Taking the Reader into the Woods: a critical reflection on the process of writing Orca and Bird, a novel, including the writing process, and the reading and walking that supported it

Turner, Anna Ruth (2024) Taking the Reader into the Woods: a critical reflection on the process of writing Orca and Bird, a novel, including the writing process, and the reading and walking that supported it. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

If we need to reinvent our place in the world in order for it to survive, stories of our relationship with the forest, which in the past have been reductive, anthropocentric and patriarchal, need revisiting and rewriting. This practice-based research project, involving walking in woodland and reading about woodland, and an examination of the connections between these two practices, resulted in a piece of creative eco-fiction in the form of a novel, as well as parallel texts of poetry and flash. The texts aim to examine how (eco-)fiction can create a deeper sense of knowing, and thus caring, about woodland in the reader, using a range of ideas, tools, methods and stories. In order to re-write the relationship between fiction and the forest, I have built on my own life-experience of forests and the variety of ways in which they are woven into my life story (from childhood play to grief), by re-experiencing and re-plotting them through my walking and writing. As a woman walking alone in forest settings, I have disrupted the predominantly male, urban practice of psychogeography in creatively productive ways. In my novel, forest is not merely a symbolic setting but something the reader must also 'travel' through in all of its physical and symbolic diversity. This is vital to my project as eco-fiction: the reader comes to care about this environment by experiencing it as more than a backdrop to character and plot. The research followed an iterative process of walking and writing: I visited specific woodlands and recorded the experience through words, photographs and sound recordings which were collated in a blog. Alongside this, a course of reading spanned a range of relevant texts from ecology and philosophy through to novels and poetry. The writing practice wound between these elements, informed by and also impacting upon them. The thesis accompanying the novel is a collection of short critical essays exploring pertinent themes which arose during the research practice, and which act as a critical lens through which to reflect upon the creative process and the novel itself. The thesis is arranged in such a way to introduce the reader to the research process and the emerging themes before reading the creative output. These early chapters are followed by the novel, Orca and Bird, with accompanying parallel texts. This is followed by further chapters of critical reflection on the process and output. The intention has been to create a new way of experiencing woodland in a novel which utilises a three strand approach; through immersion in the woodland the reader will encounter woods in their diversity and differences, both intellectually through knowledge immersion, and by saturation with sensory experience; connectedness without hierarchy between all things via rhizomatic patterns and assemblages will offer a way to resist anthropocentrism; a central character with uncertain status will introduce a sense of indeterminacy, allowing the text to challenge the usual hierarchies. It is hoped that as well as encountering a new piece of creative work, the reader of the novel will also experience the story and the woods within them in such a way that they will know forests more deeply -experientially, intellectually, sensorially, through their myths and stories- and thereby make them care more about these threatened landscapes.