Alexia Tiches on Ecofiction
Artwork by Alexia Tiches
Genre is advertising.
Market an expression. Sell it to a wide audience. Think of your brand. Think of your angle. Monetize that primordial urge to make sense of the world around you and hope the endless work will pay off in a career that shows just how wise you really are.
Genre is borders.
What makes ecofiction different from any other form beyond the name we tack onto it? A novel and the mating dance of a Red-Capped Manakin arise from the same impulse to prove that we’re here. Do you see me? I’m alive in this moment, in this place.
Genre is propaganda.
There is no separation between stories, just as there is no separation between humans, mountains, or bacteria. Division only benefits those who wish to be superior to the ecosystem and have the biggest, most sterile mansion in the world.
You ask about ecofiction.
How can I define this urgency to express my own little relation in a world inching toward extinction? How can I capture this present before it’s gone forever, before our stories become echoes of some mythological past? Are we writing to the future, or are we trying to breach the boundaries that separate us now?
And yet you still want to know?
Ecofiction is that swath of pine, grown and chopped, beaten into pulp and bleached, pressed and printed for the book you just bought at the airport. Your sister just had a baby. You can’t wait to see her and hold the newest member of your family, to welcome the child into this world. It’s been too long since you’ve all been together, and you radiate with excitement. But there are still many hours between you. So, you sit at the gate with a smutty novel that once was an idea in some spinster’s head, who then typed away on a computer that was once microscopic metallic particles deep in the earth’s core. The rocks, the forest, the faith in her craft and idealized love. Hope.
That trashy romance was written with the same atoms as fallen stars, Parthenon marble, freshwater mussels, soccer balls, birthday candles, fresh milk, wild horses, the Amazon rainforest, Amazon warehouses, that thick white paint landlords brush over everything, newborn babies, silver lichen, Monsanto soybeans, the boat that brought your grandparents to this country, the coal that powered that boat, the megafauna that crushed into itself to make that coal, the sun that fed that fauna.
That airport book, which you read on a whim to pass time, to keep you company on a long journey, is listed under the romance section of the store.
Yet it defies definition and genre.
It’s all ecofiction.
It’s everything.
Alexia Tiches is a writer, visual artist, and performer currently based out of Chicago. Almost finished with an MA in Science Writing at Johns Hopkins University, her work focuses on the intersection of the existential dread created by modernity, the whimsy of nature, and the seemingly unfeeling oddities that come out of science. Her work has been featured in Off the Wall Plays and About Place. To enter her Amoeba-verse, you can read and see more at: amoebablah.com and on Instagram at @i_am_just_amoeba