Project conclusions

Persephone Calling contributes key insights into how conventional writing practice is shaped by print technologies by revealing the possibilities that are opened up when a writer becomes a maker. It demonstrates the opportunities created for story by following the narrative subject – and the materials and methods it inspires – instead of working with a predetermined technological outcome in mind. Circumstance gave me the opportunity to completely reshape my practice and enabled the boundary-crossing and experimentation from

There's a difference when I start working with a material, like when drawing the spiders web, different to thinking I know what a spider’s web is like and describing, working with it from memory, engaging with object in real world makes story material very specific and rooted to then work with (August 2016)

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which a new approach to storymaking has begun to be developed. This engagement with material practice is particularly suitable for ecological

storymaking as it involves a consideration of, and purposeful connection with, the context and materials of a work’s production. By engaging with materials as a writer I’ve been forced to confront the ecological impacts of their use and to make choices that align with my values, intent, and desire to bring the work to a wider audience in the most appropriate way possible. Persephone Calling

builds on previous practice, drawing on my professional experience of writing short stories for print for ten years and beginning to experiment with digital technologies. It is in part inspired by the frustrations I have experienced of a mismatch between ecological story content and the technology used to share it and considers whether there are other ways of working.

Persephone Calling contributes to the key research objective of

developing a new approach for ecological storymaking by providing insights into how a practice that is rooted in materials and connection with wider

nature can work. Bringing findings from the contextual review into this project, I focused on material writing practice and engaged with digital technologies to help reveal the unquestioned habits and assumptions formed by writing for print. By prioritising the ecological subject of stories and following this to make choices in materials and methods I was able to open up my practice and

uncover interrelationships between subject, content, form and medium. The project included non-textual experiments in composition during the two months when I was unable to write. Although breaking fingers isn’t

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recommended as a research method, this led to a rich expansion of methods that could be carried over to writing practice.

Below, I consider insights from this project in response to my research questions:

1) How can writing practices be developed with new technologies for ecological storymaking?

Working with new technologies in this project involved not starting with them but starting from the way they illuminate existing conventions and new

possibilities for story. Ecological storymaking requires engagement with other living things. Finding ways to explore the existing myth of Persephone in the context of the ecology of the contemporary city was key to gathering materials for story and finding imaginative ways to work with them. Working with an open-ended process helped me to develop stories with technologies that responded to their content.

2) How are stories changed when new writing practices are developed for ecological storymaking?

The stories resulting from this project are intimately tied with the materials and methods of their making and traces of this can be seen in the content, form and media used to share them. Three Seeds is an oral composition, marked by

rhythms and language choices that make it memorable, and which resists sharing except through being told. For Hades uses minimal stories of many living things and is inspired by the attention paid to these things through drawing. Persephone’s Footsteps, which can be characterised as altitude-

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responsive ambient literature (see p.41), was made through walking and it is a story that has to be walked. The way it responds to a reader’s movement, so their experiences join with the character’s, is the result of an integration of writing and design processes. Considering how all three stories are

characterised by their making provides understandings into how challenging conventional practice can lead to new kinds of stories.

3) What does the development of these writing practices mean for the role and continuing relevance of the writer?

This project demonstrates that connection as a writer with wider nature is vital to make ecological stories and a material focus can be an important part of this connection. The approach to practice I have begun to develop through this project, expands the role of the writer that is dominant in conventional print publishing and shows the value of exploring across artforms. The constraints imposed by circumstance pushed me further than I may have otherwise gone in extending practice. I made a choice to embrace these constraints inspired by my intuition that there was something to be discovered through finding other ways of working.

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Approaching storymaking without a fixed outcome in mind, following materials and responding to the ecological subject meant I was working in a wide-open space, and it would have been easy to become lost. Using an existing myth provided some structure and a reference point to work from. In the

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scaffold of an existing story was taken away. I was able to take forward the materials and methods used while continuing to expand my practice in response to other ecological themes.

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Part 2, Chapter 5: The Lichen Records

All it requires of us is attentiveness. Look in a certain way

and a whole new world can be revealed (Kimmerer 2017,

p10)

To see the intricate worlds of lichen, lichenologists use a small magnifying glass known as a jeweller’s loupe. Asked why I had one by a colleague in the office, I explained it was so I could look at lichen and his reply was, what’s a lichen? I soon discovered this was not an unusual response. The more I saw lichens everywhere, the more I realised other people didn’t see them. One of the oldest living organisms on Earth, lichens helped and help to create the conditions for all forms of life (Purvis 2010, p46). Having no filters, they take everything in from the air around them and because of this they are vital bioindicators (Seed et al. 2013). Lichens can tell us about the condition of the air we’re breathing, and yet we often don’t see them or understand their messages. This section documents my attempts to make stories about lichen in an effort to draw attention to those messages.

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5.1 Beginning

Figure 22: lichen growing over the River Lune, Lancaster

Intending to centre this project on a living thing in urban environments as part of the focus on urban nature discussed in the contextual review (see p.18), I was initially going to work with trees. A chance encounter with a lichen growing on the railing midway along the bridge over the River Lune piqued my curiosity and changed my plans (see fig. 22). As with Persephone Calling, I trusted my instincts and followed where they led me. I don’t remember ever having noticed lichen growing on the bridge before, although I must have passed it daily for years. Ubiquitous but unnoticed, thriving on human-constructed substrates, I soon realised lichens can be seen everywhere in the city. Early desk-research told me the lichens I was finding were those species that can tolerate and even thrive on the nitrogen oxide from car fumes (Wolsley 2015). I discovered Lancashire, as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, has a poverty of lichen species (Travis & Wheldon 1915), with many not having returned even

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after the mill chimneys stopped smoking in the mid-20th _{century (Hawksworth} 1970; APIS 2016).

Setting out to work with lichens I almost immediately encountered a tension between scientific and artistic approaches, made apparent in their naming. As discussed in the contextual review, Macfarlane asserts that if we can’t name something we don’t pay attention to it (see p.25). Lichens are bereft of common names and largely absent from folklore. Their complex Latin names defy easy memorisation and pronunciation, but this is the way many

lichenologists prefer it. A contact recommended a lichenologist I should get in touch with, but I was warned he would not be keen on my work with fairy tales and folklore. The British Lichen Society website refers to the controversy

surrounding common names for lichen, noting many members view them as ‘positively undesirable’ although some realise they can have value when communicating with the public (BLS n.d.).

The challenge of making stories with something many people don’t see and can’t name was daunting, but I found myself captivated by lichens’

incredible diversity and marvellously intricate forms, and by the fact they can only exist through a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae, which come together to exist in places where neither could ever thrive alone. I was determined to find a way of sharing this sense of wonder.

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