Zsuzsi Gartner,
You’ve got your plants feeling oppressed by the insects and rodents and birds carrying on their procreation for them. They get rid of all the insects. Then they get rid of all basic animal life, including humans on the planet.
A couple of years ago, author Zsuzsi Gartner picked up a used copy of the controversial book, The Secret Life of Plants.
The 1973 curio explores the idea of plant sentience, an area of study that has not exactly been widely embraced by mainstream science in the past 40 years.
“It’s exhausting to read at times just because of the detail, but a fascinating look at the ability of plants to communicate with each other, with humankind, with the earth and even perhaps with alien life,” Gartner says.
She found the ideas compelling, even if there was “something very ’70s about it.” It also proved inspiring for the Calgary-raised, Vancouver-based author, editor and creative writing instructor.
She was reading a chapter on the sex life of plants when a line popped into her head: “Why let the insects carry on our fornications for us?”
She wrote it down on a Post-it note and stuck in the cover of The Secret Life of Plants, determined to one day put it to practical use for a story that would begin with plants ranting about insects enjoying fornication on their behalf.
She found her opportunity earlier this year, when a group of 10 Canadian authors spent three weeks amid the beautiful surroundings of Banff penning modern fables for the 21st century.
It was all part of an imaginative literary arts residency at the Banff Centre’s Leighton Artists Studios, which found writers crafting short stories under the watchful eyes of faculty authors Rawi Hage, Madeleine Thien and Lisa Moore.
The 10 fables will be published in 2018 as part of an anthology.
Gartner’s The Second Coming of the Plants will be among the tales found in the book. It’s a thoughtprovoking, and very funny, fable about a revolution led by the downtrodden greenery in our midst.
Tired of the injustice found in “the enslavement of millions bound for the Christmas tree lots” or suffering of “office plants, cowering under artificial light, cigarette butts and the dregs of weak coffee polluting their meagre soil,” the plants revolt.
First, they target the insects. Then the animals and, finally, all the humans.
It fits nicely into the traditional definition of fables, which are often succinct tales where animals, mythical creatures or plants are given human language and characteristics. Usually, they are cautionary tales of sorts or, at the very least, have a moral at the end.
Gartner was not interested in penning a simple, green-hued “nature-is-our-only-salvation” tale. An avid gardener in Vancouver, some of the basic sentiments of the tale stem from Gartner’s love-hate relationship with certain invasive plants.
“It’s when the oppressed become the oppressors,” says Gartner. “You’ve got your plants feeling oppressed by the insects and rodents and birds carrying on their procreation for them. They get rid of all the insects. Then they get rid of all basic animal life, including humans on the planet. Then they end up having this mad orgy for a year or two years, 10 years, 12 years, they lose track of time. Then they realize they are becoming completely inbred and going to destroy themselves and they have to diversify.”
Gartner is known for eschewing realist fiction and focusing on social satire. Her book of short stories, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, was shortlisted for a Giller Prize in 2011 and inspired one reviewer to call her the antiAlice Munro, while another described it as a “nervy mix of scientific ideas, pseudo-scientific New Age quackery and pop culture.”
While many literary programs tend to be aimed at emerging writers, Gartner and a number of the other participants are hardly newbies. But even critically acclaimed authors who have been shortlisted for a Giller can use some guidance and workshopping with their peers.
Other writers trying their hands at fables included renowned young adult novelist Alice Kuipers, poet Moez Surani and short-story writer Matthew J. Trafford, who was one of Gartner’s students at UBC. “Obviously, these are very talented writers with varied backgrounds in terms of their work,” says Devyani Saltzman, director of literary arts at the Banff Centre. “It really felt like it was a peer experience and a midcareer experience as opposed to a top-down teaching experience.” The fables range in topic from intimacy in AI to a tale about queer marriage told through the eyes of animals. and even one which is told in the voice of the Three Sisters mountain peaks nearby.
“The fable form gives an accessibility and a way to frame contemporary issues,” Saltzman says. “Banff offered a space for convening and the writers, working with the faculty, went into their areas of interest. The range of final stories did touch on many subject matters that we’re thinking about right now.”