Issue #4 - Nisbet - Feeling the Cultural Value of the White Rose Forest

Inquiring Feelingly after the Cultural Value of

the White Rose Forest, an Ecosystem-based Adaptation Programme

Rachel Nisbet

 

Introduction: Cultural Value and the White Rose Forest as an Extended Scenography

Community is fostered by spoken exchange. So poetic makings (poein) that evolve from dialogue can support this process. But exchange is more that just what is said. Breath roots us in feeling, with the parasympathetic nervous system involving a complex feedback network between bodily feelings, digestion heart rate, breath and more (Howland, 2014).  Conversation, then, has an nuanced role in giving place to feeling when negotiating commonly beneficial climate change adaptation practices. The Frankenstein Adaptations # Climate Adaptation seminar series draws on these connections between feeling, breath and placemaking, using interviews as a creative practice to explore how the White Rose Forest (WRF) might equitably enhance the well-being of diverse communities.[1]

That cultural value can be derived from woodlands is well evinced (O’Brian et al. 2024, and references therein). However, in considering how cultural value (namely, spiritual beliefs, practices, and a sense of relationality to nature) could nurtured by the WRF in a changing climate, it is a useful to conceptualise this community forest as an expanded scenography. Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer propose that scenographic interventions in public space have political, social, cultural, and ecological impact (2017). They develop Aronson’s contention that the scenographic ‘framing and positioning’ of audiences outside of theatre buildings constitutes ‘environmental scenography’; indeed, they claim that expanded scenographic interventions occur when the dynamic interaction of ‘bodies, environments and materials’ happens in any space (2017, 7-8). Such exchanges involve affect, relationality, and materiality (2017, 10-13). I adopt this conceptual frame to consider how the WRF might yield cultural value to people living in its catchment, as it enables a shifts from seemingly nature-focused ideas of ecology and environment, to a model of collaborative performance, in which human and more-than-human actors have a part in performing adaptation. The WRF spans east-west from Huddersfield to Scarborough, and north-south from Richmond to Wakefield. Human and more-than-human communities within its area will benefit from flood and heat island buffering and ecological niche enhancement. To consider how diverse communities of people might also derive cultural value from this programme, this article references my interview practice with the WRF programme manager, Iwan Downey. Our exchange was one of three open-ended interviews that were shared in a public seminar at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries in autumn 2024. That seminar event forms the first of a three-part seminar series, with subsequent events planned in York (2025) and Bradford (2026).

As an expanded scenography, the newly planted WRF can represent dynamic conditions of abundance, loss, and restoration for local audiences. Thus, it spatialises a process that is synonymous with the affective adaptation detailed by Strobe and Schuert (2010). These researchers define affective adaptation as a shifting between loss and restoration mindsets, in processing grief. What the first Frankenstein Adaptations # Climate Adaptation seminar event probes is if, and how, the extended scenography of the WRF invites collective acknowledgement of this adaptive coping cycle, as stage adaptations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein appear to do, by representing juxtaposing forested and frozen scenographies, in my reading. This psychological process plausibly bolsters people’s adaptive capacity, following a model where vulnerability to climate change is partly countered by creating a greater sense of community through shared experiences (Walmser 2014).[2] Could a coupling of psychological and socio-environmental adaptive process occur when experiencing scenographies of loss and restoration within the WRF? This question guides the seminar series, and my approach to the interview-as-creative-practice.

 

The Interview as Creative Practice: Looking to Alice Oswald’ Dart

Interviewing is recognised as a creative practice. However, self-reflective methods are needed to position it as a practice capable of establishing spaces of collective listening. As Masschelein and Roach note, questions of subject involvement, editorial control, and scope need to be acknowledged if an interview is to be viewed as both creative and a practice; contributions to style, and content creation also need consideration (2018, 169). These researchers rightly contend that interviewing is ‘a key means of constituting publics, subjects, and authorship in modernity’, with the interviewer embodying broader anxieties regarding impersonalisation and mediation in contemporary society (170). Their observations hold with respect to mainstreaming participatory approaches to climate change adaptation. If earth-system scale geoengineering approaches are advanced to tackle the problem of climate warming via a top-down model, ecosystem-based adaptation emphasises community-based decision-making (FEBA, 2017). Positioning myself as an empathetic interviewer of climate adaptation practitioners and academics whose theatre practice intersects with or furthers community-based climate adaptation, then, fits with Roach and Masschelin’s framing of the literary interview as a listening practice.

In approaching the interview as a creative practice that furthers collaborative listening as a first decision-making step, Alice Oswald’s book-length poem Dart is a key reference. It was the first example of interview-based creative practice that I encountered, during my PhD. A stated aim of Dart is to ‘reconnect the local imagination to its environment’.[3] Although Oswald personally received a Faber Prize for this literary endeavour, the opening pages of her art work foreground its development from ‘conversations’ with people, including significant contributors listed in an opening acknowledgement, who acted as ‘life-models’ for her creative project (2002). The intimation of this text is that the poem’s fictionalised characters are sketched from this material. That their voices are placed within a ‘sound-map’ of the River Dart suggests that Oswald’s fine art analogy is performative, involving exchanges between sounding bodies within an extended scenography. Dart, then, could be understood as is a multi-medial work, whose sonic, visual, and haptic facets are crowd-sourced to produce a representation of a co-created extended scenography. Adopting the interview form enables Oswald to eschew any sublime connotations of speaking directly with animate bodies in nature, such as the River Dart. Instead, her acknowledgement text foregrounds conversations with living people, who ‘helped with this poem’ (2002). Thus, Oswald seems to use a participatory approach to reproduce place-making relationships for a national readership. Consequently, Dart steers clear of Wordsworth’s idea of an intercursus, a latin term used in The Prelude to suggest that he is uniquely privileged to commune with the divinely animated River Derwent (Prel-13 I. 589, 428).[4] Instead, using the medium of poetry to reproduce varying listening capabilities, Oswald exchanges with many people, who live within the River Dart watershed and respond feelingly towards it, collaging her poem from these conversations. Thus, Dart  reinterprets a late eighteenth-century idea that, as John Mee reminds us, views intersubjective conversation as providing ‘a key terrain working out the communities’ values, rather than performing them in a prescriptive way.[5] I draw on this idea of a collective conversation in approaching the interview as a creative practice that – to borrow Mee’s words – facilitates a ‘collision or communion’ between different ideas.[6] Positioning the embodied knowledge of interviewer and interviewees to engage a wide audience appears key to successful creative practice in this regard.

Questions of standpoint are central to my practice. Accordingly, I draw on a key formal characteristic of Virgil’s Georgics since, like Dart, the seminar series and podcast that I am making can be regarded as participatory, georgic productions. Virgil’s poem invites participation alongside an awareness of contrasting standpoints, as it is characterised by the extensive use of second person address. For Robert Cowan, Virgil’s Georgics guides the reader in how to act: the poet’s ‘you should’ establishing ‘a parallel between the performance of composing for a reader and the practice of teaching of agriculture to a trainee farmer (2018, 272-3).[7] In his view, the poem’s second-person, repeated imperatives to action blur the extradiegetic and the intradiegetic addressee, involving the reader in processes of enactment (ibid). Thus, a georgic poet assumes the standpoint of a guide or coach. Oswald, who read Classics, is very likely aware of this blurring process, achieved by using second person address, and may well adopt it in collaging the loose transcripts of her tape-recorded interviews with people living and working in the River Dart catchment: the practice emphasises the inclusive power of ‘you’. However, rather than emphasising her own authority as a guide, in the style of Wordsworth, Oswald leverages her poet-standpoint to amplify her interviewees use of ‘you’.  In broadening the authority of speakers in her poem to include the embodied wisdom of many participant interviewees, Oswald develops the Georgics implicit ‘you should’; accordingly, the guidance shared in her text implicates her readers in a questioning their performance within the extended scenographies of the Dart bioregion. Donna Haraway’s use of a marine reproductive metaphor in discussing literary interviews  as productions that occur outside of one individual’s body indicates how the Georgic imperative of ‘you should’ becomes pluralised, multi-vocal and productive in unpredictable ways in Oswald’s poetics (1995, xii). My own interview practice similarly seeks to amplify and juxtapose the wisdom of my interviewees regarding the curation of equitable adaptation processes. By mediating their ‘differentiated visions’ of adaptation practices, using a podcast medium, I aim to shift focus from a prescriptive georgic, to collaborative, site-specific georgic practice.  Interviewing, then, becomes a means to shape participatory, georgic creative practice. Firstly, by capturing community-sourced guidance on adaptation practice, ‘you should’, or ‘you do’. Secondly, by tuning into the feelings that accompany discussion about loss and restoration mindsets, that accompany adaption in grief, and during climate change.

 

Recording as Method: Breathing as Aesthetics

Interviewing, in my practice, also involves recording methods used in ethnobiographic studies. Albuquerque et al. note that tape recording open ended interviews can help conversation to ‘flow freely without any concern’.[8] They observe that the technique can ‘strengthen the affective bonds with the investigated population and identify new facts that might be of interest’.[9] In staged public interviews, affective bonds between interviewer and interviewee might also be strengthened, if the exchange is felt to be a supportive alliance, before a live audience. Methods of recording, remixing, and disseminating interviews from the seminar series are also integral to the podcasting element of my practice. However, I want to reproduce a sense of ‘liveness’ in this process. My podcast experience, thus far, is that recording captures the feelings and knowledge of interviewer and interviewees, which are reflected not just in the content of what is said, but also in what Tremblay refers to as ‘breathing aesthetics’: namely, a mediation of breath that can be nurturing, or can cut off others’ flow (2022, 2). In analysing poems that cultivate attention to the fact that breathing does not exactly coincide with speech acts, Tremblay offers the insight that ‘air is a conduit between the guttural and skeletal adjustments that produce breath’ (ibid. 5). Foregrounding this gap between affect and the ability to articulate feeling verbally, as nameable emotion, informs my evolving podcast practice.[10] In a first commissioned podcast series I made, available here; and, in the recorded interview with Iwan that I shared with a live audience at Leeds University at the first Frankenstein Adaptations # Climate Adaptation seminar, I often sought to smooth the phrasing of interviewees answers and those used in my own interview questions during editing. Removing hesitations and stutters, for instance, seemingly bolstered our authority as guides, who invite reflection on adaptation, as a participatory practice. However, while an ‘authoritative guide standpoint’ shapes community involvement with the WRF, with public engagement following initial planting phases, it seems increasingly important to include preverbal expressions of ambivalent feeling about adaptation, in my podcast editing for this project. Specifically, because mediating affects of uncertainty can invite more nuanced or vulnerable expression of public feelings about equitable access to green spaces, like the WRF. Showing it is challenging to articulate feelings about cultural value, via the podcast medium hopefully invites more inclusive conversation, where stumbles, uncertainties and strong feelings are given space.

Microphones recording the first Frankenstein Adaptations # Climate Adaptation seminar in the series felt unobtrusive. However, the presence of a live audience intensified the shifting affects arising in conversing with my generous interviewees. Similarly, knowing that the Zoom-recorded interview with Iwan Downey anticipated this future live audience also shaped my feelings of trepidation in making it. Recording these exchanges preserves how shifts in feeling accompany and inform the semantic content of our conversation. In my podcast practice, then, I want to respectfully identify and give place to some of these affect-rich slippages between breath and speech act. Doing so acknowledges that conversations about the cultural value of green spaces that are designed as climate change adaptation initatives can be deeply felt.

 

Autoethnography as Georgic Method

Listening for what catalyzes shifts in feelings in the seminar series interviews, while editing the recorded material for a podcast audience, forms the second step of my method. This process seeks to involve a broader demographic in considering how they might engage with the WRF. I cultivate this listening attitude, via an auto-ethnographic method; thus, it differs from Olufemi’s research method, which is the connecting thread between articles in this CEPRA journal issue. Olufemi asserts that her method is “above all, feeling!”, a probing technique to evaluate ‘what it is that keeps us here, what it is that stops us from deciding to leave’ (Olufemi 2021, 8). While foregrounding a practice of self-reflexivity at the start of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Olufemi appears to adopt an emotional autoethnographic method, characterised as creating a ‘moment’ of ‘qualitative inquiry’ (Anderson 2006, 374 and references therein). She advocates for her readers to resit the urge to contextualise events within a chronological narrative, and rather to value the affective power of fragmentary images (2021, 14). Olufemi’s approach to feeling is, then, in my view characterised by a synedocial approach; the feeling associated with a fragmentary incident indicate the wellbeing state of that feeling body within a systemic, societal whole.

In contrast with Olufemi’s part:whole diagnostic approach, whose method involves snapshots of feeling, I turn to a narrative, autoethnograpic method to situate the feelings of myself and my family members in relation to the WRF programme. My creative practice, then, draws on  autoethnography as a georgic methodology that situates a speaker with respect to affects experienced in a particular place and time: in other words in a specific expanded scenographic scene. A striking feature of the Georgics is that in this text the poet situates himself within a coupled socio-cultural and geophysical cosmic system. This embedded standpoint enables him to analyse the system in which he belongs, and to invite its partial transformation through creative praxis that might potentially guide his readers actions, using poetic narrative. Virgil situates himself as an embodied observer within the Italian (Mantuan) countryside, where his father’s farm was located. Additionally, he anchors his poetic voice in feeling; for instance, declaring ‘I…in obscurity love the woods and rivers’ (Georgics II. lines 485-6; trans. David Ferry 2015, loc 1258). Thus, Virgil mediates an extended scenography, while representing himself within it as a feeling and sounding body.

Drawing on this auto-ethnographic, Virgilian practice, I crafted an interview script for my exchange with Iwan Downey that was designed to situate myself, feelingly, within the WRF catchment. But in addition to establishing my standpoint relative to the three dimensional, cartographic space of a specific, ancient woodland inside the WRF area, I also situated myself within the fourth, temporal dimension of the forest’s growth. I achieved this by relating the woodland’s extended scenography to feelings recorded by my grandfather and great-grandfather in diaries and autobiographical writings. Discussing my family’s relationship to this woodland gave me an opportunity to invite Iwan Downey to relate his family’s intergenerational sylviculture practice to UK forestry history. Thus, we plotted feeling into this forestry history, using a situated, authoethnographic georgic approach. In our conversation, Iwan suggested that adaptation can be motivated by different societal values at different times: a desire to produce instrumental financial value in a fearful postwar period, ceding at least partly to a desire to nurture relational value, by planting woodlands as places that might foster wellbeing and cultural value within the climate change adaptation initiative of the WRF. This is a narrative account, rich in feeling.

Reflecting in this manner on our exchange within this article is characteristic of the analytic autoethnography method. Anderson defines it as the positioning of ourselves as ‘complete member researchers’; assuming ‘analytic reflexitivity’; and the narrative visibility of ourselves as researchers, as we ‘dialogue with informants beyond the self’, and finally, commitment to theoretical analysis (2006, 378). In assuming an analytical approach to autoethnography rather than an emotional one, I eschew Olufemi’s method of using feeling in acts of re-enchantment. Her method of feeling involves the active modulation of breathing habits; for instance, ‘building feeling to a crescendo’, via a quasi-baptismal altered state of breath holding, in anticipation of a coming ‘up for air’ that restores belief (2021, 35). In contrast to this in-the-moment method of feeling, focused attention to standpoint and narrative in my georgic-informed creative informs the aesthetics of breath I aim to create in editing interviewee narratives. This practice reproduces moments of feeling, while relating a breath aesthetics to narrative content.

 

Towards a Participatory, Georgic Podcast

 

Editing a feeling-led podcast from seminar recordings was a process suggested to me by attending a poetry workshop run by Alice Oswald. With composer Stevie Wishart, she co-led a week-long, music and poetry exploration (Dartington Summer School, August 2017). It culminated in a performance using a graphic score, laid across a floor. Oswald shaped the score, deciding where individual vocal entries should occur within a frame narrative provided by Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s ‘Echo and Narcissus’. The individual scores that we participants made, as voicings of our versions of this myth, were positioned as vocal solos or duets within the collective score. The running order of these solos and duets was very possibly shaped by a desire to create a particular tone or affective atmosphere at a given point in the performance. Thus, shaping a listening-focused, affective journey for the audience. Echo and Narcissus are respectively guided by sonic and visual information, which combined can lead to greater understanding and collaboration in addressing a situation. Thinking with Oswald in my podcast editing, then, leads me to amplify moments in interview recordings where breath establishes a connection between feeling and the verbal articulation of meaning. In podcast editing, I will also foreground visual imagery, shared by my interviewees that might help podcast listeners to connect the felt, embodied spaces of my interviewees (and the characters they evoke) to the perceptual space represented in their narratives. It is hoped that this creative practice of inquiring feelingly through interview narratives mediated by podcasting will foster equitable engagement with the WRF.

 

Bibliography

Anderson, Leon. “Analytic Autoethnography” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35:4 (2006), pp. 373-395.

Haraway, Donna. ‘Foreword’ to Gary Olsen, and Elizabeth Hirsh eds. Women, Writing, Culture. New York: SUNY Press, 1995.

Masschelein, Anneleen and Rebecca Roach. “Putting Things Together: To Interviewing as Creative Practice. Biography 41:2 (2018), pp. 169-178.

McKinney Joslin and Scott Palmer. Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017.

Olufemi, Lola. Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. N.P.:Hajar Press, 2021.

Strobe M.S. and Schut, H.A.W “The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement: A Decade on” Journal of Death and Dying 61:4 (2010), pp. 273-289.

Tremblay, John-Thomas. Breading Aesthetics. London: Duke University Press, 2022.

 

Endnotes:

[1] Live interviews with Proffessor Steven Scott-Bottoms and Professor Andrew Quick on 28.11.2024 were financed by a School of Performance and Cultural Industries Research Committee grant (Leeds University) and a post-doctoral bursary from the Société Académique Vaudoise.

[2] Adaptive capacity is ‘the ability of a system [or person] to adjust to climate change… to moderate potential damages, to take advantage of opportunities, or to cope with the consequences’; IPCC 2007a: 21; quoted in Wamsler 2014, 28).

[3] Alice Oswald, ‘Interim Report’, May 1999, http://archive.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/archives/places/dart/.

[4] Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short translate intercursus as ‘a running-between’, A Latin Dictionary; Founded on Andrews’ edition of Freund’s Latin dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/resolveform?type=exact&lookup=intercursus&lang=la

[5] Jon Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 5.

[6] Ibid. 32.

[7] Cowan characterises georgic poetry, specifically, by its use of autotelic, second person address that conflates reader and narratee (2018, 272). Commenting on Eighteenth-century georgic, Keavis Goodman makes the related claim that ‘poetry invested in the georgic mode obsessively tests its mediating power’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 8. The narrative device of second person, epideictic address is also used in lyric poetry and ecopoetic texts, with Margaret Ronda describing it as a writerly attempt to ‘draw into relation’ (Culler 2015, 241-242; Ronda 2014, 105).

[8] Albuquerque, Ulysses Paulino et al., Methods and Techniques in Ethnobiology and Ethnoecology (New York: Springer, 2016), 3.

[9] Ibid. 25.

[10] This disjunct between affect or feeling, and articulatable emotional understanding is traced with brio by Matthew Reason as a difference between ‘having sense and making sense’ (2016, 19).