Nonhuman Story
Building from your eco-postcards, you will write a short story from the nonhuman perspective of your selected animal, insect, or plant. Your story should incorporate the research you did for the postcards but also extend readers’ imaginations to how your nonhuman narrator perceives and responds to the world as a biological character. Your story should strive to avoid an anthropomorphic or patronizing sympathy but attempt to represent a nonhuman lifeform through its own agency and not as an inert object or prop for humans. You might emphasize the nonhuman character’s tactile elements or sensory perceptions.
For example, to write from an avian perspective you might require a world described vertically not horizontally. Or, consider the octopus, a highly evolved cephalopod that has more neurons in their tentacles than their brains. Because their tentacles can act independently of brain signals, scientists argue that the octopus has a distributed brain. What does this mean in terms of how an octopus “sees” the world? How does its ability to change color for camouflage purposes affect that view of the world as well? How does being boneless affect perception? Think about telling your story in terms of your nonhuman biological character’s perspective, the experiences of its own morphology and the space/place it inhabits, its living role enmeshed or entangled with other lifeforms and environmental factors. Narratives might follow the life-cycle of your species, an encounter with another species, or its sense of emplacement in a specific habitat or environment.
Stories should be a minimum of 1,500 words in length, though you may go over the minimum as long as your narrative demonstrates effective editing and organizational choices. When you post your story to your corresponding website page, make sure the formatting is clear and readable, with recognizable paragraph breaks or indentations. You are encouraged to include images or visuals that complement your narrative (though try not to reduplicate images used in your Eco-Postcards section). A word copy of your story must also be submitted to the Pilot dropbox by the assignment deadline, Sunday, Oct 4 (11:59 pm). Your story should be original work written in your own words; any references to secondary sources should be clearly cited in the text of the story and listed at the end with hyperlinks to the online source.
*Adapted from Jeff VanderMeer, “Unconventional Ways of Approaching Narrative” and “Tactile Experience” (Wonderbook)
For example, to write from an avian perspective you might require a world described vertically not horizontally. Or, consider the octopus, a highly evolved cephalopod that has more neurons in their tentacles than their brains. Because their tentacles can act independently of brain signals, scientists argue that the octopus has a distributed brain. What does this mean in terms of how an octopus “sees” the world? How does its ability to change color for camouflage purposes affect that view of the world as well? How does being boneless affect perception? Think about telling your story in terms of your nonhuman biological character’s perspective, the experiences of its own morphology and the space/place it inhabits, its living role enmeshed or entangled with other lifeforms and environmental factors. Narratives might follow the life-cycle of your species, an encounter with another species, or its sense of emplacement in a specific habitat or environment.
Stories should be a minimum of 1,500 words in length, though you may go over the minimum as long as your narrative demonstrates effective editing and organizational choices. When you post your story to your corresponding website page, make sure the formatting is clear and readable, with recognizable paragraph breaks or indentations. You are encouraged to include images or visuals that complement your narrative (though try not to reduplicate images used in your Eco-Postcards section). A word copy of your story must also be submitted to the Pilot dropbox by the assignment deadline, Sunday, Oct 4 (11:59 pm). Your story should be original work written in your own words; any references to secondary sources should be clearly cited in the text of the story and listed at the end with hyperlinks to the online source.
*Adapted from Jeff VanderMeer, “Unconventional Ways of Approaching Narrative” and “Tactile Experience” (Wonderbook)
