FIELDNOTES #1: Speculating / Storying 

“I stand firm on this soil and tell stories… The only seed that needs regular watering is our imagination” – Diriye Osman

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Speculative Storytellers is a self-directed stewardship held by nature writer and founder of Peaks of Colour, Evie Muir. In this role Evie offers the genre of ‘Speculative Nature Storytelling’ as a liminal space and fugitive medium that makes writing into being healed and liberated futures possible. Between April-September, Evie is co-authoring a rigorous practice that writes-with Black Feminist literary ancestors and more-than-human kin. To support this, they are tending to craft-based storytelling technologies, as a practice of remembering and ritualising the source/material from which our stories are homed. 

Alongside this, Evie has curated ‘The Speculative Storytellers’, a collective of creatives (Cara Thompson, cee-cee manrique, Evie Muir, Foluke Taylor, Gemma Weekes, Jazmeen Isa Qureshi, Leela Keshav, Nathaniel Télémaque, Pear Nuallak, Yaya Wang) who interrogate and ideate the role the Storyteller plays within our liberation movements. Informed and inspired by writing clubs and collectives, past-present, that nurture our radical imaginations (with a special shout out to Living Room Studios), together, the Storytellers attend weekly Write-With sessions, spaces that carve dedicated time to be in-practice. 

Throughout the Summer of 2026 the Storytellers will convene in a peer-led Storytelling Retreat at Wild Rumpus, during which they will create a collective body of commissioned work: ‘The Speculative Storytellers’ Anthology’. 

Below Evie shares some of the fragments, works in progress’ and unfinished thoughts that are grounding this process; what is landing, the questions that are arising, and the ethics and commitments in which this work is situated and accountable to. 

Temporalities / Pluralities: An Editors Note

Then, a burnt out writer, newly published, exhausted from a book tour that asked me to regurgitate responses to repetitive questions, disassociating from the complexity of naming that which was a dream come true and that dreams are never realised unscathed under capitalism.

Now, drafting this on the bank of a reservoir with a sample of books that landed in a mandala formation when tipped from the bag. A Muscovy duck sits affectionately close as I read Black Nature. I swim. I read. I swim. I read. I swim. I read. 

Then, unresourced. No time. No energy. Scarcity. Routineless, thoughtless, vague ideas of an idea but nothing tangible enough to hold on to, no strength to hold onto what could have been something. No space to la la la my way around a thought and follow its threads. To see where it took me, what lessons it had to teach me. What openings it had to show me. 

Now, forged time, time carved, non-negotiable time. Time that has bent itself to hold me and the stories I want to tell. Time that is moving fast fast, at the pace of my own momentum. I frantically scribble ideas down, my hand unable to wield my pen at the speed of the inspiration that is frothing from me. Time that moves slow slow on a Thursday morning, stretches itself out so we, together, can write upon its back, can have more of each other. 

Then, fear of the unknown. 

Now, Octavia E. Butler tells me the three starting points for speculation are: what if / if only / if this goes on… and so I commit myself to unravelling the fear and entering the unknown with curiosity. Knowing that what I can see is never as scary as what my amygdala can anticipate. What I can’t see is simply an opportunity to speculate. 

Then, d i s c o n n e c t i o n. Fraudulent feelings of unbelonging – not in the rooms but in the role. This system makes you skip a step. Makes you cross the river without being given the tools to make a bridge. Expects you to keep walking. 

Now, I reverse my steps. I boil moss until the water is green. Collect scraps and junk mail and turn them to pulp. Press and caress and hang to dry in the evening sun. Write thank you letters to the forests upon its new, uneven form. It feels correct. 

Then, a lonely pursuit. Shared google docs but never a shared meal. The white page reflects back the isolation of a system that has been detached from the heart of every story.

Now, I story into others and am storied into with a reciprocity that could shatter newsrooms and the comment margins of every first, second and third draft. Heron, and moss and slugs of all varieties are now writing companions, no story is solely mine to tell. 

Provocations / Speculations: An ongoing exploration

What does it mean to excavate and embody the role of the Storyteller within our current times? How can storytelling act as a process of remembering and return, where we can reconnect with the crafts, technologies and somatics of the written word? In what ways could a relational storytelling practice, rooted in community and coalition, transform how we hold our lyrical power? What worlds could we construct through a genre that can speak to and be in service of the human and the more-than-human?

Divesting from / Posturing Towards – A positional intentionality

Storytelling as extraction and disconnection; of mind, body, land // Storytelling as reciprocity and intimate entanglement with multiple cosmologies; 

Storytelling as production and product // Storytelling as process and prototype, a site of intervention and transformation; 

Storytelling as a solo endeavour of exceptional originality // Storytelling as a practice of collective becoming; 

Storytelling as a linear journey towards a singular conclusion // Storytelling as a spiralling, errant, wandering amongst, alongside and under complexities and temporalities; 

Storytelling as a forgotten craft // Storytelling as a sacred tool, (re)membered. 

Grounded in / Committed to: An Affirmation Manifesto

In my role of Speculative Nature Storyteller, I am a commitment to: 

Storytelling with and in my body, even when (especially when) it hurts. 

Ensuring that the first utterance is spoken into the oral present by throat or written into present being by hand. 

Being in co-authorship with nature; in service of every living thing.¹

Swimming amongst intelligence that is embodied, instinctual, ancestral, relational, never artificial. 

Longsightedness. ²

Writing with unpredictability and moving towards the unknowns, conjuring new possibilities out of the many unending ways to access aliveness. 

Unruly, errant, wayward storytelling that is grounded in ‘a sense of sacred motivation’. ³

Robustness and rigor: storytelling as ritual, as routine, as repetition. 

Writing underneath⁴, to honour the depths⁵, intricacies and intersections, holding close this truth: Land is personal. Land is political.

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¹ Olufemi, L., (2021) ‘Experiments in Imagining Otherwise’, Hajar Press 
² Harrison, G. R. (2023) ‘Equal Opportunity Forum Interview’ in ‘Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations’, Melvin Publishing House Records
³ Glissant, E., (1990) ‘Poetics of Relation’, Penguin Modern Classics
⁴ Clifton, Lucille, (2009) ‘Untitled’ in Dungy, T. C., ‘Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry’ (University of Georgia Press)
⁵ Gumbs, P. A., (2020) ‘Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals’, AK Press

Evie Muir

11/07/2026