Tricky Writing: Women and Animals as Tricksters in Anthropogenic Fiction

Tricky Writing: Women and Animals as Tricksters in Anthropogenic Fiction

This Creative Writing research investigation focusses on the creative practice that will lead to a written product, a novel, and an exegesis that critically reflects upon that practice. The research investigation combines multiple areas of study, including human/animal relations, ecofeminism, the trickster archetype and eco-fiction/criticism, in order to create a novel that offers an alternative representation of women and animals in anthropogenic fiction. This project therefore involves creating a unique methodology dubbed the ‘trickster methodology.’ This methodology combines elements of practice-led research with trickster qualities: slippery, subversive, disruptive, shapeshifting, creator and destroyer. The trickster’s shapeshifting abilities support the narrative needs of the creative artefact while complementing the fluid, influential and ever-changing process of novel writing. The project articulates a writing method/ology that puts into practice a reimagining of the trickster as female, animal, nature. Early exploratory drafts will experiment with a range of strategies for subverting, or making strange, the traditional hetero-patriarchal archetype of trickster narratives. This ‘zero’ draft will then be reworked using insight gained through critical reading, research and reflection. Critical analysis of creative works such as Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015), Briohny Doyle’s The Island Will Sink (2016) and Jennifer Mills’ Dyschronia (2018) will reveal how a text can explore the physical and metaphysical oppression of women and animals within space while simultaneously creating space for readers to appropriate the external and internal experiences of a protagonist – an Other. By reflecting on my own creative practice as well as conducting interviews with Australian women writers to discover how they addressed the unique challenge of writing about large-scale issues, such as the Anthropocene, within the narrow scope of a narrative, I will discern a series of strategies that other writers can use when crafting feminist anthropogenic fiction and model these through the production of a novel.

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