(W)riting the Eco-Divine into Everyday Practice: Bearing or Plucking the Fruit? | Susan Pyke

Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Susan Pyke Part of my fictional work involves a ‘futuristic’ novel with resilient communities operating outside the dominant economic structure. It is developing in concert with my readings of Luce Irigaray’s ‘becoming divine’, working with her idea that writings and readings might nurture ‘the fruit of the covenant between word and nature’. Yet is my work fiction or even futuristic? Leading economists are arguing for fundamental changes to global accounting, correcting their calculations to include the finitude of natural resources. At the same time, philosophical ‘freegans’ and guerrilla gardeners are cutting voluntary simplicity into the edges of mainstream thinking. My ‘speculative’ fiction might simply be chronicling emerging everyday practice. Perhaps it’s not possible to write the world into a radically new state; our fiction merely condemns or applauds our limits. Are my words merely harvesting what is already sown? Perhaps a new language is needed to seed something new. Susan Pyke’s Creative Writing PhD with the University of Melbourne is ‘Unbinding the Divine in the Environs of Wuthering Heights: The ‘Becoming’ Potential of Ghosts, Dreams and Love’. Her creative and non-fiction work can be found in Victorians Institute Journal, Intermedia, Hecate, Overland and Island. She works part-time with Sustainability Victoria.