EDEN

Eden is a piece of speculative fiction written only partially on the page. Linking one site across two temporalities, Eden leans upon embedded knowledge and language as encountered through three coal stones from Yuin country (Eden NSW). Presented as an assemblage of notes by a character in the late stages of a terminal illness, and addressed to the child who will be left behind, these reflections weave an account of impending departure, together a chimeric amalgam of fact, dreams and instructions. Eden has been footnoted by a reader in a time yet to come, a future researcher, piecing together the traces of a world long gone. The text experiments with linear time, co-emergence, entangled multispecies narratives and non-human agency.

Exploring how Material Ecocriticism might be applied as a practical methodology for transdisciplinary storytelling, Eden uses its sensory poetics, temporal experimentation and material artefacts as provocation for readers to grapple with the distance and difference of the myriad site specifics of its geographic setting. The story was written for the completion of a Masters of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne in 2019, and published in 2022 in Antipodes Journal of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS) vol 35. Issue 1.

You can read the story in full here.