble turns into the command that none in her realm will disobey. Ka'atirafe. Nothing but silence meets her. I think this is a really successful exercise in perhaps not gifting agency to these forces of weather and forces of nature, but acknowledging the agency they have. Isabelle is extending her imagination into the emotional life worlds of these functions of the universe with some very memorable language formulations there. Thanks so much for sharing that, Isabelle. Graham's piece, which is titled An Emphatic Moment, is very different in tone to Isabelle's. I have to say, Graham, I don't know that you're quite responding to the prompt here, but I did find this piece extremely engaging and entertaining. It's a memory of traveling through the air, 10,000 meters in the air, in a fat metal tube, i.e. a plane. And the speaker, who's speaking in the first person, is meditating on the scope of human achievement, technological achievement, as well as the scope of human foolishness. And what I think is really effective about this piece is the juxtaposition between the very small, the kind of daily minutiae of the moment with these bigger scale meditations. So, you know, the speaker's eating a pineapple yogurt and he describes, you know, the pressure differential and the engineering that's gone into this plane with, yeah, pretty entertaining, in an entertaining tone and with great attention, great attention to detail. And those small details, as I said, are juxtaposed against these bigger questions. Why are we collectively so dumb on the big things, like messing with our life support system on spaceship Earth? Graham, one thing that your piece made me think of was a metaphor by the writer Tim Urban. He has this metaphor of all of human history as a thousand page book. So, he's kind of plotted the time span of Homo sapiens on planet Earth and each page in a thousand page book corresponds to 250 years of life on Earth. And what's really striking about this metaphor is from page one through to page 999, you're reading hunt together, hunt together, hunt together, hunt together, hunt together. And it's not until the kind of last page that we see all the narratives of modern civilization as we understand it. Cities grow, we invent electricity, we invent modern medicine, all of the kind of contemporary technologies that are causing climate change only happen on the last page of this thousand page book. So, it is fascinating to meditate on how recently this acceleration in human technology has happened in our societies and on our planet. And what a small amount of human history on the planet this makes up and how quickly really things have been changing over the past few hundred years. I think there's a sense of wonder expressed in places in your piece, Graham. You write, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I mean, we are a magical, incredible species. We have huge powers of imagination and we can divert that into technologies. Like I've said, there's a lot of darkness in some of the contributions this week, but I think we have cause for hope as well. In Adam's piece, he is thinking into tree time, which, given that trees can live much, much longer than humans, it's a great imaginative exercise in stretching our brains to try and understand the patience of a creature such as a tree and how that is so different from the culture that most of us humans live in, which is rush, rush, rush, rush, 24-hour work culture. One of the things that struck me about Adam's piece is the way that repetition, what in poetry we call anaphora, the way that repetition is evoking a sense of the repetition of cycles. So, Adam writes from the perspective of a tree. The circle completes and repeats. Smaller cycles of sun and moon ripple past, barely noticed. The days, the nights, the waxing, the waning. These are my breath, in, out, in, out. I feel these cycles in my sap rise, fall, rise, fall. I think that very judiciously managed repetition is working beautifully to evoke the breadth of time of the tree and, as I said, also the tree's patience. Adam writes, maybe there are longer cycles too, cycles that I have not yet circled around. After all, as long as I can remember, things have been getting warmer, the warm time wetter, the sleep wilder. I shall just have to wait and find out. I am content to do so. In the second paragraph, I understood the new bit of technology roped around one of the tree's boughs as a swing and the small creature bringing a kind of vibration and weight as swinging on that swing. Certainly, it seems like an intrusion that the tree is happy to accommodate. I wonder what of other restraints or technologies that trees have to endure, how they might respond to those. I wonder about trees that are pollarded in order to make space for power lines, how they might feel having themselves shaped in that way. I wonder about trees having big bands of metal wrapped around their middles to prevent possums from climbing up and eating their leaves, whether they respond with irritation, whether they respond with patience. This was a really thought-provoking one. Thank you, Adam. Lucy's first paragraph of her piece is really intriguing. I'm going to read out the first paragraph because I think there's great simplicity and restraint in the language. Even though I don't know what's being written about yet, I want to know and I'm kind of given enough precision in the description to really pique my interest, even though the mystery is preserved. She writes, after being in the space below, I really like that, the space below, sort of an open description, we came out to run in the warm grass and find food as the sky changed. You were waiting for me when I heard the deep sound. I started to go, but I was pinned by light and couldn't make it work. I did the perfect stillness. I was kicked by something hard and left the ground. Wow, I really like that, I did the perfect stillness. What a fantastic grammatical twist on the expected there. So I have to say, I get to the end of Lucy's piece and I reread it and the intrigue is intact, the mystery is intact. I feel affected by the descriptions of a mean darkness that came with a wrong smell. I'm intrigued by the something wet that comes near and I touched it and it was good, but it wasn't really good. I feel affected by those complex contradictions in the good and the not good and the sense of yearning that this creature, I suppose it's a creature, has. It's trying to find, I think it's fellow, and go, it's saying, go now, go running in the damp grass at the other end of darkness. The language is just so poetic. Lucy, you have to tell us what this piece is about or I'd love to hear other people's interpretations. Is it an insect, some kind of mammal or some other function of the natural world? Yeah, I'm not sure, but I would like to know. Like Adam, Andrew's piece is written from the perspective of a tree, but in this case, not just one tree, but trees as a we, as a collective, which I think is really, really striking. Yeah, I think that's another way in which we, individualistic humans raised as we are in a society that valorizes the exploits of the individual hero. It's interesting to stretch our imaginations and to write from the perspective of a collective noun as Andrew is doing here. I think that's really, really interesting. Andrew's also engaging in his piece with tree time, which is, as I've said, much deeper, much slower and much farther reaching than the time of our watches and alarms that we structure our days by. One of the options for the first assignment in this course is to write a kind of extended review essay of a single book, and Andrew, if you haven't already read it, you might be interested in taking a look at Richard Powers' The Overstory, which is a novel that is written from the perspective of trees. Yes, maybe there are significant sections of it where he gets into the perspective of certain trees. Certainly it's a book where trees as well as humans are the protagonists, and yeah, it's quite an unusual and fascinating book for that reason, so something you might consider for assignment one. Jasmine, I believe, is writing from the perspective of a dog, and I think there's some really fabulous details here as she's trying to get into the dog mind. She describes the nose wiggling. Instead of using a word like human or person, she uses the word two legs, which seems very obvious. Of course, that's how a dog would conceive of a human and understand them as different. I think another way that this piece is getting into the mind of the dog, the four-legged one, is to focus on smell. Dogs have this huge spectrum of smell abilities, far, far more than humans have. If you take a dog for a walk and you watch how it stops to sniff in all the same places that it sniffed on the previous walk, you can almost see how smell is a form of conversation, conversation with the previous selves of the dog as it's gone on previous walks, conversations with other dogs, and conversations with all of these other blossoming and fruiting and growing things in the natural world. One provocation I have for you, Jasmine, if you want to keep working with the dog voice, is to consider the way that dog grammar might be different from human grammar. Would dogs be speaking in full sentences with capitalization and commas and full stops? Or would they be using other grammatical forms altogether that's more natural to the doggy way of being? Laura-Jean McKay, who helped to design this course, has a novel called The Animals in That Country, and one of the dominant voices in that book is the voice of a dingo, and men speak about grammar departing from our usual rules. It takes, for a reader, quite a lot of getting used to acclimatize yourself to this dog voice. It's very poetic, it's very kind of feral and aggressive, and even the way it addresses her two legs is shifting throughout the book according to the changes in their relationship. Yeah, that might be a fascinating one for you to take a look at. Tara's piece is kind of a companion piece to Jasmine's. Instead of a dog, she's writing from the perspective of a domesticated cat, and once again, working to get inside of the things that the cat likes, the things that she enjoys, the things that she's afraid of, and the way that she conceives of her human companions. So in this case, she's calling the humans, the big cats, the hairless ones, which made me laugh. I imagined that the silly big leaves lying on the floor, which the cat is stretching and pouncing on, are maybe the pages of someone's manuscript. Maybe this cat's been locked in an office, and I was kind of set up to expect maybe some kind of confrontation or telling off when the cat was finally discovered. Yeah, this piece is definitely working with humour, and I think, you know, getting inside the cat mind and making the familiar domestic world unfamiliar through the cat's eyes is, yeah, it's working well and it's engaging. Luciano's piece is written from the perspective of a butterfly who loses their way inside the abode of a human. Something I found interesting about this piece was the butterfly's language. You know, I mentioned earlier when speaking about the glossary how, yeah, we have a dominant narrative in our society that humans are the only ones who are gifted language, and that makes us special. So I found it interesting that the butterfly in this piece is encountering frustration as she tries to communicate with the human in her language, which is opening and closing her wings, a language which feels, you know, very natural and obvious to her, but which this foolish human can't seem to understand. The butterfly's capacity to tune into and feel the kind of minute changes in vibration and energy was another part of this piece that I found interesting and maybe deserving of some further exploration. But his hands are warm and I enjoy how my antenna can feel his intense energy. Yeah, I felt that those sensitivity capacities of the antenna of the butterfly to kind of sense and interpret the world around her, yeah, I found that really interesting and maybe there's more to be written about there. Fantastic work, everyone, in posting these pieces, and as I said, please do feel free to respond to one another's work and offer comments and feedback on the pieces that your fellows have posted. It would be good to get a bit of a discussion going in the forum there. And before I sign off, just one announcement. I'm recording this podcast at the end of week one. Next Thursday at 1pm we have our first Zoom workshop where we'll get together on Zoom and it's absolutely not necessary that you come, but it is very encouraged for you to come. It won't be a formal lecture or anything like that, but it will be a chance to talk through some of the readings, talk about our ideas for what we might want to work on in our bigger pieces this semester. Yeah, and just a chance to chat and connect and get to know each other a little better. So, as always, I'm here to answer questions or concerns. Thank you for bearing with some of the technical issues that we've had at the top of the semester. There's always a few funny things on stream to get ironed out, so thank you for your patience. And, yeah, I'm so looking forward to seeing more of your work. Ka kite ano. Bye for now.