Alex Lockwood
A writer, scholar, and activist working in the fields of vegan praxis, Critical Animal Studies, literature, creative writing, media, environment, and climate change. He has published widely on Rachel Carson and her legacy for contemporary writers. He lives in Newcastle, United Kingdom, where he writes about animals, veganism, and sometimes running (when the Achilles isn't inflamed). He writes creative prose and non-fiction, as well as journalism for the Guardian, Like the Wind magazine, Earthlines, and other publications. He is a 2014 Winston Churchill Fellow and a member of the Save Movement UK Steering Group, as well as a member of the Research Advisory Committee for the Vegan Society.
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (32)
Uploads
Books by Alex Lockwood
Struggling to keep his marriage together after the death of his wife’s father, Anthony finds himself at the centre of an emergency when an accident on a Trident submarine throws the base into crisis. As the situation worsens old memories from childhood reach into the present, and Anthony begins to understand that it isn’t only radiation that has a half-life.
Inspired by real events, The Chernobyl Privileges depicts the traumatic experience of surviving disaster. Both heart-warming and tragic, it explores the consequences of decisions we are forced to make and that shape our lives.
In exploring different modes of activism throughout North America, The Pig in Thin Air asks how animal advocacy and environmental activism can best join forces to tackle these interconnected crises in such a way that we might develop deeper, more authentic compassionate relationships with all other animals, including ourselves.
The {bio}graphies series explores the relationships between human and nonhuman animals through scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences viewed through the lens of autobiography and memoir, to deepen and complicate our perspectives on the other beings with whom we share the planet.
Papers by Alex Lockwood
My introduction from the anthology from Ashland Creek Press. Here's a full description:
A unique anthology of articles and essays to inspire animal-themed creative writing
Despite all we know about the sentience of animals, society tends to view and treat nonhuman animals as lesser creatures. And for society to change its views, writers must change their views. We must look closely at how we depict animals and ask ourselves difficult questions. For example, are we using animals for our writing in a way that is authentic and fair? Or are we using them for our own purposes, leading to further misconceptions and abuses?
As our awareness awakens about animals’ intelligence, sensitivity, and social and emotional lives, literature is beginning to reflect this change in awareness. Yet little has been written about the process of writing about animals, from crafting point of view to giving animals realistic voices.
Writers face many questions and choices in their work, from how to educate without being didactic to how to develop animals as characters for an audience that still views them as ingredients. In this book, writers will find myriad voices to assist them in writing about animals, from tips about craft to understanding the responsibility of writing about animals.
Articles & Contributors
Do We Have the Right to Write About Animals? Joanna Lilley
Animals that Work in Stories Lisa Johnson
A Case for More Reality in Writing for Animals Rosemary Lombard
Meeting the Wild Things Where They Are Kipp Wessel
Rewilding Literature: Catalyzing Compassion for Wild Predators through Creative Nonfiction Paula MacKay
Rabies Bites: How Stephen King Made a Dog a Compelling Main Character Hannah Sandoval
Real Advocacy within Fantasy Worlds Beth Lyons
Writing Animals Where You Are Hunter Liguore
Other Nations Marybeth Holleman
Giving Animals a Voice: Letters from an Ashland Deer John Yunker
No One Mourns an Unnamed Animal: Why Naming Animals Might Help Save Them Midge Raymond
Are You Willing? Sangamithra Iyer
With a Hope to Change Things: An Exploration of the Craft of Writing about Animals with the Founders of Zoomorphic Magazine Alex Lockwood
One key mechanism used is to conduct vigils held outside slaughterhouses, where activists gather to bear witness to the passing of nonhuman animals in trucks, and to raise awareness of the suffering of animals to passers-by. Central to the practice are the roles played by
emotional engagement and bodily encounter with the nonhuman animals; the movement is founded on a selfstyled ‘love-based’ compassion for other living beings. In 2014, I joined the Save Movement in Toronto for a number of vigils, engaging in an autoethnographic study of the means by which activists employ emotional labour, bearing witness and bodily encounter in foregrounding the realities of life for industrially farmed nonhuman animals. This article argues that the Save Movement represents a new moment (although not wholly without precedent) in the practices of animal rights activism.
Working from the intellectual standpoint of Critical Animal Studies, the structure of the paper employs this autoethnographic and emotionally-affected personal account of taking part as a researcher-activist in the vigils, to offer access to experiences of how emotion, activism and empathy overlap in ‘coming to care’ for nonhuman others in public settings. The article seeks to elucidate the Save Movement’s emphasis on bodily encounter and the making visible of already existing embodied entanglements with farmed nonhuman animals, and suggests this form of engaged witnessing offers opportunity for radically reimagining our species’ existing relationships with those species we currently identity as food.
I caught up again with Susan and James to see how the project has shifted and changed shape—a natural development for a publication interested and involved with the zoopoetics of wild animals. In both conversations we explored both the “macro” work of establishing an animal-centric space of truce for new writing, and at the “micro” work of the individual acts of writing craft, technique and imaginative leaps that shapes and expands the animal-centric ethos of such a space. This essay is drawn from these interviews, as well as from follow-up conversations, the study of their books, and writing published in Zoomorphic.
I’m interested in asking what nature writing feels like when we read it through the lens of vegan theory. I argue there is a lack of attention given to the ways in which contemporary creative non-fiction nature writing fails the nonhuman body; and that this failure (in the text, and our criticism) undermines the often explicit pro-environmental messages of the texts. Such a failure can be identified by reading/writing environmental or nature texts through a vegan lens. This essay will then explore how vegan studies furthers ecocritical studies, as well as be of use to ‘nature writers’ in deepening the impact of their work.
My essay provides readings of two contemporary nature narratives: Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Charles Foster’s Being a Beast. Both have been praised for their quality of writing and embodied engagement with the nonhuman; both pronounce a need to steward our environmental commons better. And yet both fail to address the structural causes of the devastation to nonhuman bodies that they argue pro-environmental behaviours will protect.
H is for Hawk retells the story of Macdonald’s training of a Goshawk, Mabel, intermingled with the death of her father. Being a Beast is Foster’s attempt to ‘live like’ five different nonhuman animals. Both books advocate a nostalgic conservancy ethic of intimately ‘knowing nature’ as a means to protect it. However, both Macdonald and Foster fail to engage with contemporary understandings of the role of speciesism in contributing to the damage inflicted on nonhuman nature through, for example, industrial animal agriculture.
Macdonald’s book reinforces an outdated paradigm of relating, based on speciesist valuations, and reinforcing systems of exploitation. In perpetuating a logic in which humans express love for some animals but exploit others, she forecloses an opportunity for a radical episteme of affective knowledge, gained though an embodied engagement with other species’ bodies that her writing, on the surface, seems to advocate. I explore this question through the book’s other birds: the dead one-day-old chicks, by-products of broiler production that Macdonald feeds to Mabel; and the pheasants that the pair hunts. These different relations to less charismatic birds help us see the gap in knowledge between the model Macdonald offers, based on speciesist hierarchies implicit in the worst degradations of nature, and a more entangled, vegan ethic.
Similarly, Foster’s attempts at garnering embodied knowledges of the nonhuman other are grounded in his anthroponormative view of them as other, often as victims, falling into the fallacy of human exceptionalism. His nature writing remains rooted in a historical relation to knowledge of nature that is blind to the systems of exploitation that such knowledge shores up and sustains.
My essay argues that Ecocriticism must begin to explore ‘nature writing’ through the lens of vegan studies if it is to avoid the trap of failing to ethically engage with the environmental crises of our 21st century; similarly, this essay implores ‘nature writers’ to attend to a vegan ethic in their contributions to bearing witness to the nonhuman world.
In addition, if writing is, as Jose Rivera names it, “the explanation of life to the living” where writers “try to tease apart the conflicting noises of living and make some kind of pattern and order” how does the non-linguistic nature and sense of those being written about impact upon the writers’ processes; those stories being told anew, and listened to? And by whom? How do writers avoid didacticism and propaganda in their work? How are affects and emotions from the research processes parsed back through the everyday lives of those engaged with creaturely narrative pursuit?
A particular thread will engage with the belief that fiction creates knowledge differently, and it is a different kind of knowledge created through narrative. Engaging with ideas from Anat Pick’s Creaturely Poetics, with Susan McHugh’s Animal Stories, and with the strands of literary considerations of affect theory, I will elucidate a sense of the process of ‘writing the creaturely animal’ in literary works that are an attempt to create a break with the business-as-usual representations of the nonhuman in contemporary culture.
This is important. It is through a sense of new more-than-representational narratives, the something-out-there that we are beginning to become attuned to, that we will become cognizant of other beings in ways that no longer deny them (or us) our creatureliness, and instead build constellations of affect and meaning-making between and becoming-with species, rather than over and against them.
Keywords: creatural, writing, craft, emotion, pigs, Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales
Struggling to keep his marriage together after the death of his wife’s father, Anthony finds himself at the centre of an emergency when an accident on a Trident submarine throws the base into crisis. As the situation worsens old memories from childhood reach into the present, and Anthony begins to understand that it isn’t only radiation that has a half-life.
Inspired by real events, The Chernobyl Privileges depicts the traumatic experience of surviving disaster. Both heart-warming and tragic, it explores the consequences of decisions we are forced to make and that shape our lives.
In exploring different modes of activism throughout North America, The Pig in Thin Air asks how animal advocacy and environmental activism can best join forces to tackle these interconnected crises in such a way that we might develop deeper, more authentic compassionate relationships with all other animals, including ourselves.
The {bio}graphies series explores the relationships between human and nonhuman animals through scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences viewed through the lens of autobiography and memoir, to deepen and complicate our perspectives on the other beings with whom we share the planet.
My introduction from the anthology from Ashland Creek Press. Here's a full description:
A unique anthology of articles and essays to inspire animal-themed creative writing
Despite all we know about the sentience of animals, society tends to view and treat nonhuman animals as lesser creatures. And for society to change its views, writers must change their views. We must look closely at how we depict animals and ask ourselves difficult questions. For example, are we using animals for our writing in a way that is authentic and fair? Or are we using them for our own purposes, leading to further misconceptions and abuses?
As our awareness awakens about animals’ intelligence, sensitivity, and social and emotional lives, literature is beginning to reflect this change in awareness. Yet little has been written about the process of writing about animals, from crafting point of view to giving animals realistic voices.
Writers face many questions and choices in their work, from how to educate without being didactic to how to develop animals as characters for an audience that still views them as ingredients. In this book, writers will find myriad voices to assist them in writing about animals, from tips about craft to understanding the responsibility of writing about animals.
Articles & Contributors
Do We Have the Right to Write About Animals? Joanna Lilley
Animals that Work in Stories Lisa Johnson
A Case for More Reality in Writing for Animals Rosemary Lombard
Meeting the Wild Things Where They Are Kipp Wessel
Rewilding Literature: Catalyzing Compassion for Wild Predators through Creative Nonfiction Paula MacKay
Rabies Bites: How Stephen King Made a Dog a Compelling Main Character Hannah Sandoval
Real Advocacy within Fantasy Worlds Beth Lyons
Writing Animals Where You Are Hunter Liguore
Other Nations Marybeth Holleman
Giving Animals a Voice: Letters from an Ashland Deer John Yunker
No One Mourns an Unnamed Animal: Why Naming Animals Might Help Save Them Midge Raymond
Are You Willing? Sangamithra Iyer
With a Hope to Change Things: An Exploration of the Craft of Writing about Animals with the Founders of Zoomorphic Magazine Alex Lockwood
One key mechanism used is to conduct vigils held outside slaughterhouses, where activists gather to bear witness to the passing of nonhuman animals in trucks, and to raise awareness of the suffering of animals to passers-by. Central to the practice are the roles played by
emotional engagement and bodily encounter with the nonhuman animals; the movement is founded on a selfstyled ‘love-based’ compassion for other living beings. In 2014, I joined the Save Movement in Toronto for a number of vigils, engaging in an autoethnographic study of the means by which activists employ emotional labour, bearing witness and bodily encounter in foregrounding the realities of life for industrially farmed nonhuman animals. This article argues that the Save Movement represents a new moment (although not wholly without precedent) in the practices of animal rights activism.
Working from the intellectual standpoint of Critical Animal Studies, the structure of the paper employs this autoethnographic and emotionally-affected personal account of taking part as a researcher-activist in the vigils, to offer access to experiences of how emotion, activism and empathy overlap in ‘coming to care’ for nonhuman others in public settings. The article seeks to elucidate the Save Movement’s emphasis on bodily encounter and the making visible of already existing embodied entanglements with farmed nonhuman animals, and suggests this form of engaged witnessing offers opportunity for radically reimagining our species’ existing relationships with those species we currently identity as food.
I caught up again with Susan and James to see how the project has shifted and changed shape—a natural development for a publication interested and involved with the zoopoetics of wild animals. In both conversations we explored both the “macro” work of establishing an animal-centric space of truce for new writing, and at the “micro” work of the individual acts of writing craft, technique and imaginative leaps that shapes and expands the animal-centric ethos of such a space. This essay is drawn from these interviews, as well as from follow-up conversations, the study of their books, and writing published in Zoomorphic.
I’m interested in asking what nature writing feels like when we read it through the lens of vegan theory. I argue there is a lack of attention given to the ways in which contemporary creative non-fiction nature writing fails the nonhuman body; and that this failure (in the text, and our criticism) undermines the often explicit pro-environmental messages of the texts. Such a failure can be identified by reading/writing environmental or nature texts through a vegan lens. This essay will then explore how vegan studies furthers ecocritical studies, as well as be of use to ‘nature writers’ in deepening the impact of their work.
My essay provides readings of two contemporary nature narratives: Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Charles Foster’s Being a Beast. Both have been praised for their quality of writing and embodied engagement with the nonhuman; both pronounce a need to steward our environmental commons better. And yet both fail to address the structural causes of the devastation to nonhuman bodies that they argue pro-environmental behaviours will protect.
H is for Hawk retells the story of Macdonald’s training of a Goshawk, Mabel, intermingled with the death of her father. Being a Beast is Foster’s attempt to ‘live like’ five different nonhuman animals. Both books advocate a nostalgic conservancy ethic of intimately ‘knowing nature’ as a means to protect it. However, both Macdonald and Foster fail to engage with contemporary understandings of the role of speciesism in contributing to the damage inflicted on nonhuman nature through, for example, industrial animal agriculture.
Macdonald’s book reinforces an outdated paradigm of relating, based on speciesist valuations, and reinforcing systems of exploitation. In perpetuating a logic in which humans express love for some animals but exploit others, she forecloses an opportunity for a radical episteme of affective knowledge, gained though an embodied engagement with other species’ bodies that her writing, on the surface, seems to advocate. I explore this question through the book’s other birds: the dead one-day-old chicks, by-products of broiler production that Macdonald feeds to Mabel; and the pheasants that the pair hunts. These different relations to less charismatic birds help us see the gap in knowledge between the model Macdonald offers, based on speciesist hierarchies implicit in the worst degradations of nature, and a more entangled, vegan ethic.
Similarly, Foster’s attempts at garnering embodied knowledges of the nonhuman other are grounded in his anthroponormative view of them as other, often as victims, falling into the fallacy of human exceptionalism. His nature writing remains rooted in a historical relation to knowledge of nature that is blind to the systems of exploitation that such knowledge shores up and sustains.
My essay argues that Ecocriticism must begin to explore ‘nature writing’ through the lens of vegan studies if it is to avoid the trap of failing to ethically engage with the environmental crises of our 21st century; similarly, this essay implores ‘nature writers’ to attend to a vegan ethic in their contributions to bearing witness to the nonhuman world.
In addition, if writing is, as Jose Rivera names it, “the explanation of life to the living” where writers “try to tease apart the conflicting noises of living and make some kind of pattern and order” how does the non-linguistic nature and sense of those being written about impact upon the writers’ processes; those stories being told anew, and listened to? And by whom? How do writers avoid didacticism and propaganda in their work? How are affects and emotions from the research processes parsed back through the everyday lives of those engaged with creaturely narrative pursuit?
A particular thread will engage with the belief that fiction creates knowledge differently, and it is a different kind of knowledge created through narrative. Engaging with ideas from Anat Pick’s Creaturely Poetics, with Susan McHugh’s Animal Stories, and with the strands of literary considerations of affect theory, I will elucidate a sense of the process of ‘writing the creaturely animal’ in literary works that are an attempt to create a break with the business-as-usual representations of the nonhuman in contemporary culture.
This is important. It is through a sense of new more-than-representational narratives, the something-out-there that we are beginning to become attuned to, that we will become cognizant of other beings in ways that no longer deny them (or us) our creatureliness, and instead build constellations of affect and meaning-making between and becoming-with species, rather than over and against them.
Keywords: creatural, writing, craft, emotion, pigs, Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales
differing conclusions) is that the very nature of the threats we face is a reckoning with our alienation from the nonhuman world. It is a reckoning we need to have, without ‘hiding’ away from our accountabilities. The
argument here is that literature, poetry, and creative writings can help us have that reckoning by leading us to explore our storied relations with the nonhuman, especially animals. Ghosh, however, believes that the realist
novel – and by implication the ‘highest’ forms of literature – has failed us in this need. This is because the novel has become a bourgeois vassal of numbing entertainments, and in such a form has wholly betrayed us, because it is not capable of coming to terms with the evidence of climate change: that, in simple terms, we are no longer connected to or a part of ‘nature’. That is, the realist bourgeois novel cannot admit we are, and always have been, ‘animals’ dependent on our very real environment.