How Our Art Can Sustain our earth

An Interview with Taylor Beidler

Of working as an interdisciplinary artist in the climate sector, Taylor Beidler says “there's no room for competition or career building. Instead, we focus on world-sustaining.” In this interview, Beidler speaks about how strong narratives can motivate scientific research and make us more aware of environmental change—without limiting us to apocalyptic endings. How can we weave together global stories, science, and personal moments while maintaining authenticity in our art? How can we learn to listen better to our bodies and our worlds? Her words are insights to help others looking to make an impact through their art: she describes how we might find a place for our voices as we lend them to others, recognize when it’s not our time to speak, then speak up clearly when it is.

It’s so exciting to speak to you now not just as a friend, but as a fellow entrepreneur in interdisciplinary creativity. Your company Arts Regeneration—which seeks to confront environmental change through stories and community engagement—stands out for its participation in corporate, pop culture, and fine art spheres. We’re very excited also for your upcoming pilot release for a TV series exploring vertical farming. Can you tell us more about how this company started?

In a very similar way to how The Napkin Poetry Review began, I met Magda Bird on our MA course for script-writing at University of East Anglia. There, we quickly found a common interest in writing about climate-based issues and environmentalism. We kept weaving in and out of each other’s spheres throughout the year—I was developing a workshop with the UEA Green Film Festival on environmental writing and Magda was creating a festival for extinction rebellion in the Norwich Xrt Festival, which was a whole day of interdisciplinary art and community building. Around that point, we were both called in to start writing some material for AMC.

Finally, we both wanted to solidify this relationship which was also a means to be sponsored—in this way, Arts Regeneration was formed partially out of necessity. It was endorsed by the University of Oxford for a startup visa, but as a formal business it also led us to look a lot more closely not only at how we could connect our interest to the scientific community, but how we could find ways to bridge that narrative gap between the arts and sciences.

The beauty of creating an interdisciplinary company, and especially one rooted in climate science, is that it's a continual question. It's a continual experiment with shifting X and Y axes because we have to remain flexible. Especially now, we have to watch the forefront when talking about climate change: who needs to be included, how can we include them, are we the right people to do this work, and who else do we need to reach out to. Because I was brought up as a dramaturge originally, so much of my training is to identify the conversations that aren't happening rather than to contribute to the ones that already are.

How do you understand the arts as a tool to generate not only social awareness, but environmental research as well?

In regards to our work, I can talk about the arts as a tool through the context of our pilot TV show, which was optioned by a company called Silverprint Pictures and then commissioned for a pilot by ITV2. It was centered around the shared interest Magda and I had in underground vertical farming. As an example of what vertical farming is, there's actually one a couple of miles away from me—Growing Underground in Clapham (UK)—which grows loads of microgreens and sells them to nice hotels as well as higher-end supermarkets such as Waitrose and Planet Organic.

We did a lot of research into vertical farming and especially into the ways that it could become a mainstay with the increasing soil degradation due to monoculture. Specifically, we spent a lot of time interviewing farmers. One time we were talking to a scientist and he said, “innovation is what happens when your back is against the wall.” That became the setting, the mantra, the thesis that we were trying to investigate when writing our pilot. I think so often there's such a demand for climate-based stories but so often, they’re viewed in an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic light. For a while, I've really been playing with my relationship to dystopia and whether or not that's just another colonialist lens to a world that for many people has already been degraded.

What we were really trying to do, and are continuing to develop, is to provide an alternative narrative—to say that we don't have to write from this point of view in which the world is already decimated. Instead, what we want to do is write, especially in this YA series, for the generations that are going to have to live with the implications, the impact of what we're doing for the longest amount of time. While it is based around our research, our show still has the humor and levity of coming-of-age narratives as it demonstrates the reality of what a slightly different world might look like in 10, 20 years when we’ve created these shifts in how we’re growing our food.

Your work for Net Zero Fashion, part of the UN’s Race to Zero Campaign for COP26, advances an industry-wide move towards decarbonized fashion across the Global South. As part of this dialogue, you and Amanda Gorman read a poem, and we’d love to learn more about how you chose these words to inspire leaders. What role did narrative play in your writing process?

Amanda presented her beautiful poem “Earthrise” and it was such a great introduction to start asking how we can form narratives and discussions around climate change. My poem, “Wearing the Weight Of/On my Sleeve” was a culmination of my experience working alongside the climate champions team. We interviewed youth leaders in the global South who are US consumers or businesses and/or business people in the fashion industry about what they would like to see and hear from discussions with these leading fashion stakeholders who are a part of the Race to Zero November dialogues.

In approaching this poem, I had to reckon with the weight that I wasn't just working with my own words. I was working with the culmination of 30-plus individuals’ words and shaping the narrative, setting the precedent for what these young people deserve to hear. In many ways, I wasn't even regarding this as a poem right until a few days before the event: really, I was approaching this project through a dramaturgical lens; identifying my target audience and curating a story specifically for them; identifying the source material I have then figuring out how I could make this transference.

To make that narrative leap, especially within the fashion industry, I wrote about my great grandmother, whom I lived with. She owned a children's clothing store, so I threaded this image of my great grandmother approaching clothing by feeling the fabric with the implications of what goes into that fabric, especially because I was speaking directly to textile CEOs and industry leaders and stakeholders.

For me, this poem was a way to acknowledge that I was using my voice to lend voice to many other young people. In the discussion that followed the poetry presentation, it was such a privilege to hear certain lines of those poems spoken back verbatim. It was also such a great initiative to kick off these dialogues with poetry—it really set a tone for the dialogues. Because dialogue can have an “unformed” connotation, it doesn't necessarily lend itself to tactile problem solving. So, when we came in to deliver our poems, I also knew I had the job to light a fire in everyone to make a change that day, to really ask themselves what they were going to do in the now. We can think about approaching net zero by 2050 and though that seems so long into the future, it will come faster than we think so we have to start this work today.

As a platform that looks to break down stigmas, we’re especially interested in your work with NeuroTales, a group that encourages Neurodivergent and Mad writers to share their own stories on their own terms. What was your experience like leading workshops to expand sensorial input, and what might be some exercises our readers could add to their own toolboxes?

I will champion NeuroTales with my ever-living breath. Cortland Nesley, who is the founder, is such an amazing advocate, theater-maker, and writing facilitator and however I can plug him, I will plug him. I worked, and continue to work however I can, as a creative consultant for NeuroTales. That means coming in as an outside writer to give insight about what I like to see, what works for me as a writer, and how we can invite writers in—how would I feel welcomed?

We often use the word “struggle” with mental illness, but what’s so fantastic about NeuroTales is that it’s actually a place for people to thrive in their neuro-divergences and their mental abilities. It’s great to come into that space. As a workshop facilitator, what I want to do is help create lateral pathways for the writers to explore their worlds. What was so beautiful about that experience and teaching exercises on sense memory (writing based from different senses, from your body as well—paying attention to what sensations are coming up for you) is that it really breaks open storytelling and de-clutters story structure. You can learn this skill and then pocket it away, which creates more looped pathways and a wider ingredients list to put into your work.

Every time I teach a workshop that revolves around sense memory or sensorial input, I say that this is just a toolbox: take what works and leave what doesn't. I think sometimes it's important to write into those places, explore and remain curious to places that don't necessarily feel uncomfortable, but maybe feel a bit fuzzy because writing into that fuzzy sphere may be a way of generating new forms. It’s like when you work a new muscle in your body: when you pay attention to your world from a different perspective, it may feel less formed or familiar, but within this newness you could find an exciting way to understand and conceptualize your experiences.

The inaugural winner of the UEA New Forms Award for an innovative and daring new voice in fiction (judged in part by Inua Ellams), you have written work that incorporates personal narratives of others, for example your grandmother’s experience within the American healthcare industry. What considerations do you make when working stories not your own into your art, especially when they speak to larger social issues?

(Excerpt from Beidler’s “A Well-Attempted Life”):

I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in my Grandmother. To be fair, I’ve never met either.

“That’s a stigma, you know it’s all just in your head…but it’s actually a disease, these are actually organic diseases.”

We’ve got a Janus-faced relationship to female pain. We’re attracted to it and revolted by it; proud and ashamed of it. So we’ve developed a post-wounded voice, a stance of numbness or crutch of sarcasm that implies pain without claiming it, that seems to stave off certain accusations it can see on the horizon—melodrama, triviality, wallowing—and an ethical and aesthetic commandment: Don’t valorize suffering women.[1]

When I was an Episcopalian, I wore a gold Chain around my

Neck and twirled it when I felt myself Stiffen.

I took it off and now bloodlet My cuticles instead.

“It never was about money, they had plenty of money.”

I'm toying with my relationship to the quote “specificity is the key to universality.” Maybe I'll look back on me saying this 5, 10 years from now and have a different perspective once again. But for now, I don't necessarily know if all stories are universal so I have to acknowledge where I sit in the present day, writing and trying to encapsulate the stories that I'm trying to encapsulate. As a middle-class educated white woman, there is no way that I can or should be a universal storyteller. So, acknowledging the inherently fractal nature of my narrative and what I can bring without apologizing, while still acknowledging my place in the piece, helps me to then open up the place for others in these works.

As another example, when working with the focus groups for NetZero I was looking for points of commonality and especially points of collective agitation. One common narrative was how slowly things are moving in the fashion industry. Though that theme felt more ephemeral, there was something that I could work with there and soon, that ephemerality developed its own rhythm. When writing the poem, speaking it as I went along, I began recognizing how many full stops were in that collective rage. Then, when I brought in my own personal narrative, I acknowledged where I was coming from while highlighting how I resonated with that passivity felt in those focus groups.

In keeping with interdisciplinary themes, your lyric essay “A Well-Attempted Life” is a collage of voices, dictions, and tones. Here, the clinical, the philosophical, the vernacular, and the poetic are beautifully interwoven, and we’d love to learn more about how you navigate these linguistic hierarchies and their stereotypes.

(Excerpt from Beidler’s “A Well-Attempted Life”):

Uhm, this is Taylor, uhm it’s 12:07...and uh…

I’m half-dressed...uh...i felt like i couldn’t really

continue until I forced myself to just

sit down and speak it…

it’s really scary to…

be on the record…

and be the author of…

a piece which-

I am the most removed from,

in terms of memory and…

Truth.

A lot of that collage comes from me approaching all my work from a playwright’s standpoint. I love being an interdisciplinary worker, allowing everything to intersect, but so often I find when I say “I'm a poet-dash-playwright,” all those hyphens begin to look like subtraction symbols and I don't know what I'm left with. Whether or not I always choose to identify as a playwright, writing plays and working with actors got me interested in the white space on the page. What I mean by “white space” is the moments when words fail; when a character double backs on what they're saying or coughs or sneezes—I have this almost rule in my plays that at some point, someone just has to say they have to pee. We are functioning bodies, and I think sometimes we forget that these bodies have intake/outtake valves.

At the time that I was working on “A Well-Attempted Life,” I was studying a lot of verbatim theater through my master's program. I was asked by a professor of mine to perform in her storytelling event called True Stories Live which was held in a former church. While I was acting, I acknowledged the church and I acknowledged that in this building, I was going to talk about my complicated relationship to God which I would explore also in my lyric essay. Through this acknowledgement, I developed a contract with the audience—you know, if God's really here then I could be smoked tonight and you might all witness it!

Then, I realized I wanted to go and write, I wanted to put this text on a page. There was such a fear of authenticity, and ultimately the only way this piece could feel authentic to me was if I worked with the verbatim script. It's a really interesting theatrical tool, but I also thought it would be just as interesting to have the verbatim dialogue on a printed page. The True Stories Live event was recorded so I was able to listen back to it. Using the “ums” and the hesitations from my performance in the essay itself was a way for me to acknowledge how sometimes, we don’t realize what we think until we begin speaking and the thoughts or beliefs come out between the stutters.

I also laid out these columns as an outlining technique that became the shape of the lyric because I physically felt the need to remove my story from my family. I also didn't feel right naming names of the people that I interviewed because I didn't want the readers to feel as if they could to put their own preconceived notions on a relationship if they knew from the get-go that this is someone's husband, this is my grandma's son, this is my grandma's daughter in law. In theatre, however, you would know about these relationships because you would see those actors on stage. So that was one of the unique opportunities of writing “A Well-Attempted Life” as an essay and not a script. I was also always able to remove myself through this objective research down the middle—research was my entry into my grandma's story.

What are some tips you have for others looking to make an impact through art?

I always emphasize identifying your audience. Though we should try to write as much as we can from environmental and/or sensorial input to find those universal truths to speak, we also have very specific audiences that we can address. It's okay to say no to opportunities that aren’t going to serve you, and it's even more okay to say yes to giving some opportunities to others, to using your platform to highlight others. One of the best things about working in the climate sector, besides that it's going to have a global impact, is that there's no room for competition or career building. Instead, we focus on world-sustaining.

That mindset has had such an impact on how I approach my writing because I'm not approaching writing to sustain myself and have a retirement fund, although I should probably worry about that at some point. I'm writing to sustain others from climate burnout, to provide alternatives to apocalyptic thinking. To provide respite for those of us who have tired bodies and to provide places where the research and the creative facilitation can intersect and find room to breathe. To others looking to make an impact, I would say recognize your audience, build your platform based on universality, and then project your message.

[1] Leslie Jamison, “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” VQR, 90, no.2 (April 2014). https://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-pain