The collaborative craft of creaturely writing

Alex Lockwood

pp. 167-187

in: Dominik Ohrem, Roman Bartosch (eds), Beyond the human-animal divide, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

What does it mean to write in a creatural way? One way we"re going to find out is by doing it, by telling stories with nonhuman-centred agency, and by exploring the practices of writers engaged with zoocentric elements in their craft. This chapter first engages with a range of literary texts that highlights the creatural in both human and nonhuman narrative voices, before drawing upon in-depth interviews with seven writers occupied with a range of issues related to posthumanism and creatural writing; these writers have also played roles in establishing spaces for such writing to flourish in communal and collaborative ways. And why not scholarly stories too? This chapter adopts an autoethnographic and creative/critical approach to not only examine creatural writing, but also attempt its practice.