Current Projects

Plantasmagoria: Botanical Encounters in the (M)Anthropocene

This book project draws on my current plant-based research interests and will result in a collection of creative nonfiction (personal) and critical essays on botanical biopolitics, environmental history, human/plant encounters, plant fictions, and everyday plant relationships as elements in an expansive, multispecies, environmental justice politics. Essays and creative interventions will examine a wide array of flora (e.g., Scotch broom, mulberries, Douglas-fir, stinging nettle) and their entangled relationships in and with a variety of political and historical contexts (e.g., colonialism, climate change, misogyny, and the [M]Anthropocene), as well as literary texts that push “plant-thinking” into feminist, queer, trans, anti-racist, and decolonizing work.

Sample: https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/32863/25424

Dear Jane Rule

This book project considers the literary and political legacy of BC author Jane Rule. Rule was a prolific author of fiction (realist novels and short stories) and non-fiction (essays and journalistic pieces) and was an influential—and sometimes contentious—commentator on a variety of feminist, lesbian, queer, and literary political topics. This book will explore Rule’s literary and political commitments and contributions across the communities of her readers and, especially, her extensive network of correspondents, as well as the more immediate and intimate communities in which she lived and of which she was a vital part.

Sample: https://niche-canada.org/2016/04/18/stumps-jane-rule-on-galiano/

Recent Projects

Storying Climate Change: Narrative, Imagination, Justice, Resilience (Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellowship, 2016-20)

Through workshops and other structured gatherings, this project developed a significant public conversation about climate change, environmental justice, and everyday life, working from the premise that sharing “small” stories from personal experience —fiction and nonfiction, traditional and experimental—is a crucial practice from which to cultivate creative, collaborative, just, and meaningful responses to environmental and climate justice issues. Results of this project included the anthology of stories, poetry, and creative nonfiction Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times (Caitlin Press, 2019), as well as the “Storying Climate Change” website that describes key elements in the process of the collaboration, provides additional resources on story and literature in response to climate change, and offers both a record of community events and a selection of contributors’ readings that make a continued space for conversation in the COVID universe in which all in-person events after March, 2020 had to be cancelled.

Website: www.storyingclimatechange.com