[version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations]
No competing interests were disclosed.
This study explores how contemporary literature writes
The authors employ three key strategies for multispecies care. First, affective intimacy draws readers into close, empathetic encounters with nonhumans without projecting human consciousness onto them. Second, temporal layering and attention to collective memory situate human and nonhuman lives within shared histories and ecological rhythms. Third, ethical engagement with nonhuman suffering allows literature to recognize damage and loss in nonhumans, fostering moral reflection and interspecies responsibility. Through these strategies, this study demonstrates how writing with trees can function as a multispecies practice of attention, care, and ethical imagination, offering a framework for understanding literature as a site of relational and ecological engagement.
This study examines how three contemporary novels—Elif Şafak’s
Recent scholarship on the relational lives of trees and forests entwines multiple forms of knowing, showing that literature can participate in the webs of multispecies care rather than merely represent it. In
Some books in this growing literature investigate the lives of trees primarily as a way to illuminate human life. For instance, Spencer’s
While theoretical frameworks emphasise active relationality and care in forests, 21st-century fiction increasingly engages with climate change, environmental anxieties, and social-ecological injustices (
Ecofeminist literature increasingly challenges the anthropocentric paradigms that have long dominated Western thought, particularly in the representation of nonhuman entities. For instance,
Just as merely including women in research does not in itself make a study feminist (
Although anthropomorphism and anthropodenial have traditionally been discussed in the context of human–animal relations, these concepts can also be extended to trees and other nonhuman plants. This tendency is reflected in what
To explore how such careful forms of anthropomorphism and attention to nonhuman agency can be enacted in literature, the analysis now turns to three contemporary novels that exemplify these possibilities. In the first part of the results section, Shafak’s fig tree functions as both narrator and witness, entwining human memory, loss, and migration with arborial endurance. The tree’s voice invites readers into an affective intimacy bordering on anthropomorphism, yet its rootedness and cyclical temporality open a nonhuman perspective on storytelling. The second section explores Le Guin’s portrayal of a collective arboreal consciousness, where trees communicate and act in ways that challenge colonial and patriarchal logics. This depiction exemplifies anthropodenial, acknowledging the sentience of trees while resisting human-centred narratives; here, the forest itself becomes a site of epistemological resistance, where trees think, communicate, and act in ways that reconfigure the boundaries of the political. In the third section, Kingsolver’s Appalachian ecology offers a quieter, more relational approach through its intertwined female voices, grounded in ecological entanglement. It presents a mode of writing in which human and nonhuman lives are interwoven through an ethics of care, highlighting the interconnectedness of all life forms. Together, these novels demonstrate how writing with trees generates ecofeminist forms of attention, reciprocity, and resistance. In this sense, ecofeminist literature does not merely represent nature but reconfigures storytelling itself as a multispecies practice of ethical imagination.
This study employs a qualitative, interpretive methodology grounded in ecofeminist literary criticism, drawing on feminist posthumanist thought (
Methodologically, “feminine writing” informs the reading practice by guiding attention to narrative forms, rhythms, and sensibilities that foreground relationality and embodiment. In analysing the three novels, this approach allows for noticing how the texts enact flows of attention between humans and nonhumans, mirroring the ways trees themselves mediate multispecies encounters. By applying feminine writing as a lens to read-with, the study attends not only to what is narrated but also to how stories unfold, tracing affective, sensory, and ethical connections across species and spaces.
The choice of novels is guided by three criteria. The choice of novels is guided by three criteria. First, each text highlights trees: they are neither exclusively about humans nor solely about trees, but depict both clearly, emphasising the entanglement of human and nonhuman lives in their titles, cover pages, and subject matter. Second, each novel is treated as a distinct experiment in
The study bridges these frameworks by pairing each novel with a key thinker whose concepts illuminate its multispecies ethics. Şafak’s fig tree is read through Anna Tsing’s ideas of “friction” and “collaborative survival” (2015), foregrounding how human and nonhuman beings sustain one another in damaged landscapes. Le Guin’s forest world is examined alongside Donna Haraway’s notions of “sympoiesis” and “response-ability” (2016), where storytelling functions as a collective act of world-making that resists colonial and patriarchal logics on a damaged planet. Kingsolver’s Appalachian ecology is approached through Thom van Dooren’s concepts of “mourning”, “ecological ghost”, and “shared vulnerability” (2014, 2017), highlighting the affective and ethical dimensions of extinction and multispecies care. Through this integrated framework, literature is read as a multispecies practice of thought and care, attending to how trees, and the writing that grows with them, reshape storytelling, ethics, and multispecies coexistence itself.
Elif Şafak’s
At the heart of this storytelling stands the fig tree, rooted in the soil yet deeply entwined with human dramas. As both witness and one of the narrators, the tree mediates between human experiences and arboreal life, reflecting on memory, displacement, and interconnection. One of Şafak’s most compelling narrative strategies is her inclusion of both human and nonhuman narrators. Fig Tree is not the sole narrator of the novel, yet some events are recounted from multiple perspectives, allowing readers to perceive how a single occurrence is situated differently across human and nonhuman worlds. This repetition is not redundant; rather, it illuminates the intersections and divergences of human and arboreal experiences across time and space. Through what can be termed
“Despite all this, it would take me seven years to be able to yield fruit again. Because that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don't simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside, so that another part can start all over again.” (p.55)
Here, the fig tree frames migration and trauma as processes that affect multiple species, illustrating
Building on its established role as a witness, Shafak further develops the tree’s engagement with trauma through temporal and historical layering. The fig tree’s life in the tavern, blooming amidst social and political upheaval, exemplifies its enduring role in facilitating relational ties and hope:
“The voices of our motherlands never stop echoing in our minds. We carry them with us everywhere we go. Still today, here in London, buried in this grave, I can hear those same sounds, and I wake up trembling like a sleepwalker who realizes he has ventured dangerously into the night.” (p.341).
Here, the fig tree observes the characters’ losses and transformations, translating their experiences through its own temporal and botanical perspective. Shafak’s strategy of attentive intimacy allows the tree to convey human-like emotions without reducing its own agency to a mere projection of humanity. At the heart of this affective engagement is listening. The fig tree becomes a bridge of affective intimacy by listening to its surroundings, and connecting readers to human grief, resilience, and renewal while maintaining its distinct botanical voice. It neither fully humanizes the tree nor renders it silent; instead, it mediates between human and more-than-human experiences, inviting readers to inhabit a space of shared attention and care.
Another strategy for fostering multispecies care is a temporal and historical approach that understands history not as solely man (
"In a tavern named the Happy Fig, with a blooming tree at the center, it was hard not to feel hopeful." (p.93).
The tree’s vitality and growth are rendered in ways that resonate with human emotion, yet its presence is never reduced to a mere human symbol. Instead, the fig tree mediates between human experience and botanical life, offering a space where readers can sense interconnectedness and relationality.
Shafak’s writing strategy also involves an attentive focus on the distinct characteristics of each living being, grounded in careful observation and understanding. Through this approach, the fig tree reflects on survival, adaptation, and transgenerational memory, portraying tree life as capable of learning, responding to stress, and passing experience to subsequent generations. Its consciousness and ethical awareness resonate with human understanding, yet remain rooted in plant-specific realities rather than functioning as a projection of human thought:
“A tree knows that life is all about self-learning. Under stress, we make new combinations of DNA, new genetic variations. Not only stressed plants, but also their offspring do this, even if they themselves might not have undergone any similar environmental or physical trauma. You might call it transgenerational memory. At the end of the day, we all remember for the same reason we try to forget, to survive in a world that neither understands nor values us.” (p.100)
Shafak portrays the fig tree as a sensitive witness to trauma, both human and botanical, observing the subtle marks of stress and imbalance: “cracks in our trunks, splits that won’t heal, leaves that display autumn colors in spring.” (p.100). Through this approach, the tree speaks with care and insight, acknowledging suffering without reducing it to human terms and memory. At the same time, the tree situates itself within a web of relationality, recognizing its connections to fungi, bacteria, and the wider ecological community:
“But no matter what kind of trouble it may be going through, a tree always knows it is linked to endless lifeforms. From honey fungus, the largest living thing, down to the smallest bacteria and archaea, and that its existence is not an isolated happenstance, but intrinsic to a wider community." (p.100).
The fig tree observes people’s rituals with a mix of curiosity, affection, and subtle humour. It interprets human actions —knocking on wood, scattering eggshells, burning fires— not merely as superstitions, but as practices with tangible effects on the vegetal world. By highlighting how these actions enrich soil and nourish plants, Shafak positions the tree as an ethical and knowledgeable witness, attentive to human behaviour yet retaining its own distinct perspective:
“Personally, I don't mind such superstitions. Some can even be helpful for us plants. The rusty nails she sticks inside flower pots to chase away the jinn make soil alkaline. Similarly, the wood ash left from the fires she burns to remove a hex contains potassium, which can be nourishing. And as for the eggshells she spreads around in the hope of attracting good fortune, they too are an enriching compost. I just wonder how she continues to carry out these old rituals without realizing that they originate from a deep reverence for us trees.” (p.177).
Here, anthropomorphism is responsible and reflective: the tree speaks with human-like understanding to convey insight, but it does not lose its arboreal identity. It shows readers how humans and trees interact in reciprocal, often unrecognized ways, embodying the ecofeminist strategy of cultivating empathy, relational awareness, and ethical attentiveness across species.
The fig tree draws attention to its connections beyond humans, highlighting relationships with other life forms, for example, butterflies. By noting their migratory feats and contesting the human perception of fragility, the tree demonstrates a broad ecological awareness, emphasizing resilience and interdependence across species. Importantly, this is not a romanticized view: the tree recognizes the butterflies’ capabilities as they are, neither idealizing nor reducing them to symbols of beauty or delicacy.
“The next day, the butterflies came. (…) They can fly for an impressive 2,500 miles. I have never understood why humans regard butterflies as fragile. Optimists they may be, but fragile, never!” (p.259).
Similarly, in observing bees, the tree underscores human limitations in perceiving diversity:
“Humans have hackneyed ideas about bees. Ask them to throw one, and on this, infants and adults are surprisingly alike, and they will scroll a plump, round blob covered in dense yellow and black striped fur. But in reality, bees come in a wide variety. (…) How can they all look identical to the human eye when they are so mesmerizingly diverse?” (p.294).
Through these observations, the fig tree enacts a “witnessing” methodology, attending to the lives, practices, and capacities of multiple species while maintaining its own arboreal perspective. However, Shafak’s approach to anthropomorphism is perhaps most visible not in granting the fig tree narrator status, but in moments where she conveys human cultural worlds and emotions through the tree’s perspective, moments that verge on romanticization. For instance, when the fig tree says:
“I miss Cyprus too, maybe because of the frigid climate. I can't help harking back to my days in the sun. I might have become a British tree, but some days it still takes me a moment to fathom where I am, on which island exactly. Memories come rushing back upon me, and if I listen intently, I can still hear the songs of meadowlarks and sparrows, the whistling of warblers and wigeons, the birds of Cyprus calling my name.” (p.81).
Yet here, the sense of
Similarly, when reflecting on how humans symbolically associate trees with aspects of their cultural world, the fig tree says:
“For wisdom, try a beech. For intelligence, a pine. For bravery, a rowan. For generosity, a hazel. For joy, a juniper. And for when you need to learn to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its white silver bark peeling and shedding layers like old skins. Then again, if it is love you are after, or love you have lost, come to the fig. Always the fig.” (p.330).
Here, when the tree attributes qualities such as wisdom, bravery, or joy to different species, it reflects human interpretations projected onto nonhuman life rather than the actual experiences or meanings present in the trees’ own worlds. Yet, these passages also illustrate the narrative’s ethical and imaginative possibilities: by articulating human cultural meanings through a nonhuman lens, Shafak invites readers to attend to relationality, care, and affective engagement across species. On the other hand, under the playful heading
In conclusion, Shafak’s approach to “writing-with” trees relies less on abstract categories of “trees” and more on attending to a single, situated tree whose life unfolds in a specific time, place, and set of relationships. This attention to the singular and relational echoes
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for the World Is Forest unfolds on the planet Athshe, a world covered almost entirely by forests. The novella depicts the violent encounter between the planet’s Indigenous inhabitants—the Athsheans, a small, green-furred people who live in symbiotic relationships with their forests—and human colonisers from Earth, the Terrans, who exploit Athshe’s trees as a source of timber and economic gain. It stages a confrontation between two ontologies: the extractivist logic of Terran colonisers, who perceive trees as raw material, and the relational cosmology of the Athsheans, who live
A similar strategy to Şafak’s can be observed in Le Guin: She incorporates multiple perspectives, including human and nonhuman narrators, to explore how a single event is experienced differently across worlds. For example, a fight scene is recounted first through the colonial settler Davidson, then from Atshean Selver, who lives in close connection with the forests, and finally from Lyubov, who comes with the colonisers yet advocates for the Atsheans’ rights. This narrative multiplicity allows readers to witness divergences and convergences of perception, ethics, and relationality, highlighting how experiences of the same event are mediated by different forms of embodied and ecological knowledge.
Her narrative also refuses the anthropocentric tendency to grant individuality and interiority only to human characters; instead, she redistributes agency across the forest’s dense networks of life. The forest, for example, is far from a passive victim: it constitutes the very ground of Athshean life, language, and consciousness. Le Guin thus reimagines the forest as an active participant in the narrative, a living network through which dreaming, communication, and care circulate. She composes a form of plural agency: the forest speaks not through a single sentient tree, but through multiplicity—roots, branches, and dreams that interlace all beings on Athshe. Her language enacts this collectivity by refusing boundaries between human and arboreal subjectivity:
“Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. … The substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root.” (p.42–43).
Here, the forest becomes both the material and symbolic ground of Athshean existence. The syntax performs what it describes—folding “forest” and “world” into a single term,
Le Guin delicately contrasts the perspectives of the Terran colonisers and the Athshean inhabitants. For example, Captain Davidson, the main coloniser, sees the forest as empty, in contrast to the Athsheans’ view of it as full of life:
“But when they came here, there had been nothing. Trees. A dark huddle and jumble and tangle of trees, endless, meaningless. A sluggish river over-hung and choked by trees, a few creeechie-warrens (a humiliating word for Atshes) hidden among the trees, some red deer, hairy monkeys, birds, and trees. Roots, boles, branches, twigs, leaves, leaves overhead and underfoot and in your face and in your eyes, endless leaves on endless trees” (p.15).
This passage illustrates how the Terran colonisers impose an anthropocentric and extractivist lens on the forest, reducing it to an endless, chaotic mass devoid of meaning or agency. Davidson’s description flattens the diversity and vitality of Athshean life, rendering both the forest and its inhabitants legible only in terms of utility or nuisance. In contrast, the Athsheans perceive the forest as an interconnected, sentient world, where every element—from trees to undergrowth—participates in relational and ethical networks of life. In
Le Guin’s prose also destabilises the visual mastery typical of colonial description. In passages where the Terrans attempt to survey or control the forest, language itself thickens and resists clarity:
“No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex.” (p.17).
Le Guin frames parts of the narrative within a dream-world, where only children naturally dream at night, but adults can cultivate the capacity to experience dreams during the day. Unlike the Terrans, who distinguish between “real” and “unreal”, the Athsheans inhabit two equally valid temporalities:
“He [Selver] went out to see what kind of trees they were. They all lay broken and uprooted. He picked up the silvery branch of one, and a little blood ran out of the broken end.” (p.21–22).
The image of “blood” here in the dream-time, extending from the severed branch, invites empathy yet resists full humanisation. The forest’s injury is not figurative—it is ecological. Through this strategy, Le Guin mobilises anthropomorphic language as a rhetorical threshold: a space where readers can feel proximity to nonhuman suffering without imposing human consciousness upon it.
Le Guin extends this strategy by depicting the forest as a collective agent, where agency is distributed across trees, undergrowth, and the very soil. The forest does not act like a single human subject but emerges as a network of interdependencies, reflecting Athshean relational ontology:
“A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.” (p.35)
Here, the forest is represented not as a backdrop or mere resource, but as a living system whose fate is inseparable from the Athsheans themselves. By framing the forest as synonymous with the world, Le Guin collapses the separation between human and nonhuman, offering a literary mechanism for collective anthropomorphism. The forest’s “voice” is diffused across its components, allowing the novella to acknowledge vegetal agency without resorting to conventional human-like traits.
By describing the forest’s response in ecological rather than purely emotional terms, Le Guin creates a space for ethical engagement with nonhuman suffering. Readers are invited to register the forest’s agency and sentience, but this engagement does not collapse into projection of human feelings. In effect, the prose exemplifies a deliberate strategy against conventional anthropomorphism, using corporeal, affective, and ecological cues to articulate vegetal life as a collective, morally and materially consequential presence.
Another crucial strategy in Le Guin’s writing is her use of the fantastical setting of Athshe to make intersecting forms of oppression and exploitation visible. The novella foregrounds intersectional discrimination, encompassing the entwined exploitation and oppression of class, race, gender, and species. The Terran colonisers initially perceive the Athsheans as almost subhuman—incapable of pain, pleasure, or aggression—reflecting assumptions of racial and species-based superiority:
“They’re tough; they’ve got terrific endurance; and they don’t feel pain like humans. (…) It’s more like hitting a robot for all they feel it.” (p.17).
The narrative also portrays gendered violence, including sexual assault, and class exploitation, highlighting the systematic exploitation of Athshean labour. Phrases such as “all looked alike” underscore the erasure of individuality and the flattening logic inherent in both colonialism and anthropocentrism. By situating these intersecting forms of oppression in a fantastical forest world, Le Guin uses speculative fiction to reveal complex social and ecological hierarchies, offering readers a lens to understand multispecies ethical entanglements and the responsibilities that arise from relational coexistence.
Through these narrative strategies, distributed agency across trees, undergrowth, and soil; narrative opacity and dream-time to resist human mastery; collective relationality exemplifying sympoiesis; and the depiction of intersecting social and ecological oppressions, Le Guin enacts a practice of multispecies care that fosters ethical attention, relational awareness, and co-creation between human and nonhuman worlds. In doing so, her narrative demonstrates how writing with trees can foster interspecies ethical imagination, allowing the forest itself to participate actively in story, thought, and ethical reflection.
Barbara Kingsolver’s
Kingsolver’s narrative structure mirrors the interdependence of ecological systems and forms of memory that exceed human time. The recurring motif of the American chestnut tree functions as an ecological connector, threading together disparate human lives through the lingering presence of a species nearly erased by blight. This spectral presence aligns with Thom van Dooren’s (
Unlike Shafak, Kingsolver does not grant a tree the status of a narrator. Nevertheless, the agency of trees is evident throughout the novel in other ways: they shape human experiences, mediate ecological relationships, and act as carriers of memory and ethical significance within the narrative. The American chestnut, in particular, functions as a connective and spectral presence, influencing the lives of characters and the unfolding of ecological and emotional dynamics. For example, Garnett’s reflection on the old chestnuts illustrates their spectral agency in the narrative:
“He was haunted by the ghosts of these old chestnuts, by the great emptiness their extinction had left in the world, and so this was something Garnet did from time to time, like going to the cemetery to be with dead relatives: he admired chestnut wood. He took a moment to honour and praise its colour, its grain, and its miraculous capacity to stand up to decades of weather without pressure treatment or insecticides. Why and how, exactly, no one quite knew. There was no other route to compare with it.” (p.130).
Here, the chestnuts are not simply absent; they persist as agents of memory and affect, shaping human perception and emotional engagement. The comparison to visiting a cemetery situates the act of noticing chestnut wood within an ethical and affective practice, highlighting how humans can bear witness to more-than-human loss. This notion of “haunting” aligns with Van Dooren’s idea that extinction should be understood relationally: it is not an absolute termination but an invitation to ongoing ethical reflection and care.
The motif of being “haunted by arboreal ghosts” recurs throughout the novel, often coupled with the acts of listening and hearing. Kingsolver repeatedly invites readers to attune to the multisensory world of non-human life. Through listening, she examines human interactions with creatures such as Japanese beetles and salamanders. While Garnett and others may see Japanese beetles as pests and often overlook salamanders, characters like Nannie Rawley exemplify deep ecological attunement. In Garnett’s narration, she is almost “witch-like” in her uncanny ability to listen to birds, oppose pesticide use, track wildlife, and protect habitats, practices that reflect both intimate ecological knowledge and ethical responsiveness. She intuitively knows exactly when the pesticide spray will come and places a “no spray zone” sign accordingly (p.93).
Her attentiveness is not limited to observation; it extends to everyday ecological ethics. For example, when Garnett says, “Miss Rawley, as the poet said, ‘good fences make good neighbours,’” she replies, “Oh, people just adore fences, but nature doesn’t give a hoot.” She explains that “the wind caused the weed killer on his side to drift over into her orchards” (p.88), highlighting her awareness that the world does not adhere to human boundaries. Rawley recognises that care for plants, animals, and land requires attentiveness beyond social conventions. In Garnett’s eyes, her almost magical attunement frames her as a “witch-like” figure
At times, this act of listening seems to verge on anthropomorphism. For instance, Garnett muses:
“The birds were starting up their morning chores. (...) He listened. The prothalamion, he had named this in his mind years ago, a song raised up to connubial union. There were meadowlarks and chats, field sparrows, indigo buntings, all with their heads raised to the dawn and their hearts pressed into clear liquid song for their mates.” (p.52).
Similarly, he reflects:
“Birds and oak trees have minds like hers [
Here, the act of listening and these reflections anthropomorphise the birds’ songs and the trees, translating them into the language of human intimacy and cognition. Yet this anthropomorphism is not reductive or appropriative; rather, it becomes a form of empathetic translation that allows human readers to enter into a mode of multispecies engagement. Through Garnett’s listening, Kingsolver does not merely project human qualities onto birds but creates a shared affective space where the boundaries between species momentarily blur. In this sense, anthropomorphism becomes an ethical and poetic strategy, a way of acknowledging kinship without collapsing difference, inviting readers to listen across species lines and to recognise the vitality of more-than-human voices.
Kingsolver’s women characters, particularly Lusa, Deanna, and Nannie, serve as conduits for experiencing and enacting ecological care. Their intimate relationships with the land, animals, and seasonal cycles allow them to bear witness to loss and regeneration. The chestnut trees, already spectral in their ecological absence, intersect with these human stories, creating spaces where grief for the more-than-human world is inseparable from daily practices of stewardship. Through Lusa’s efforts to restore balance on her farm and Deanna’s and Nannie's engagement with wildlife, Kingsolver portrays women’s labour, both physical and affective, as inseparable from ecological memory and resilience. In this way, mourning becomes an active, ethical engagement rather than passive lamentation: the characters’ attention to loss generates knowledge, empathy, and the possibility of multispecies flourishing. Kingsolver’s narrative thus intertwines feminist and ecological sensibilities, showing how care, grief, and regeneration circulate across human and non-human lives alike.
As Kingsolver gives voice to different characters with varying perspectives on the world, she foregrounds the wisdom of her female characters, particularly Nannie Rawley. While following their reflections and discussions about trees and our relationships with other beings, these wise characters owe much of their impact to their attentive listening and to the ways they invite others, through empathy, to engage with and relate to non-human life. For example, in the section where Garnett writes a letter to Nannie, he raises the question: “If one species or another of those muddly little salamanders went extinct, who would care anyway?” (p.188). Nannie responds:
“I would never expect you, Garnet Walker, to ask who cares if one species is lost. The extinction of one kind of tree wreaked pure havoc on the folks all through these mountains, your own family more than any other. Suppose some city young said to you, well, sir, the American chestnut was just one tree, why the woods are full of trees? You'd get so mad you'd spit. It would take you a day and a night to try and explain why the chestnut was a tree unlike any other, that held a purpose in our world that nothing else can replace. Well, sir, the loss of one kind of salamander would be a tragedy on the same order to some other creature that was depending on it.” (p.217).
This story reminds us how people were persuaded to protect the ʻAlalā, a critically endangered Hawaiian crow, when conservationists highlighted its connections to Hawaiian culture (
Through these intertwined narrative threads, Kingsolver develops a poetics of multispecies care grounded in attentiveness, relational ethics, and imaginative empathy. Her writing mobilises several strategies to cultivate this sensibility. First, she employs listening and multispecies engagement as literary techniques, inviting readers to perceive ecological relations through sensory, affective, and embodied experience. Second, she transforms mourning into care, portraying grief for vanished species not as paralysing sorrow but as an ethical practice that sustains connection and responsibility across species lines. Third, through feminine narrative voices and cyclical structures, Kingsolver enacts an ecofeminist ethics that values interdependence, regeneration, and vulnerability as sources of strength. Finally, she opens a shared imaginative space where human and non-human voices can coexist without hierarchy. In these ways, Kingsolver’s storytelling becomes a literary form of care work, one that teaches readers to dwell with loss, to listen across difference, and to imagine new possibilities for living and writing with others in a more-than-human world.
These novels demonstrate that trees are not mere background; they speak, remember, witness, and act. Şafak’s fig tree models attentive anthropomorphism by taking on narrator and witness roles, inviting readers into a relational space where human and nonhuman lives entwine in memory, trauma, and care. Le Guin’s Athshe forest demonstrates distributed agency, dream-time, and narrative opacity, while also drawing attention to intersecting social and ecological oppressions, showing that collectivity and interdependence can resist human mastery. Kingsolver’s chestnut ghosts embody relational extinction, using sound, listening, and attuned sensory perception to challenge vision-centered, human-dominated storytelling, and transforming mourning into active multispecies care.
Across these texts, we can identify key narrative strategies for enacting multispecies care in literature: attentive intimacy that cultivates empathy without erasing difference; temporal layering and ecological memory that situates human and nonhuman lives in shared vulnerabilities; distributed and collective agency across forests and ecological networks; ethical engagement with nonhuman suffering and loss; intersectional attention to ecological, social, and gendered entanglements; and sensory and affective attunement, privileging listening, touch, and other nonvisual ways of knowing.
Writing-with trees, then, is not merely representation; it is an act of attention, an ethics of becoming-with, and a practice of world-making. It invites readers to dwell in arboreal time, listen across species boundaries, and co-create worlds in which humans, trees, and all manner of nonhumans are active participants. Literature, in this sense, becomes a site to practice multispecies care: to mourn, to flourish, and to learn how to live in kinship with the more-than-human world. Crucially, they reveal that developing multispecies care is also a writer’s responsibility. They suggest that the most powerful strategy may be inseparable from the act of writing itself: writing and perceiving the world are entwined practices. To write-with trees is to write-with care, where narrative craft, ethical attention, and multispecies relationality are woven together, and where words become a medium for dwelling in arboreal time, listening across species, and co-creating worlds in which humans, trees, and all manner of nonhumans participate fully. Literature, in this sense, becomes a practice of multispecies care: an ethics of becoming-with that teaches us how to live in the more-than-human world. And so, let us write and read more of the writers who write as if the trees are reading; carefully, responsively, kinfully; and let attentive words take root in the frictions of the world!
The data for this article consists of bibliographic references, which are included in the References section.
1 In feminist literature, the “witch-like” magical woman figure often signals women’s intimate relationships with nature, which patriarchal systems have historically represented as threatening or subversive. Scholars such as
This article offers a comparative reading of three contemporary novels, Elif Şafak’s
The pairing of Şafak and Le Guin does not appear convincingly established from a comparative literature perspective. As the article itself implicitly acknowledges, the mere presence of plants or animals in a novel does not automatically indicate that an author is working within a more-than-human worlds perspective. For this reason, positioning Elif Şafak’s text as an “equivalent case” on the same analytical plane as Le Guin’s work is problematic. Le Guin is not simply a novelist who critiques anthropocentrism; she is a language-shaping, genre-formative, and avant-garde figure within speculative fiction, whose work has fundamentally expanded the conceptual possibilities of the genre. This foundational position allows nonhuman agency, ontology, and epistemology to be articulated in her writing at a far more structural level. While Şafak’s novel displays moments of strong ecological sensitivity, it does not, within the current framework, demonstrate a comparable corpus-level continuity or a genre-formative epistemic claim. The analysis should therefore either situate Şafak within a different comparative set, based on closer poetic or theoretical affinities, or explicitly justify her position within this trio as a non-equivalent case, marked by specific limitations rather than equal analytical weight. The manuscript pairs each literary work with a separate theoretical framework: Şafak with Anna Tsing’s concepts of “friction” and “collaborative survival,” Le Guin with Donna Haraway’s “sympoiesis” and “response-ability,” and Kingsolver with Thom van Dooren’s work on mourning, ecological ghosts, and shared vulnerability. While each pairing is individually plausible, they remain analytically isolated rather than placed in dialogue with one another. Theory and literature tend to mirror each other instead of being brought into productive tension, which weakens the comparative ambition of the article. It remains unclear what is gained by reading these texts together if the theoretical frameworks do not themselves interact or collectively advance a shared conceptual argument. Rather than functioning as an integrated analytical architecture, theory operates primarily as an illustrative lens that confirms what the literary texts already appear to express. A stronger contribution would require clarifying how these theories speak to one another through literature and what new insights emerge from their combined use, particularly regarding multispecies care, nonhuman agency, and ethical imagination. Across the three analytical sections, the manuscript successfully identifies conceptual overlaps between literature and theory; however, it remains largely at the level of alignment rather than transformation. The analyses tend to map theoretical concepts onto literary texts in a parallel manner, without mobilising these overlaps to generate a perspective from which one text, concept, or framework actively reframes the others. As a result, the readings explain resonance but do not move toward a genuinely comparative or transformative argument. The sections unfold more like a narrative sequence of thematically related interpretations than as an integrated analytical trajectory that produces new conceptual insights. What remains underdeveloped is a reflective movement between perspectives, in which each literary case would not only illustrate but also rework, challenge, or extend the theoretical and comparative framework of the study.
Is the study design appropriate and does the work have academic merit?
Yes
If applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate?
Partly
Are all the source data and materials underlying the results available?
Partly
Is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it engage with the current literature?
Partly
Are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results?
Partly
Are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others?
Partly
Reviewer Expertise:
Multispecies ethnography, Ecofeminist political ecology, More-than-human relations, Plant Studies
I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above.
The premise of this paper is sound and it theoretically align with the latest development in literary analysis, however, i have several concerns before this paper is published.
The very first paragraph of your introduction reads like an extension/continuation of the abstract, it is awkwardly placed.
The introduction suffers from several major concerns which hinders the flow of the argumentation, you moved abruptly from discussion relational lives of trees and forests (is there a term for it? What about Critical Plant Studies? See Ryan for example) --> then you move into 21st century fiction --> ecofeminist literature --> the coherence is lacking.
You may consider restructure your introduction so that the argument flows better
Feminist posthumanist is foregrounded as your method/theoretical framework, but you barely mention it in the analysis, it seems like an ecofeminist reading.
As a suggestion, do not conflate many theories/approaches into the analysis, just pick one and stick with them
The analysis suffers from individual reading of each texts instead of finding ways in which each texts compares/contrasts with each other
Overall the writing leans heavily on AI generated texts/sentences which tend to be overly long, dense, and vague.
Is the study design appropriate and does the work have academic merit?
Yes
If applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate?
Not applicable
Are all the source data and materials underlying the results available?
Yes
Is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it engage with the current literature?
Yes
Are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results?
Yes
Are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others?
Yes
Reviewer Expertise:
Environmental literature, ecocriticism, postcolonial ecocriticism
I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above.