Written with the Forest

Abstract

In June 2021, as research for a novel about humans and forests, I undertook a commitment to walk in the forests of Gebhurr (Mount Macedon) every day for one year, and to document the thoughts arising from each day’s encounter as an in-situ drafting exercise; in essence, to attempt to write the forest–or my experience of it. Out of this structured entanglement with the poetic possibilities of place, a novel arose. Poststructuralists have long queried the idea of the author as a text’s single originating point, just as ecologists and environmental philosophers have questioned the unique status of human subjectivity in relation to wider notions of ecological thoughtfulness. In this article, I will briefly consider what is meant by the term ‘forest’ and its history as a metaphoric terrain, before describing my own year-long in situ forest writing project. In interpreting this, I draw on existing frameworks that explore the blurred boundaries between environment and human thinking, including Freya Matthew’s ontopoetics, Vicki Kirby’s grammared biologies, and Australian Indigenous notions of narratively-patterned environments, as well as thinkers of European forests such as Bachelard and Heidegger. I draw widely from the existing research into the relationship between forests and human creativity, in order to argue that the forest may hold a legitimate claim to authorial acknowledgement of works developed within its realm.