ASLE’s Scholar of the Month for November 2023 is Lucien Darjeun Meadows.
Lucien Darjeun Meadows was born in Virginia and raised in West Virginia. A Ph.D. graduate from the University of Denver (June 2023), his Ph.D. dissertation studies the queer ecology of clouds in nineteenth-century British poetics, so as to show how lyrical writing on clouds, within works from poems to scientific treatises, destabilizes human subject/environmental object hierarchies and instead offers subject/subject relationships.
Across his interests in environmental studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, and working-class poetics, as well as his creative and critical writing, Lucien is committed to increasing the visibility of marginalized voices and multispecies relationships.
Lucien has presented at the 2020 and 2023 ASLE Conferences, been an ASLE Spotlight featured contributor to the 2021 episode on “Identity and Place,” and currently serves the ASLE Executive Council as a Graduate Student Liaison. His debut collection of poetry, In the Hands of the River (Hub City Press, 2022), was a finalist for the ASLE Creative Book Awards.
Following a five-year tenure with Denver Quarterly, Lucien now works as a poetry editor for The Hopper, an environmental literary journal, as well as the managing editor for Legacy Magazine, the premier periodical of the National Association for Interpretation, a 6000+ member organization of cultural, historical, and natural interpreters. He is a certified interpretive guide and manager, and when not reading or writing, Lucien can often be found among the northern Colorado foothill trails as an ultramarathon runner and a volunteer ranger assistant.
How did you become interested in studying ecocriticism and/or the environmental humanities?
We, you and I, have a commitment to each other and an undeniable interconnection with each other. We move through and make choices within networks of relationships. These relationships are rarely single-species, making “ecocriticism” or “environmental humanities” a necessary orientation, as I see it, if we truly wish to build more equitable, inclusive relations.
As such, it is hard for me to separate out “environmental writing” from other modes or styles of writing. Similar to how all art is political, all art is also always situated within particular bodies, locations, and contexts. As Felicia Rose Chavez writes, “your body, culture, class, and privilege influence your knowledge construction.” Since we never live in a hermetically sealed bubble, our bodies, locations, and contexts always extend beyond the porous container of our skin and mingle with the lived, built, and natural environments with whom we share life.
Even when I am writing, for example, on a poem from another country or period, my knowing is shaped by where I was raised and where I now live, at least as much as when I was raised or when I live. The environment who raised me populates my language with metaphors, and my body and mind with memories, and I cannot tease these interconnections apart. Perhaps this means that I have never not been interested in ecocriticism or the environmental humanities.
Who is your favorite environmental artist, writer, scholar, or filmmaker? Or what is your favorite environmental text? Why?
I am inspired by many scholars, writers, makers, and thinkers in this wide-ranging field. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s grammar of animacy, discussed at length in Braiding Sweetgrass, has affirmed my commitment to respectful descriptions of our ecological relatives. I have been grateful to the editors (and dissertation committee) who have questioned my use of “who” and “they” for ecological relatives and, after considering Kimmerer’s rationale, fully accept this language.
Karen Barad’s research into queer quantum physics, alongside Astrida Neimanis’s feminist phenomenology and N. Scott Momaday’s multivocal narration, encourage me to witness the body as porous, all matter as holding narrative, and meaning as always generated through relationship. In addition to these scholars, I am so grateful for the growing body of work on queer ecologies, nurtured by individual scholars as well as dynamic collectives, like you are here, a journal of creative geography housed at the University of Arizona.
Given the barriers to academic access, as well as the myriad ways of knowing that do not always find a home within academia, I am continually grateful for the scholars working outside of the formal academy and often outside of traditional monograph-style publishing. Thinking of Appalachian creators, makers, and thinkers, I am inspired by writer, oral historian, and video producer Rae Garringer’s Country Queers multimedia oral history project with artist, educator, and community advocate Vick Quezada. Kendra Winchester’s Read Appalachia podcast series often celebrates emerging diverse voices across the region.
Collaborative projects offer space to highlight how knowledge emerges in community. I seek out such work in academia and, importantly, in nontraditional spaces from community groups to small presses and collectives.
What are you currently working on?
In my creative and critical research, I reach across disciplinary borders because it is within the ecotone that the greatest diversity and richness of life may be found—and where those who have long been denied voice in white disciplines can reclaim agency, community, and voice.
Thus, my first poetry collection, In the Hands of the River (Hub City Press, 2022), queers traditional poetic forms to show how a childhood for a queer boy of both Cherokee and European heritage happens within and outside dominant narratives of Appalachia. Breaking traditional forms (e.g., sonnets, syllabics, triolets), these poems show how hegemonic containers cannot fully hold familial and ancestral trauma, nor the crisis of the speaker’s own coming-of-age. By queering these forms with his ecological kindred, this speaker finds and reclaims agency in his body, page, and world.
My second manuscript, Never Summer, is a hybrid poetry and lyric prose volume that works across both English and Cherokee. I use the running of a 100-kilometer ultramarathon as a linear frame for nonlinear meditations on ancestral and ecological memory, trauma, and survivance.
My dissertation (now becoming my first monograph project) also moves across literary studies, queer studies, and ecology. I study clouds in nineteenth-century poetics to notice spaces where writers open more mutual modes of human-environmental relationships and nonlinear hybridities—where clouds, and their poets, queer the subject-object relationship of conquest into a subject-subject partnership, as in John Clare’s ecologies of wonder and the embodied hybridity of Ellen Johnston (“The Factory Girl”). I have presented portions of this project to the American Association of Geographers, Université de Montréal, and ASLE.
Following a growing creative nonfiction practice, I am gathering a body of essays that considers the interconnections between identity and place; some of these essays are published in New England Review and Phoebe Journal. My third poetic project is inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s speculative archives. I use poetry and archival documents and images to study my family’s connections to working-class Appalachian legacies of mental struggles—work that connects historical and present-day mental health crises to ongoing class, gender, race, and environmental injustice across the region.
What is something you are reading right now (environmental humanities-related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally? Comment briefly on why or how it inspires you.
My stack of borrowed books continues to grow, and I am amazed at the wealth of essential, important learning offered by diverse makers across disciplines: particularly those who connect environmental justice to racial and social justice, for I believe (as others have long shown) that the tendency to objectify environments and ecological relatives swiftly leads to objectifying kin of our own species, which then facilitates racism, misogyny, classism, and more.
Right now, books that I am reading (or re-reading!) on these topics that inspire and nourish me include Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Workshop, on creating more inclusive classroom communities; Our Colony Beyond the City of Ruins, by Janalyn Guo, a magical ecological speculative story collection; Poetics of Liveliness, by Ada Smailbegović, on relationships between science and poetry; “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, on decentering settler perspectives in favor of unsettling and social justice; and Blood Snow by dg nanouk okpik and In the Current Where Drowning is Beautiful by Abigail Chabitnoy, two unique poetry collections on environmental injustice, misogyny, settler colonialism, and the persistence of kinship.
