Abi Andrews is a writer from the Midlands. Her debut novel The Word for Woman is Wilderness was published by Serpent's Tail in February 2018. Andrews used her residency to develop work for the National Museum of Australia and a PhD project at the New School of the Anthropocene.

When I arrived at the stone house on Plumwood Mountain for my BREW residency I was ecstatic, if a little overwhelmed, by the number of books I was invited to help myself to. The books of Val Plumwood, inside which lay some of the secrets to Plumwood’s incendiary ideas – which have had so much influence on me – inside I might find some of their origins and fables. I imagined that if I picked up the right books, I would find clues on the path to my own writing project. I pulled out and scanned the title of every single book and journal in the building, making a teetering pile of those in which I thought I might find these answers. How can one person read all these books in ten days? I didn’t. Nor did I sort my incoherent notes on my writing project (on ‘kithness’ and wildlife care) into a neat draft as I had daydreamed. But I got something more from the act of rifling through those books.

Val Plumwood clearly wasn’t one for the hallowed treatment of books. Those books are well-worn, many were heavily annotated, highlighted, stuck with little post it notes – their contents not allowed to rest from scrutiny. Plumwood’s signature was written onto the flyleaf page of many of them. I think books for Plumwood were animate texts, to be shared and passed around, as well as tactile objects to be scribbled on, their resonances drawn attention to, their apparent flaws contested. Never mind a published book being the pinnacle of a well clarified idea, statically bound, as sure of its purpose as a marble bust. Books are more like wet clay; something to pummel, reshape. They are something to help ourselves to – carry away the good bits on our shoulders, like ants. Something closer to the authorlessness of orality than we would normally admit.

This mild sacrilege of marginalia seemed to me to reflect Plumwood’s ethical anti-anthropocentrism. After she was attacked by a crocodile and survived, Plumwood's own philosophical thinking started to coalesce around an ethic that would situate humans as ‘part of the feast’, as agents in, and objects of, ‘an ecological universe of mutual use’. She became insistent on her ‘essential meatiness’. Nothing and no one is above use by others – this is an ecological kind of thinking.

In her life, as in her philosophy, Plumwood was in reciprocity with the land that she lived on. Her stone cottage built from rocks from the land, much of her food from her vegetable garden, and sometimes, feral rabbits. And as the place itself and her relationship to place helped nurture her ideas, so too it is now a site of compost; Plumwood had a natural burial, she literally nourishes the land that nourished her. And so too, the archive inside her stone cottage which is literally food to dust mites and bookworms, and nourishing for me and anyone else who might visit Plumwood Mountain. The assertion of Val Plumwood still inside all those pages; it was like she was reading at my shoulder. It bolstered my feeling that writing is itself ecological. As Plumwood put it: ‘we are incurably members of one another’.

I spent my time at Plumwood Mountain immersed in this living archive, and it gave me encouragement and renewed confidence in my own writing preoccupations. I wrote two short essays: one on archives as compost, and one about Deborah Bird Rose and caring for Flying Foxes.

Read more about her work on Val Plumwood and Deborah Bird Rose at the New School of the Anthropocene here: https://www.nsota.org/post/forest-lover-live-forever

Abi Andrews: 12 - 22 December, 2021

Kris Verdonck & Kristof van Baarle: 19 - 24 May, 2022

Rory King: 19 - 30 July, 2021