Ecofiction — A Novel Approach to Environmental Truth-Telling

Meg Turville-Heitz’s novel “Black River” was inspired by a Society of Environmental Journalists conference tour to Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Above, she signs one of her books. Photo: S. Gideon Sandford.

Feature: Ecofiction — A Novel Approach to Environmental Truth-Telling

By Valerie Brown and Meg Turville-Heitz

From classics like Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Word for World is Forest,” to more recent examples like Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Water Knife” and Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach Series,” readers have demonstrated an appetite for ecofiction.

A cross-genre phenomenon, ecofiction, or green fiction, finds that some element of the nonhuman environment is a critical component to the story, as a plot catalyst, an overarching theme or even a character.

For environmental journalists, ecofiction can be a natural fit.

Like the code switching from covering an oil spill to writing a feature about a recovering species, the shift to fiction for some writers is just another angle for sharing a story.

Both of us (Meg Turville-Heitz and Valerie Brown) have skipped both ways across the fence, and so have several other Society of Environmental Journalists members, including Melody Kemp and Elyse Hauser.

Within this group, there are both similarities and differences in what prompted us to write ecofiction, how we navigated the conventions of the genre, whether writing journalism affected our fiction and whether writing fiction changed our journalism.

 

Diverse routes to fiction

Though our sample is small, there is considerable variety in our approaches.

Melody Kemp engages with children in a village in Laos during a reporting trip. Photo: Paul Wager.

Turville-Heitz published “Black River” with Mystique Press, an imprint of Crossroad Press, in 2024 and independently published a series, “The Enchanter’s Web,” this year.

Brown independently published “The Prodigal’s War” last August on Amazon and is working on a sequel.

Kemp published “Tree Crime” with Proverse Publishing in 2022 and has a further series in the works.

Hauser is a member of a cooperative group called The One Humanity Writing Collective, shares stories set in a team-created world and has yet to publish.

We also came to fiction along diverse paths.

Kemp spent more than a decade reporting on environmental destruction in Laos, where she observed a great untapped reservoir of imagination and a thirst for literacy in children. Fiction has helped her fulfill these needs, while conveying the importance of environmental issues.

Hauser says she had “been dabbling a bit in my own science fiction writing for a while, but it was The One Humanity Collective that really lit a fire for my ecofiction work.”

Turville-Heitz has been writing fiction since grade school, as has Brown. Both wrote for their high school newspapers. Turville-Heitz took a double major in creative writing and journalism in college, later earning a journalism doctorate. Brown dropped out of college to be a professional musician specializing in singer-songwriting before earning a master’s degree in journalism.

 

Journalism feeds the fiction

The kinds of research, observation and curiosity that are inherent in environmental journalism are things all the authors consider critical to their writing.

 

‘Covering today’s environmental issues

often feels like science fiction already:

environmental impacts of AI, amazing robots

that enable deep-sea exploration, you name it.’

                                                 — Elyse Hauser

 

Hauser notes that covering “today’s environmental issues often feels like science fiction already: environmental impacts of AI, amazing robots that enable deep-sea exploration, you name it.”

She sees ecofiction as a logical extension of her work that allows her to explore those stories from a different angle.

Kemp, too, notes that journalism allows her to “apply a fictionalized but real context for the stories, using examples and trends I see in the news.”

It also clued her to the need to research and get her facts right, even for fiction. She explores the role of nonhuman life in both traditional and modern cultures, and explicitly aims to reduce the industrial/cultural exploitation of elephants, pangolins, trees and frogs.

Kemp writes for both Lao and English-language readers, making her stories short and colorful and using humor because, she says, “People are more open to learning, and less defensive, if they are amused.”

Stories that appear to Westerners to be for children are perfectly acceptable for all ages in Asian cultures, Kemp adds.

 

Magic and logic

Journalism has led Brown to feel “compelled to make sure the internal logic made sense.”

She notes that the magic in her novel is important, “but also very risky. I didn’t want to rely on what I think of as shallow trickery.” Instead, she wanted to come up with what she thinks of as a “logical magic,” that makes sense in the world she built.

Like Brown, Turville-Heitz saw the need for verisimilitude, applying logic to her world-building and the cultural interactions between people and their environments.

In the case of “Black River,” Turville-Heitz points to SEJ for inspiring the novel. One of the full-day tours from the 1994 conference in Provo, Utah, took journalists to Dugway Proving Ground. That experience first led her to write a short story, “Proving Ground,” which was published in the anthology “Wizard Fantastic.” Eventually, it became the prologue for “Black River.”

 

‘As we toured the labs, I kept seeing

things that screamed opportunity for

catastrophe, and in the story

I postulated what would happen

if a wizard had the means to sneak in.’

                            — Meg Turville-Heitz

 

“As we toured the labs, I kept seeing things that screamed opportunity for catastrophe, and in the story I postulated what would happen if someone, say a wizard, had the means to sneak in and make off with a weapon of mass destruction,” says Turville-Heitz.

While journalism has clearly had an impact on their storytelling, in some cases it’s something of a two-way street.

Turville-Heitz has found that the more fluid and complex writing style of fiction lends itself more to features than to the tight news lede and sometimes is more enjoyable to write.

Brown suggests in some ways writing fiction has liberated her from the more restricted style of news reporting, though the tension between the two styles remains.

Kemp, on the other hand, strives to keep the two styles separate.

 

Fraught publishing landscape

While seeing ecofiction as a necessary way to engage younger generations in conservation practices, Kemp finds restrictive markets, costs of production and distribution limit what’s possible, especially in the regions where she publishes.

In fact, the publishing market remains fraught everywhere, according to Publishers Weekly.

Publishers continue to consolidate. And self-publishing combined with traditional publishing generates more than 5 million titles a year, 20 times what it was 30 years ago, all competing for attention, according to Bowker, the company that issues ISBNs.

That doesn’t count the influx of AI-written manuscripts, which also tax editors’ ability to wade through the submissions.

It’s harder and harder for fiction authors to gain the attention and publishing support they need, which echoes the difficult time environmental journalists have finding space on the page.

 

Fiction’s irresistible appeal

But SEJ novelists will write despite the practical challenges.

Brown feels that creative writing can express truths in a way that journalism cannot, and vice versa.

As facts have become ever more difficult to convey in the welter of propaganda and disinformation in today’s media universe, Brown puts more effort into supporting her every statement in her journalism with evidence from the most authoritative and original sources possible. Meanwhile, writing fiction provides a release from the microscopic details and the freedom to express a bird’s-eye view of a reality common to both genres.

Hauser finds that “unleashing my imagination through fiction helps me to become better at generating journalistic story ideas, writing them in an interesting way and thinking about how they’ll resonate with an audience.”

Turville-Heitz confesses to one not-necessarily-harmful effect of her fiction on her journalism: “It’s getting harder for me to write a straight-up nuts and bolts lede or nut graph. I’m more likely to write with a feature flair, with prose inflections and longer and more complex sentences.”

This blending shows that for writers — journalists or fictioneers — genre divisions are often fluid; ecofiction presents itself as another tool in the writer's toolbox.

“In a way, ecofiction and journalism are just two different ways to provide information and new ideas to readers,” says Hauser.

“Ecofiction, of course, has to be exciting and intriguing and get people to read it. But I think there’s also value in working to make journalistic stories exciting and intriguing, as well as accurate and informative, so more people will take interest.”

[Editor’s Note: For more on this, check our list of SEJ members’ favorite environmental fiction books.]

A former journalist, editor and farmer, Meg Turville-Heitz’s short fiction appeared in anthologies and magazines before she took a break to collect a Ph.D. and teach science and technical communications to undergrads. She lives on a defunct farm near Madison, Wisconsin, where she coddles chickens and is kept by cats. She can be found on social media at Bluesky. A sneak peek at her fiction can be found on her website.

Valerie Brown spent more than two decades writing about environmental health, climate, infectious diseases, nuclear waste, forests and fish. Before that, she was a professional musician in Portland, Oregon, for more than a decade. Her master’s thesis explored the censorship of popular music in the 1950s. She has also published an academic history of the late-1960s popular music scene in Portland. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with one sweet cat who refuses to be brushed. The nearest chickens are right behind the back fence. She’s on Bluesky.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 28. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.