Beyond Human

This is a course for anyone writing now who feels a duty to tend to the equality of non-human beings and landscapes. Are you interested in exploring how we shift our writing from capturing to expressing our world? Are you seeking ways to represent how we exist in relation to other beings? Do you want to learn how to write minds that move, think, interact and operate in time differently than humans?

Do you look up at the tree canopy, at the fractured gaps between trees and ask – how does tree etiquette work so that they don’t touch one another’s leaves and how do I write that?

Do you want to reimagine how you write to connect, to read and empathize with wild mind? Then this course is for you.

Course Outline

Course Session Outline

1. Rewilding the Mind: As long as there have been humans, there have been stories and in the oldest stories humans transform into animals and animals to humans. In our first session we are going deep into the fluidity between human and animal in story, starting with Ovid, Aesop and Bestiaries and landing with Clarice Lispector’s awesome cockroach and Sarah Hall’s Mrs Fox.

2. Focalisation: Having grown some claws and feathers in session one, our next session will shake us up to write beyond the human body and play with what that does to language, structure and plot. We will learn how narrative voice can drift into other consciousnesses with Virginia Woolf. We’ll learn how to voice the chorus of wild and human with Alice Oswald’s Dart and how to follow a single droplet of water through time and troubles with Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky.

3. Land Speak: In his incredible work, Listen to the Land Speak, Manchán Magan describes the land as a mnemonic, land is a holder of story through time. In this session we will not ‘give the land a voice’, we will learn how to listen to it with Magan, Irene Solà ( When I Sing Mountains Dance) and Sarah Hall’s Helm.

4. Mouth to Mouth - Geomythology: Humans are newcomers to this planet but have always been brilliant witnesses to change. Our oral stories, passed from generation to generation from pre-scientific cultures hold the secrets to geological events and natural landscape features in the form of myth and folklore. This is Geomythology. Just like rivers contain grains of mountains, oral stories contain grains of our past, collective memories of great floods and earthquakes that reshaped our world. In this session we will look at those origin stories passed down through oral traditions, ballads and the work of Adrienne Mayor in Mythopedia

5. Beyond Story: In this final taught session we will reflect on the activity and activism of writers working at the forefront of change, and look at contemporary essays and reflections on the non-human from writers including Rebecca Tamas’s Strangers and Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment. We’ll learn how to blend essay and story together to create a map of our responsibility as writers in a world that needs us to think beyond human for the future of all.

6. Write, Share, Reflect: My courses are usually 5 sessions long but I’ve found that this does not allow space to shape what we’ve written together and to share it with those who’ve been on the adventure together. Sometimes, I have notes from courses that always remain potential but have never had the focused attention they need to become something. So I’ve added this extra session that will provide guided editing time and a chance to share excerpts of your emerging writing with those who understand the creative path you’ve taken.