Embodied Place Writing

some notes from teaching creative writing for Arvon

Over the last couple of months I’ve been co-tutoring a creative writing course. It’s part of the reason I haven’t been able to feed this blog quite so often. ‘Embodied Place Writing’, with Khairani Barokka, was a new course we developed specifically for Arvon, with socio-environmental and disability justice at its heart. These were the shared the values that built Moving Mountains.

We were able to create the course we wanted to teach and drew on some of our favourite writers’ work to illustrate different ideas and perspectives of writing about place and writing about the body. It was a dream! We welcomed all writers from all genres, and a fantastic group of people from around the world joined.

I thought I would share with you some of my notes, and some of the books - work that was included in workshops and others that were recommended in tutorials. I got to compile a reading list for each writer from my bookshelves and had a lot of fun tailoring a new stack of titles depending on each individual’s work and interests.

There were so many more books I wanted to include but there just wasn’t the time or space. Those books that didn’t get a look in are forming new thoughts for new courses…

One of the threads of the course I particularly enjoyed teaching, was of disentangling, or re-entangling, what it is to be human. I was interested in exploring how different and similar we are to other animals, and how difficult it is to separate the human from the non human (or more than human). This is more complex when you consider genetic make up and similarity, how we share 98.8% of our genetic material with chimps, 97% with orangutans. In Indonesian and Malay languages, orangutan translates as person/people of the forest (see Okka’s Barbellion Prize shortlisted poetry collection ULTIMATUM ORANGUTAN). Considering genetic similarities with one another is more complicated when you learn that we share more than half our DNA with bananas (bananas came up a surprising number of times on the course!). The composition of protein means these connections track back to a common ancestor, with all life on earth tracking back to a single celled organism 3.5 billion years ago.

The relationship between the human and the more than human, in the contemporary world, is just as relevant when you consider the necessity (and abundance) of microorganisms in the human body. The microbiome, only relatively recently celebrated, outnumbers our own human cells by 10 to 1. That’s around 2.5lbs of bacteria in an average adult human. Daisy Lafarge’s Lovebug is a stunning illustration of this, if you want to read more.

These are all entertaining facts perhaps, but they also deconstruct what it is I think of when considering what it is to be human. It makes me think again what it means, how connected I am, to the non human world, and how essential that is to my every day existence. I feel like my body dissolves a little further into the world around it. Living with chronic illness, I am also more aware that I live with an imbalance of some of these organisms, and that some of the non essential, pathogenic variety of microorganisms inhabit me - microscopic, single celled creatures who can (literally) floor me. This, if nothing else, challenges any notions of human superiority and anthropocentrism I might have had.

One of the exercises I used in the Arvon course was the prompt: If you did not inhabit human form, what would you be? This could be animal, vegetable or mineral, object or landscape. Some of the books that influenced this thinking are included below (if you’ve been reading this blog for a while you may recognise some of them):

Sabrina Imbler’s My Life in Sea Creatures (How Far the Light Travels is the title of the US edition) - Sabrina Imbler is a science journalist and the attention to detail and research is wonderful. The research is matched by the quality of the writing and the stunning narratives that explore parallels of the lives and behaviours of sea creatures with the authors own experiences and identity as a queer, non-binary mixed-race writer. They bring parallels between marginalised human communities and endangered sea creatures to illuminate the lives of both.

Slug: A Manifesto by Abi Palmer, along with Abi’s work about fungi, popped up a few times. “Weaving together manifesto, memoir and poetic language, Abi Palmer considers the politics of space, iridescent queerness, and shapeshifting viscous ‘slug time.’ In the face of a potential apocalypse, Slugs: A Manifesto envisions a future where humanity becomes just a little more sluglike.”

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey is also one I’ve mentioned before and illustrates what we can learn from sharing spaces with other creatures and our close (and slow) observation.

Daisy Lafarge’s Lovebug is also worth adding again here. In it, she “explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life.

Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis – as well as the raw materials of love and life – Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host.

Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.”

Finally, I’m including Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals on this short list. The Whiting Foundation winner for non-fiction of 2022, “Undrowned is a book-length meditation for the entire human species, based on the subversive and transformative lessons of marine mammals. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has spent hundreds of hours watching our aquatic cousins. She has found them to be queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions humans have imposed on the ocean. Employing a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility, naturalist observation, and Black feminist insights, she translates their submerged wisdom to reveal what they might teach us. The result is a powerful work of creative nonfiction that produces not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wonder and questioning.”

In posing the writing prompt, If you did not inhabit human form, what would you be?, I was inviting curiosity. I wasn’t interested in projecting human thoughts or feelings onto another creature or landscape. I hoped the writers might imagine what they could learn about others around them, and what knowledge they could then learn for themselves. What can we imagine through identifying in this way? How can bringing parallels between us and the world around us, illuminate something of us both?

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Moving Mountains: Writing Nature Through Illness and Disability is now available in hardback and as an ebook, and is available to preorder in paperback (available from 6th March 2025)

Have a great weekend!