(In)scribing body/landscape relations

Abstract

[Extract] Preface. It is strange being an author in this postmodern age. It is an age-old discursive habit to create one author, who supposedly gave birth to the words on the page (as if they lay within, waiting to come out), who is then "known" for her words. This construction of oneself as writer-who-can-be-known attends the writing of books, however poorly known we may actually be, as we struggle to assemble, to scribe, to find the words that make "the way and the song of the book" (Cixous, 1998, pp. 144-45). Foucault (1977) wrote in his article "What is an author?" that writing emerges out of conversations with others. He suggested we should think about a practice of not signing our names to what we write, but instead signing the names of those in the group who had the conversations in which the ideas for the writing emerged. If I were to do that here, the list of authors would be very long. There are so many wonderful conversations that have shaped this book, and those conversations have been with many different groups-in different countries, and in different spaces and times within those countries. This is a multivocal text that enables an exploration of body/landscape relations from many moments of being. It comes from the lives of environmentalists, of fiction writers and of their fictional characters, of academic writers, of students, of children (as they are remembered), and of travelers, each of these in at least two countries, and in many different landscapes within those countries. This book comes not just from conversations, but also from written texts of fiction writers, and from texts produced by collective biography participants. All of the people I have interviewed or worked with to produce this text are named throughout the book, though the Australian environmentalists have chosen to use pseudonyms. But there are many conversations and contributions that are not visible here, and so I would like to spend some time, at the beginning, acknowledging those people who have made their mark, invisibly, on this book.

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