I Olive Sitting in the Backseat

More and more, I try to not host online writing(with)plants session. Also last week, I sat in the backseat of the online writing(with)olive session. Heide Maria and Konkankoh held the circle. The olive tree was our guest plant. Lisa was our doula. Lisa was tending the space so the rest of us could focus on the content. Heide prepared an amazing slide deck, with beautiful pictures from the African Peace Village.

As I did not had to focus on sharing knowledge, I could write down and reflect more. Here are a few quotes:

Writing(with)plants is a collective, ritualized practice with a structured non-hierarchy

What I keep noticing, session after session: it is a collective practice. The slide decks change, new stories pass and learning happens, but some essence stays the same. Perhaps I am selling my own shop a bit too much, but I am proud that the practice and the online sessions keep structured on purpose to stay that way. There is an epistemology of listening, inviting some humbleness. Our workshop can be seen as a structured (yes, we do some time keeping), non-hierarchical ritual space to practice a mode of attention. We are listening rather than analyzing. This mode let participants touch historical wounds, process (some) ecological grief, and gain a bit of relational insight that conventional academic or other institutional settings suppress or cannot hold.

Most importantly, the tree is not a metaphor being applied to teach a lesson. No, the tree is positioned as a co-teacher whose different time-scale and different form of knowing is the actual pedagogical resource. 

Lastly, no single voice owns writing(with)plants. Each time, different hands hold the space, different plants sit at the center, and still… the effects are the same. In June, it was Merritt hosting with Mimosa. Vitalija has invited Spruce back (and a couple of times). In February, Alette hosted with tree mallow. In January, Lisa hosted, with Medusa head.

The text that emerged in my mind

Another reason I love sitting in the backseat is that I have more headspace to experiment and do some mud writing, which means writing and ignoring the inner critic. Some years ago, I used the creative writing part to write parts that could fit in a current fiction work, but I felt quite some blockages when I tried to process what I had heard in the online workshop and try to merge it with a bigger story in my head.

This year, I let that agenda go and just write what comes up, mostly inspired by stories that other participants shared. As there were talks about the wildfires, and as I had been reading about Portugal’s eldest olive tree being entangled with a bat colony, these images returned in my writing.

Read Lisa’s blogpost to read what she wrote as a result of this session: Writing with Olive.

The new book is an invitation for more

My new book Writing(with)plants operationalizes the same set of principles and aims which were present in this online workshop and previous wriitng(with)plants sessions into a repeatable, shareable method (by providing templates and an invitation to write your own “learning story”).

I hope that the book contributes to scaling a ritual practice into something pedagogically transmissible without flattening it into a formula. Please write in the book and pitch your idea next year to me. I bought 10 ISBN numbers with the idea to produce more Writing(with)plants books in the upcoming years, reacting to previous volumes. One of the criteria is that future volumes highlight other geographies and species (than Flanders and willows, as in this first volume).

From today, you can order a physical copy in the bookshop.