OUR STORY

Planting Seeds

In May 2017, Andrea, with the help of her PhD student Jackie, led five undergraduate researchers in the JHI Scholars in Residence program at the University of Toronto in an experiment called Estrogen Stories. The students interviewed friends and family about their experiences with this popular hormone, and brainstormed how they might tell stories in which a hormone served as the central character.

In the Summer and Fall of 2017, Andrea assembled an eclectic group of women -- a farmer, an outdoor educator, a beekeeper, a visual artist, a poet, a fermentation expert, along with current and former graduate students to engage in a series of collaborative writing experiments at Bela Farm, a centre for creative cultivation that Andrea had co-founded.

Our goal was to bring bodies and the Earth into the work of writing.

As Alexandra said early on, we wanted to pursue “not just deskwork, but Earthwork” and see what emerged from the relationship between them. 

We planned two sets of experiments. The first revolved around permaculture design, which Andrea and many in the group had learned and practiced in the planning for Bela Farm. The second focussed on the microbiome; group members would test their gut bacteria and then write about who was living within them. 

We began with permaculture. Our plan was to use these design principles to plan and plant a medicinal herb garden at Bela Farm, and engage in a series of life writing exercises at the same time, observing how the two kinds of work informed one another.  How, we wondered, might an ecological design for growing things – whether garden or memoir – lead to new forms of expression?   

What is Permaculture?

The word “Permaculture” was coined by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison in the 1970s  as a contraction of “permanent” and “agriculture” and was originally conceived as a set of farming techniques. Drawing inspiration from natural ecosystems, it has developed into a complex design philosophy.

Permaculture design is used by people all over the world for creating ecologically sound households, gardens, communities and businesses which privilege Earth care, people care and fair share.

As Bonita taught us in our first lesson, “Permaculture is a language for those of us who grew up not learning how to take care of our needs in harmony with the rest of the living world.” We became fluent in the history and practice of permaculture at the same time that we were coming to terms with the ravages of colonization. We now understand that permaculture owes much of its theory and practice to traditional and indigenous knowledges from all over the world. These principles and ethics are embedded in and emerge from a worldview that sees humans as nature, as part of a vast web of relations. In order to truly practice permaculture design, we must shift our entire worldview.

For more on the need to decolonize permaculture see http://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/whitewashed-hope-message-10-indigenous-leaders-and-organizations.

The Problem Contains the Solution

Under the able guidance of Bonita Ford of LivinghEARTH, we learned about observing and interacting, valuing margins and edges, planning from needs, zone mapping, and much more. Inspired by our new tools, we wrote short pieces mapping our lives and our bodies. We applied permaculture principles to literary text, reading Rebecca Solnit’s memoir The Faraway Nearby in surprising new ways. We walked the land at Bela Farm, cultivating our observational faculties and created maps of all that we discovered.

The result? Some lovely pieces of writing, a beautiful series of maps and One Very Important Corrective. Lesson #1 of Permaculture Planning:  Don’t start with what.  Start with why. 

We began the experiment with a grand vision that involved a large and complicated project with many moving pieces. As we explored our needs, assessed our resources, and walked the land, we had a revelation: The land was alive with medicinal plants growing wild in every corner.  We didn’t need to plant an herb garden. The farm already was an herb garden! This was a remarkable example of a permaculture principle in action: “the problem contains the solution.”

This discovery changed the whole trajectory of the project and led us to re-think our research goals. If we weren’t going to create a garden, what exactly were we doing?  Why was life writing so important? What connections were we trying to make between bodies, Earth, and stories? And why? 

Starting Small and Slow

From that point forward, we hewed closely to Principle #2:  Start Small and Slow.  We put both experiments on the back burner and spent months re-designing the project in two ways that seemed very different but that actually demonstrated the interconnected methodology we were yearning for. 

First, we delved into the myth of our newly-adopted namesake, creating a communal Farewell to Persephone ritual at Bela Farm in October of 2017. We planted garlic, read the Hymn to Demeter aloud, shared a harvest meal, and discussed next steps. 

Then we used a grant application to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to articulate in detail the scholarly goals of our work and the unusual methods we intended to employ to achieve them.  

​What was emerging by the end of 2017 was a plan for a whole new way of conducting land-based research and collaborative creative work, a project that would take its cues from the Earth, from the community, and from the bodies of those creating it.

What’s in a Name?

We initially conceived of our collective as a lab and our work as a series of experiments. As we were exploring stories of women’s bodies and environmental crisis, we searched for project names that might convey a sense that we ourselves were “canaries in the coal mine.”

We brainstormed for weeks. But no matter how many permutations of “canary” and “lab” we tried, nothing seemed to catch. Something was missing.

Finally, sparked by a discussion about Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s foundational research on bodies and environmental toxins, Caroline, the Project Research Associate at the time, made the offhand suggestion that we adopt the goddess of the Spring and call ourselves “The Persephone Project.” An aha moment! The densely allusive Persephone myth — with its focus on seasons, cycles of life, mother/daughter relations, agriculture and abundance — felt like just the kind of story we were working towards. And we loved the alliteration as well.

It took years for us to fully understand the implications of the name we had chosen. But we knew that Persephone had appeared among us for a reason and it was our job to follow wherever she led.

Permaculture Planning Year

(2018-19)

In the Spring of 2018, with a generous grant from SSHRC in hand, we began to re-configure our work around the objectives we had outlined in the application.  

Our new starting point was the story emerging from self-help books and memoirs by and for North American middle class professional women. Assumed to epitomize the success story of liberal feminism, these women instead were suffering from an epidemic of fatigue, depression, fertility issues, hormone dysfunction and chronic illness. We saw a connection between the exhaustion of these women and environmental resource collapse: whether draining bodies or aquifers, a culture predicated on the myth of individual autonomy and the rampant depletion of resources was by definition unsustainable, even for its most privileged members. 

Inspired by Persephone’s annual journey between the worlds of living and dead, spring and winter, female and male, bodies and minds, we sought new stories that could challenge this ethic of depletion. And so we explicitly gathered together writers, artists, and literary scholars to comprise the new research team.  

In the Fall of 2018, Andrea, Bonnie, Sharon, Roz, Sasha, Jackie, Alexandra, Rochelle, Alisha and Caroline travelled to Bela Farm to meet one another and learn about the project. Andrea described the permaculture principles we had learned in the pilot year and the new members of the group were intrigued. We decided to begin with another permaculture training session, but this time with a twist. Instead of designing a garden, we were going to use permaculture principles to design a collaborative research and writing project.  

Observing and Interacting

In November 2018 we gathered once again with Bonita, this time in a large room at the University of Toronto.  After introducing the new members to permaculture principles and ethics, Bonita proceeded to the basics of permaculture design. She noted that in academia, one often begins with what you are going to create: an essay, a book, a class, a lecture. In permaculture design, on the other hand, we ask “why?” before asking “what?”

To ask “why,” we used the permaculture system of zones to identify the different groups invested in the project: the research team, our readers and students, our larger intellectual and spiritual community, and the Earth itself. We then assessed the specific needs of each group.  

What do we need?  Why are we coming together to create a project?  Much discussion of passions, frustrations, anxieties and obligations circling around our shared work in the environmental humanities led us to a need that we all felt keenly:  

We need a new way to know and to listen.

Ways to hear those who do not speak in human language, ways to cultivate a different kind of listening, ways to understand and act upon what we hear, structures that allow us to practice and learn this unfamiliar language. This primary need led us to more specific needs: a body of teachings to support us, social relationships that could help us make use of that support, the time to listen, discover and write.  

​We then considered the needs of our broader community and the Earth. The broad need was painfully clear: all of us -- and the Earth -- need an urgent and effective response to environmental crisis.  Some related needs of our students and readers emerged from this observation --  a need for a new kind of writing and teaching that incorporates a wide variety of communal voices, and the voices of the living Earth.  

It was hard to hold us back -- we kept jumping to strategies, projects, ideas for action.  Bonita counselled us to stick with this phase of the design process longer.  To spend some time observing our reactions and letting our understanding of needs and zones deepen.

Integrate Rather than Segregate

Over the winter, we turned to permaculture principles as we slowly moved toward a plan.  We observed our reactions to one another and the process. We considered the renewable resources already available within the group. We looked for the smallest change that would deliver the greatest impact. And most important, we kept reminding ourselves to start small and slow.

We researched how permaculture was being used in other contexts, delved deeper into zones and needs, created models to try to represent these mind-maps, and eventually began brainstorming strategies and actions.  By the late winter, we were able to condense hours of conversation into this list:

1. A way to take action

2. New listening and language skills

3. Rituals and practices for staying connected to what we hear and learn

4. Emotional resilience in the face of environmental crisis

5. A supportive intellectual/artistic community to work with in facing environmental challenges

6. Time: to work, to rest, in nature, with family, alone, sacred time, seasonal awareness

7. Institutional structures that support our collaborative, land-based teaching, writing, and working methods

8. Outreach and mass communication skills

9. Inspiring reading material

10. A system for recording and archiving our work.

Andrea felt it was important to give the permaculture experiment time to unfold, which meant staying with the “why” question longer than felt comfortable. But by late winter, the group was getting antsy; it was time to find a way to ground our conversations in real issues, projects, goals. And in the land. 

After studying the needs and strategies list, engaging in individual conversations with group members, and thinking hard about what connects the work all of us do, Andrea realized that many of our concerns revolved around what it means to be “at home” in this place and time. Which led to a “where” question:  We had assumed that whatever project we invented would happen at Bela Farm, but Andrea began to wonder if permaculture planning pointed us in a different direction.  She wrote to Sharon:

“I'm feeling a need to be more grounded in the places we live our daily lives, not in a pastoral retreat, as beautiful as Bela is. I think it is too easy for us to fall into the old ‘nature is out there’ way of thinking and to overlook the very real ‘nature’ we inhabit and embody every day. I'm wondering if our homes, and the land on which they sit and the neighborhoods of which they are a part, might serve as an interesting, immediate, and deeply personal anchor for a writing project.”

The group responded enthusiastically and so in March 2019, we convened at Andrea’s house in downtown Toronto to outline a research project investigating the current idea of “home” in urban North America -- and specifically in our home in Southern Ontario -- for women, for whom home and homemaking continue to be a fraught subject; for immigrants/settlers, who find it difficult to feel “at home” on contested land; and for Earthlings, living on land, on a planet, in deep crisis.  

Wandering Home

Committed to the primary need we had identified (new listening and language skills in relation to land), we planned a series of workshops, created by individual research team members for the group, that would involve “deep learning about and close listening to our own backyards, workplaces, and communities.” 

The Home Workshops, as we came to call them, would meet many other needs as well:  we would meet for a full day each month for a year, giving us time, supportive intellectual community, and a way of building emotional resilience in the face of crisis.  Each workshop leader would circulate inspiring reading material and create embodied rituals and practices for staying connected to what we hear and learn. We formulated a plan for recording and archiving the work, which involved hiring a filmmaker and work study students.    

“And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her.”

Hymn to Demeter, line 16