How to write nonhuman characters in healing fiction

This blogpost is based on my 20 minute talk (15 April) during the “Join the Orca Uprising!” Nonhuman Resistance and Multispecies (In)Justice. 11th Biennial EASLCE Conference, hosted in Utrecht University (14–17 April 2026). The photographs are taken during the writing(with)plants workshop in Utrecht (16 April)

Between land

When I returned from my three-year stay in Japan in 2020 (yes, that year) I didn’t know the term healing fiction yet. I had just finished my PhD in environmental studies, was training as a forest therapy guide, and was about to start at the Flemish Writer’s Academy. I only knew one thing: I needed to write.

I wanted to process grief, loneliness, and the quiet disorientation of living abroad. I imagined a story where nature would gently guide my characters toward healing… where landscapes would hold and transform human pain.

Six years later, that book exists. It is called Tussenland (Betweenland). An earlier title was Satoyama, a concept that kept returning to me in uncanny ways, through research, through books, and even as a surprise birthday gift from a small book lunch café in Nagoya (Japan) run by an elderly couple who had no idea how meaningful that word had become for me.

Satoyama refers to a liminal zone between the human and nonhuman world, a place of interaction, tension, and entanglement. I translated it as Betweenland. It is a space where boundaries dissolve.

The central journey in my book follows a walk along the Nakasendō, the “Middle Way.” Walking became essential, both in the story and in my own process. Like Walter Benjamin and Rebecca Solnit suggest, walking is a way of thinking, sensing, and slowly finding your (ecological) self again.

Discovering Healing Fiction (and questioning it)

Interestingly, I only encountered the term healing fiction after finishing my book, during the promotion phase. It seems to be a relatively new label, especially popular in Japan and Korea, and increasingly used online.

To me, it feels like a slippery term. It is often more marketing than substance. On Google Scholar, I did not find any definitions. During my talk, I even forgot to give the definition, and a professor asked me what it actually is. Answering this was difficult, as by trying to give a definition to abstract words like healing you need to unpack a lot.

What does “healing” actually mean? Who defines it? And for whom?

Many so-called healing fiction stories focus on a human character who feels better at the end. The narrative is often calmand comforting. Nonhuman beings (like the well-known talking cats in cozy Japanese novels, do I need to list the titles?) are present, but mostly as facilitators. They enable human healing, but they are not part of the healing process themselves.

There is no co-healing. And that is where I started to feel resistance.

One Health as theory and forest bathing as a practice

Parallel to my writing, I was training and working as a forest therapy guide. This practice deeply shaped how I think about storytelling.

Forest bathing (or forest therapy) is not about escaping into nature. It is about reconnecting with your senses, your body, and the more-than-human world. It is slow and relational work. I have guided sessions in Japan, Belgium, Norway and the USA where people (sometimes even doctors working on climate issues) start to cry. Not because something dramatic happens, but because they finally feel connected again.

Through this work, the concept of One Health became central to me: the idea that human, animal, and environmental health are fundamentally interconnected. There is no separation.

If the water is polluted, we are polluted.
If ecosystems are wounded, we are wounded.

This perspective changes everything, including how I write.

It becomes impossible to think of healing as something purely human. Healing must be relational. It must include the more-than-human world.

Thinkers like Stacy Alaimo, with her concept of transcorporeality, helped me understand that bodies (human and nonhuman) are always entangled. There is no outside. No quick fix. No simple “nature fix.” (Sorry, Florence Williams, I know that is the title of your bestseller).

Writing nonhuman characters: between theory and practice

When I started experimenting with nonhuman perspectives in my novel, things became messy very quickly. First, I wrote from the first perspective, but it was becoming a bit too autobiographical, and a mentor suggested to write in the third person to take more distance and allow the fiction part to flow. It really helped. Then a mentor invited me to re-write a fragment from a perspective of another character… and I do not know why (or perhaps I do… I am a forest therapy guide) I decided to re-write a fragment from the perspective of a tree. It was so fun that I decided to (re)write the story from multiple perspectives, including human and nonhuman perspectives.

II wrote from the perspective of trees, animals, even bacteria and landscapes. I tried to move beyond a single viewpoint and explore a plural, multispecies narrative. But this raised immediate challenges:

• Anthropomorphisation is almost unavoidable
• Readers questioned my authority – who am I that I can write from a perspective of the ‘other’? How do I know what and how plants think?
• Some perspectives felt acceptable (like dogs), others too strange or unfamiliar
• Cultural layers (like Japanese folklore animals) added complexity

I received a wide range of reactions, from curiosity to skepticism. Some people loved the experimentation; others found it confusing or “unmarketable.”

This is where theory meets reality. Eco-critical ideas, multispecies thinking, and philosophical frameworks sound compelling, but translating them into fiction is difficult and messy.

Key choices in my writing process

Years later, I am finalizing my book Writing(with)Plants (this is in English), where I talk more about the process of writing and re-enchanting the disenchanted world. I have developed my set of rules and templates to inform my choices in the writing process. Here are a few:

• I refused to portray nonhuman beings as villains.
• I avoided using nature as a mere tool for human transformation
• I embraced ambiguity instead of offering a neat, healed ending. Many ecofiction stories end often with a twist at the end, forcing readers to rethink.

In many eco-horror stories, nature becomes the enemy. I wanted to resist that. For me, the real scary violence comes from human systems (war, exploitation, discrimination).

Towards multispecies healing

So how do we write nonhuman characters in healing fiction?

For me, the question is still open. But I believe we need to move toward co-healing.

Not stories where nature heals humans. The cat stories are cute, but they risk to function more as a pain killer and stimulate more self-medication (through books), without letting readers reflect where the real pain comes from.

I want more stories where humans and nonhumans are entangled in shared processes of damage, care, and transformation. This aligns with the One Health perspective: healing is not individual, and it is never isolated. It is collective, relational, and ongoing.

An invitation (and a small promotion)

If you are curious about how these ideas take shape in fiction, my novel Tussenland (Betweenland) is available (in Dutch) through online bookstores (e.g. Bol, click here to take a look). I write also a monthly newsletter in Dutch, with the title Tussenland (you can subscribe here).

And if you want to explore this practice yourself, I also organize writing(with)plants workshops, spaces where we experiment together with multispecies storytelling, observation, and the messy process of translating ecological thinking into creative work. You can sign up to the free newsletter to hear about next free online sessions or the (often paid) live workshops in Europe. You can learn more about the writing(with)plants book here. The crowdfunding ended successfully (thank you to everyone here who backed the campaign(, but there is an extension for the late bloomers who want to get a copy before autumn, at a slightly more expensive price (but still cheaper than the final price).