Plants & the Non-Human for Thought

Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene
Edited by Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles
Published by Pennsylvania State University Press (2021)

Dawn Keetley, “Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ and Lorcan Finnegan’s Without Name,” pages 23-41.

Keetley writes on the agency restored to vegetal nature and critically witnesses how the human identity is a form of self-tentacular horror. Imagine that we are suddenly open to the inundating entanglement of the all-encompassing nature. We feel “tugged” into the collective of vegetal beings we have thought of as a backdrop. Our souls merge into an unutterable cohesion, yet we must carry the burden of our moving bodies or the burden of moving bodies within a society of horrors. The split caused between the more profound, less-human, and more empathetic yearning and the realities of our narrow, predetermined paths tears at us until we are like half-souls, our bodies becoming a literal material for our unseeing and ravenous structure. Perhaps, within Blackwood’s and Finnegan’s stories, as men’s souls become lodged within the vegetal – and more ‘humane’ – consciousness, there might be a whisper of the inner fragility and spiritual emptiness of exploitative patriarchies.

Brittany R. Roberts, “'This Bird Made an Art of Being Vile': Ontological Difference and Uncomfortable Intimacies in Stephen Gregory’s The Cormorant,” pages 174-194.

As strangeness becomes untethered from the fishline of specificity, it evolves into an ambiguous monster. To be seen in another’s eyes as one is can be an honor or a terror. Roberts explores the limits of the human-animal connection within the structural bounds of the owner-animal relationship and reaches an understanding that the human fear of animal unpredictability reflects the innate human unpredictability. We are muddied, complex creatures who wish simplicity upon the world. We are easily scared by untamed chaos; as our expectation of another’s docility is shattered, we quickly brew a rotting hostility often quenched through violence. As we begin to observe the anger and rage around us, we notice the ease with which egoic masculinity becomes triggered by the wild Other — women, non-binary people, non-humans, and Others. If we step closer, we will see that the internal rage is unsettling for the patriarchal structure; if we push a little harder, we will find the fragility of male power.

Christy Tidwell, “Spiraling Inward and Outward: Junji Ito’s Uzumaki and the Scope of Ecohorror,” pages 42-67.

Spirals and spirals and spirals. It is a shape capable of morphing with our psyche, flowing inward, outward, and across. The shape is beyond human; it symbolizes destruction, yet it can still be used to engulf and make sense of humans. It speaks to a volatility that cannot depart; it represents our bodies as twisted and out of shape. It is a symbol of violence upon the self, of intraspecies annihilation.

Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction
Written by Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari
Published by Fordham University Press (2019)

Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, “Radical Botany: An Introduction,” pages 1-27.

In the introduction to their co-authored book, Meeker and Szabari’s explorations of speculative botany begin with francophone Romanticism in the seventeenth century, where plant bodies began flowing as they detached from the human projection and gained relative consciousness. Are plants capable of growing in the conditions of our consciousness? Do we conceptualize their growth in years or personalities? In truth, the belief of plants as inherently passive erases any potential to see their non-human animacy and autonomy. They are often conceived as mechanical parts and valued at the depth of scientific, instrumental bodies. When we imagine climate change, the vegetal beings serve as clockwork, chiming servants of the human problem.

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
Written by Suzanne Simard
Published by Knopf (2021)

Theory & Praxis

Living in a World That Can't Be Fixed: Reimagining Counterculture Today
Written by Curtis White
Published by Melville House Publishing (2019)

Ecofeminism
Written by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva
Published by Fernwood Publications (1993)

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
Written by José Esteban Muñoz
Published by New York University Press (2009)

Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories.
Written by Elizabeth Freeman
Published by Duke University Press (2010)

Psychic Witch: A Metaphysical Guide to Meditation, Magick & Manifestation.
Written by Mat Auryn
Published by Llewellyn Publications (2020)

A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy, and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin.
Written by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Published by University of Alberta Press (2021)

Story Collection

Mexican Gothic
Written by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Published by Del Rey (2020)

Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest
Edited by Fiona Stafford
Published by Alfred A. Knopf (2021)
“Shadows”
Written by Damon Galgut

Poetry Collection

Here: Poems for the Planet
Edited by Elizabeth J. Coleman
Published by Copper Canyon Press (2019)

Look at This Blue: A Poem
Written by Hedge Coke and Allison Adelle
Published by Coffee House Press (2022)

Music Collection