Stories in, of, and for the Anthropocene: Exploring With Turkeys

By Talia Lanckton

This essay is written in reference to a children’s story I wrote about a few turkeys from Boston. That story can be found here. 

The world is ending. The planet is warming, climate change is accelerating, the oceans are rising, natural disasters are increasing in frequency.. While the ground crumbles beneath our feet and continents burn, we scramble to make sense of the chaos. We push it and scrunch it and try to stuff it into a story we know how to tell, a narrative of infinite economic growth enabled by capitalism and exceptional technology built by exceptional Man. We sit in the center of the room and refuse to budge, this is our world, and this is our story. But the world is ending. What kind of stories can we tell from the end of the world?

This is a question many are taking up across a wide array of fields, with many arriving at what may seem to be a foregone conclusion: we need new stories. I would expand that to be “different” stories, not only because “new” carries with it the weight of the forward march of capitalism, but because some of the stories we need are already all around us, and have been all along. The stories we are used to, of exceptional Man solving His problems on His own, through brute force, maybe wit and definitely grit, are not everyone’s stories. Some, like Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, are already telling stories fit for the end of the world. In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer confronts the dominant narrative of exceptional Man by writing stories that aren’t (just) about Him. She tells them in a way that challenges the alleged nature/culture divide, like in her story “Council of the Pecans,” where the trees are just as much characters as the people who depend on them. Relating to her stories from within, she provides a sense of wonder in place of drama, cooperation in place of conflict. These stories and the knowledge they contain have been passed down for generations; they are not new stories, and we need them too.

Anna Tsing recognizes the need for different ways of telling stories in her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, when she asks “But how does one tell the life of the forest?” Lucky for us, the question does not go unanswered, she suggests: “We might begin by looking for drama and adventure beyond the activities of humans” (Tsing 155). In “Toward the Eco-Narrative: Rethinking the Role of Conflict in Storytelling,” Corinne Donly echoes the sentiment of looking “beyond” the human, encouraging us to seek out “those stories that promote a cross-species mutualism” (Donly 5). This requires not only different characters and content, but new ways of writing about them. As Donly asserts, this is a change that needs to take place “on the structural level–that is, no longer identifying a story as successful merely because it accompanies a single (human) protagonist as he engages in a conflict” (Donly 5). We have to redefine and relearn how we experience “adventure and drama,” turning away from the conditioned excitement of conflict, conquest, and triumph, and towards a different kind of story that relies on cooperation, mutualism, and exploration. This is not simply a charge, but a challenge. Afterall, “we are not used to reading stories without human heroes” (Tsing 155).

What Is an Eco-Narrative?

Donly’s piece offers a helpful framework for addressing this challenge, introducing “the eco-narrative” as an alternative to the dominant plot model. Donly argues that the “dominant plot model” operates something like this:

A successful story… tracks a protagonist as he moves through an experience of conflict, and regardless of what the conflict entails, it must escalate until it reaches a moment of climax–‘the point where something has to give–and does’ (Kress 1993, p.71). As these models would have it, ‘resolution’ is only available on the other side of a crisis (Dibell 1988, p. 126).” (Donly 2)

Our stories teach us how to understand the world, and the lesson of this storytelling model is that the crisis of climate change will reach a climax, at which point there will be a moment of salvation or repent, and the crisis will resolve. This understanding is incongruous with the current state of climate disaster, in which crisis is prolonged and its resolution uncertain; “no longer… a singular, temporal event,” but “a condition that humankind dwells within” (Donly 3). How do we tell stories from within a crisis? What kind of stories can we tell from the end of the world? The eco-narrative offers us a way.

The eco-narrative is a storytelling model which centers cooperation rather than conflict, adaptation rather than conclusion. Donly grounds this in examples of children’s fantasy play, and play theory in general, defining the “eco-narratives only real directive” as “to apply concepts from play theory to the act of storytelling and then to play with those concepts” (Donly 20). Play offers us an exciting alternative to the dominant plot model. A story motivated by play is not limited by conflict and conclusion, but “confronts boundaries through adaptation, striving always for continued life” (Donly 15). The act of storytelling becomes playful, as the narrator relates to and explores the “storyworld” from within.

By telling a story from within, the eco-narrative challenges notions of human exceptionalism which present humans as separate from and superior to their environment, as omnisciently narrating their stories from above. The act of playful storytelling becomes one of relationship building as we explore the storyworld along with our characters. It expands our conception of who and what we can relate to, as we play with humans, with animals, with rocks, with the mushrooms of the forest and with the pecan grove. The dominant plot model enables and encourages us to use the relationships of the Protagonist instrumentally, to guide Him towards the end of the story. This promotes a worldview of domination; our environment comes to be seen as instrumental in our story, seperate from us and there to support our progress. The eco-narrative offers us a different way of framing this relationship, one in which we exist within and as a part of our environment, promoting mutualism and cooperation, and exploring together.

My Experience Writing an Eco-Narrative 

I decided to write an eco-narrative after reading Anna Tsing’s, The Mushroom at the End of the World (the book could be labeled an eco-narrative as it relates to the world of matsutake mushroom from within and explores its social, economic, and historical entanglements). At one point while I was reading, I was faced with the colossal task of summarizing the book to someone I didn’t know. Sitting with a professor and a few other students, a woman approached and saw it lying by my side. She said she studied mushrooms and the cover intrigued her; she asked me what it was about. I stumbled over my words as I tried to navigate the plurality of paths the book takes, aware of the professor’s presence and self-conscious of my failure to synthesize. To my relief, once the woman returned to her seat, the professor leaned over and said: “Whenever I teach that book I ask: does the way you write really need to be as complicated as the thing you are writing about?”

I reflected on that question for a while, before recognizing that, although the thought that the book could be unnecessarily complicated might be comforting to the struggling reader such as myself, the answer was yes: in the case of The Mushroom at the End of the World, the writing really did need to be as complicated as the content. It is an eco-narrative; the complexity of the book reflects Donly’s charge that we reframe not only our subjects but our structures. The fact that I was unfamiliar with those structures was not a flaw in the book, but a flaw in my education. The ubiquity of the dominant plot model has taught me to apply a one-size-fits-all approach to the stories I encounter: to look for the protagonist here, to look for the information there, to follow a book down a path I am familiar with. When the book refused to clear such a path, I found myself lost. How would my experience with this book have been different if I had already been exposed, at length, to different kinds of stories; if I had learned to navigate on my own? What if I was raised on eco-narratives? That’s why I decided I wanted to try to write one, for kids.

When considering what I would write, I thought about boundaries. Both Tsing and Donly present boundaries as sites of play. We play in boundaries. We play on beaches and in the woods at the edge of town, we skip rocks at riverbanks and draw hop-skotch on the city sidewalk. We play with boundaries. We color outside the lines. I think boundaries are a good place to start an eco-narrative, they are ripe for play.

Reflecting on boundaries, I thought about my hometown that sticks into Boston like a thumb, itself a sort of borderland between city and suburbia. And I thought of the turkeys. The turkeys of my town and of the Greater Boston Area are notorious. A quick Google search showed me a wealth of articles on the trouble they get up to as wild animals navigating a cityscape. The turkeys occupy an interesting space; they are a native species that is framed as “invasive.” What are they invading upon? This is their town. I hoped my story would, in some small sense, return it to them.

Still, I had no intention of forging a “return to nature” kind of argument; that the turkeys once roamed a perfect pristine land and we humans have come and ruined it all, but rather explore the unique relationships that these turkeys have to this radically new world. For the turkeys, this city may in fact be a ruin of what they knew, for us it may be a thriving metropolis. I hoped this story would be an opportunity to begin to see things their way, and most of all to play with them. The Boston turkeys can be ferocious and precocious, they block traffic on a daily basis and often interfere with the plans of city dwellers. I wanted to interrogate this interference. Who is getting in the way? What are they getting in the way of?

The directive of the eco-narrative forced me to think critically about the shape of my story. The typical arc of a story is that of the dominant plot model, of conflict, climax, and resolution. That just wouldn’t do. I decided to write my story as an exploration, something we can do together. This doesn’t mean my story is without conflict, but rather that conflict doesn’t signify a conclusion. Conflict, obstacles, challenges, and surprises don’t end the story, instead they add “an unexpected parameter, which then sends the story in a new direction” (Donly 16). As we play with boundaries, conflict no longer signifies a limit, but an opportunity to expand. Even the end isn’t the end, there is always more exploring to be done.

While it was important for me to tell the story from within, I ultimately decided to narrate in the third person, rather than from the perspective of one of the turkeys. This was a tricky decision to make. I was excited by Donly’s emphasis on the ability of animal narrators to “‘destabilize anthropocentric ideologies’” (Donly 7). At the same time, I was also compelled by her conviction that we must not “seek to possess or manipulate the other—never professing to have access to the other’s interiority, but beginning, instead, from a place of respectful witnessing” (Donly 20). I wrestled with how to tell a story from the perspective of another without claiming access to their interiority. I felt unable to do the turkeys justice, there may well be a way to narrate from the perspective of a turkey that goes beyond mere anthropomorphic projection, but I felt I had neither the expertise nor the skill to undertake such a task. Still, I wanted to situate myself within the narrative in a way that felt authentic, so I chose the role of the “respectful witness,” playing with and relating to the turkeys, enjoying the adventure they took me on, and wishing it would never end.

I have not written the perfect eco-narrative, the perfect eco-narrative does not exist. The eco-narrative allows us to take the act of storytelling from a game with given rules and structure and expectations, and open it up to play. I had a wonderful time playing with these turkeys. One exciting benefit of the eco-story, which I would mention in addition to its theoretical necessity in this ecological moment, is that it is plain old fun. The story of the turkeys appears as though through the eyes of a child, and that is the perspective this adventure guided me into. Exploring my city with the turkeys allowed me to see it with fresh eyes, to render the familiar strange. It allowed me to question how I relate to everyday things: how does a turkey engage with a book in a way which might not make sense to me, and vice versa? I hope this story may allow you to relate to the turkeys, to their world, and to yours in ways you might not have expected. I invite you to explore with the turkeys and I, to explore from where we are: here, at the end of the world.

Works Cited

Donly, Corinne. “Toward the Eco-Narrative: Rethinking the Role of Conflict in Storytelling.” Humanities, vol. 6, no. 2, Oct. 2017, p. 17., doi:10.3390/h6020017.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Penguin Books, 2020.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2017.