Literary Nature Writing and the More-Than-Human Garden
Speaker: Jessica J. Lee （李潔珂）｜Course Director and Panel Tutor, Creative Writing-Nonfiction, University of Cambridge｜Course Instructor, Orion Creative Writing Workshops｜Course Director, Granta Nature Writing Workshop｜Author of《山與林的深處》（2024）
Moderator: Serena Chou | Associate Research Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica
Time: 09-12-2024 (Thu) 14:00
Venue: 1F, Conference room, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica｜Cisco Webex
Abstract
In this talk I'll present my second book, Two Trees Make a Forest, which was published in 2019. Taking formal inspiration from novels The Stolen Bicycle (by Wu Ming-Yi) and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (by Madeleine Thien), Two Trees Make a Forest engages critically with the notion of memoir in the English-language nature writing genre: through an examination of the fragmentary stories of my grandparents' lives, alongside the history of Taiwan itself, it asks how the genre can be expanded beyond the scope of Anglo-American landscapes without reifying an orientalist gaze. I'll read briefly from the book before discussing its origins and formal and genre-specific challenges.
Literary Nature Writing and the More-Than-Human Garden: In this presentation, I'll consider the ways gardens have been centred in three works of very recent contemporary nature writing: Unearthing by Kyo Maclear, Rootbound by Alice Vincent, and Uprooting by Marchelle Farrell. In each of these books, the story of the garden is complicated and far from idyllic, whether as a framework for understanding kindship and relation, a means for understanding individual coming-of-age against the background of urban life, or as a means for exploring the legacies of migration and empire. In each of these works, the garden is a way of leaning more closely into the world. I'll consider the ways literary nature writing can provide a means for narrating one's experience of more-than-human kinship and connection, and ultimately provide a complex re-imagining of tropes of the garden as escape or salve.
Speaker's Short Intro.
Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, a Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of three books of nature writing, Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, and Dispersals, the children’s book A Garden Called Home, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and was Writer-in-Residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin from 2017–2018. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and the University of King’s College.