‘A shared commitment … not to be miserable’: a Posthuman Artists’ Laboratory to explore writing collaborative climate fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper continues ongoing research, by the three authors, into possible ways to write climate fiction, a subgenre of literature that focuses on depictions of climate change. Curious as to whether climate fiction has become fixed as a negative genre, most frequently mired in dystopian landscapes, we posited that writing fiction collaboratively might be one method to help us imagine a future in which we have agency and are not simply helpless victims of the inevitable. To explore this hypothesis, we ran a two-day Posthuman Artists’ Laboratory with six other professional writers, all based on Kaurna and Permangk country in Tartanya/Adelaide, Australia. In detailing the setup and findings of this experiment, the paper looks towards artistic practice that does not focus on the capitalist individual and details the thrill of collaboration. We propose that there is a strong (posthuman) argument for writers to abandon the desire to be identified as one singular being with a ‘unique’ voice and reimagine their creative subjectivities as a sticky web of connections.