Conversing Along our Coastline Part 1: Narrative Warnings

Last month, Creative Writing Against Coastal Waste ran its first knowledge exchange event: ‘Conversing Along our Coastline’. The event consisted of a vibrant morning of lightning talks and networking opportunities, and we welcomed a range of Creative Practitioners and academics interested in ocean literacy, coastal waste, and littoral communities, from across the south coast region. Throughout August, we will be spotlighting a selection of projects from the event, reflecting upon their methods and messages, and drawing some connections between them. We’ll also be sharing more information about our new ‘Oceans Collective’, a digital space which aims to facilitate longer-term discussions about ocean policy, and its relationship to Arts and Humanities initiatives.

In today’s post, we’re going to be reflecting on the projects that formed part of our first panel, ‘Narrative Warnings’. This panel consisted of collaborators from two Exeter-based projects: Climate Stories and One Chance Left. These projects are deeply interconnected, and it was fascinating to hear the principal investigators: Peter Stott, Ian Fussell, Sally Flint and Cecilia Mañosa Nyblon reflect upon those interconnections in their presentations.

Peter Stott opened the panel with a discussion of the UKRI-funded ‘Climate Stories’ project. Through a collaboration with the Dartington Trust, the Climate Stories team designed and delivered a series of creative workshops for twenty climate scientists, which aimed to help develop their communication skills in public engagement settings. In this respect, Climate Stories was also a project with an interdisciplinary vision, as demonstrated by its mission statement:

We believe that we are all storytellers. And we all have a story to tell about climate change.

The workshops led to an anthology and a showcase, and participants’ responses were meticulously recorded at each stage. As shown in our earlier blog post about the language of project titles and mission statements in this field, storytelling and narrative are at the centre of many south coast projects about ocean literacy and the climate crisis, not just in the form of project outputs, but as evaluation methods. Climate Stories specifically used structured and unstructured interviews and diaries to record participants’ narratives, and have a paper forthcoming in Geoscience Communications evaluating the project’s success.

Most crucially, Climate Stories led to the presence of a dedicated Arts and Humanities marquee at a recent Met Office event, which evidences the project’s ability to bring a range of disciplines into a scientific setting at the highest level, at the same time as it supports the development of creative literacy skills in individual scientists. In this respect, Climate Stories shares much with its successor project, One Chance Left, which, as Ian Fussell, Sally Flint and Cecilia Mañosa Nyblon explained, succeeded in getting poetry into the science tent at COP 26.

One Chance Left produced an anthology with twelve poems— one for each of the twelve days of COP—many of which dealt with coastal waste and ocean governance. The poems were narrated by celebrities, students and staff, set to music, and printed onto banners and bus shelters. These different outputs facilitated its multi-sensory, multimedia impact. The team plans to produce something even bigger for COP 27, where they will be collaborating with creative practitioners and members of the public in Egypt to produce climate-themed stories narrated in several languages, including English and Arabic.

At the heart of the discussion that followed this panel, was the question of how all our projects can balance ‘narrative warnings’ with messages of hope so that climate urgency results in action rather than feelings of futility. This question recalls Kate Manzo’s study of charismatic species, discussed in part two of our keywords blog post, in which she draws attention to the ways that we can inadvertently ‘heighten people’s sense of [an] issue’s importance while simultaneously making them feel less able to do anything about it’.

Both Climate Stories and One Chance Left balance their emphases on warnings and hope, by placing creative practice at the centre. For both projects, creative writing or performance art have brought new communities together in positive ways, enabling action that is effective both in motivating individuals to change their behaviour and bringing the arts and humanities into global climate-based discussions. At the same time—as the ‘One Chance Left’ project title clearly shows—narratives can productively contain warnings at the same time as they inspire creativity. What these projects facilitate, therefore, are forms of positive action, that never quite lose sight of the climate emergency that made such action necessary in the first place.

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Conversing Along our Coastline Part 1: Narrative Warnings