Writing Climate, Season and Cycle: Autobiographical Composting in Maggie MacKellar’s Eco-Autobiography, Graft

In Maggie MacKellar’s third memoir, Graft: Motherhood, Family and a Year on the Land (2023), she is living through a drought on a Merino sheep farm in Tasmania, her children are leaving as they enter adulthood, and her identity (mother, farmer, woman, white settler Australian, human) is under pressure. The planet and the land on which MacKellar lives are also under threat. Life writing that addresses such profound events offers a space to think about what it is to story human life. This article examines textual strategies of eco-autobiography that press on anthropocentric thinking about the natural world in a time of climate crisis, and reconfigure human selfhood ‘with and as place and time’ (Wright 2024) in a way that reflects ecological ‘enmeshment’ (via Morton 2012). We propose the term ‘autobiographical composting’ to describe how Graft assembles diverse raw materials—existing literary works, reference texts, diary entries, memories—to produce a relational subjectivity that subverts traditional linear understandings of the narrative of life as beginning with birth and ending with death. Through autobiographical composting, Graft suggests both ‘life’ and ‘narrative’ as cyclical, ecologically enmeshed processes, and so moves the boundaries of life narrative beyond the human.

Life Writing

Life Writing

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1751-2964

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