Maro Reus on Ecofiction
Photo by Meg von Haartman
The commercially dominant modern world is one of falsity. Advertising is a thick smog. It leaks through our window screens and oozes out of the linoleum. In our most densely populated places, it’s louder than us, louder than the breeze, summer rain, the trees; louder than the birds—sister earthlings from long before we became homo sapiens. Revolt and counter culture are packaged up neat and sold back to us with gusto. Our bodies are packaged up neat and sold back to us with gusto. Many people have never see the Milky Way, our tapestry and map for millions of years. Home to every single earthling that ever has and ever will live. Innate beauty. Many people don’t know to grieve it.
We have been making art since before we were homo sapiens too. In many ways, any story about living is eco fiction. Even nonfiction must drain through the gauze of a writer tasting the air, rubbing sleep from salted eyes, breaking teeth through the thin skin of fresh fruit. Human creation can’t be cleaved from the animal acts of life. I don’t think we should try. The lie is that we ever could. The lie is the reason we need to find eco fiction now.
There was a time when all our stories were about birds and stars and our grand, infinitesimal home. Eco fiction makes the deliberate choice to tell those stories again—and acknowledges that we never stopped. Stories of the earth are our oldest, and only, canon. They are us. Life is fiction, and the trees were telling it before we were.
Maro Reus is an Oregon based archaeologist who moonlights as a writer. Incorrigibly curious, she's lived all over the world and spends much of her time exploring spaces abandoned by the status quo. Her work will be appearing next in The Deadlands.
