Creative writing as nourishment: The political philosophy of Corine Pelluchon applied to our field

What if we thought of the creative writing discipline as part of a sustainable and sustaining urban or cosmo-political ecology that includes but is not limited to the university sector and the book industry? And what if we thought of creative writing practice and its resultant contribution (to knowledge, to arts practice, to the public good) as a means for sustaining an ethics of life? In this article, I draw on the work of political philosopher Corine Pelluchon, and in particular her recent work Nourishment: A Philosophy of the Political Body (2019), and apply her thinking to the kind of practice I (we) do on a daily basis. On the basis of a phenomenology of food and nourishment, Pelluchon’s thinking shows us how freedom depends on the “love of life” and on sharing what nourishes others. She applies her thinking to political systems, reimagining them such that their core aim comes to sustain an ethics of life that is relevant to multiple lifeforms and that takes into account past, present and future generations. Her project is underpinned by her affirmative ethics, her insistence on “love of life” as a crucial consideration. Inspired by her applied philosophy, I wonder about the shifts in thinking that may arise if we consider the creative writing discipline through the lens of her phenomenology of nourishment. Pelluchon argues that “we are bound to others through our relationship to nourishment” and that relationship is “above all a relation of enjoyment” (p. 11). What if we consider creative writers as integral to fashioning and maintaining “the milieu from which we live today” (p. 13). On whom (or what), then, does the creative writer interdepend for nourishment, and how might a foregrounding of such interdependence shape and reshape an ethics of creative writing practice?