This Earth Day, a collective of writers are launching a Thrutopian magazine, Bending The Arc on Substack, including poets Ilse Pedler, Hilary Watson and Alice Willitts, and novelists Laura Baggaley and Katherine Stansfield. Here Alice, Hilary and Ilse discuss experimenting with form, language and narrative to address a new way of thinking and writing about the future, including Thrutopian writing and ideas. They explain that this will mean us coming down off the “mountain” and asking others to find the belief to come down too. Read on for an explanation of Thrutopian ideas, the “mountain” and more.
What is Thrutopian Poetry?
“Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous”
–Jim Dator, futurologist and academic
Ilse Pedler: Thrutopia is a relatively new term coined by the academic Rupert Read to describe writing that guides us through the climate emergency to a future that is sustainable and achievable. As he says, ‘Don’t defer your dreams. We need those dreams now.’ So much of what is written about the environment at the moment is either dystopian or utopian, neither of which is always helpful, as you can find yourself flipping between despair and something that seems unreachable. Through-topias are narratives of how to navigate the route from where we are now, to where we may be in years to come, to give practical examples of what could work and what a futuresociety could look like and to give some inspiration for a way forward. We are taking these broader literary ideas and exploring what poetry could offer the thrutopian movement.
Hilary Watson: Rob Hopkins, the environmentalist, journalist and one of the founders of the transition town movement, talks about society collectively having spent years climbing to the top of the mountain of progress and technology and now we are here, we are at the top. We’re standing on years of environmental destruction. We need to get down off the mountain because we know the status quo’s not working but are too frightened to leave what is familiar. The way to coax people down is to show them what could be an alternative but achievable society, one that is sustainable, non-exploitative, working in a balanced way with the environment. It’s so important to create a longing and desire for that possible future.
Ilse: We’ve been thinking about the roles poetry has in society, how poetic forms have evolved over time and how they can evolve further using Thrutopian principles.
For example, we looked at ballad forms and the use of narrative and how call and response can work as a call to action when used in collaboration with other poets. We looked at circular forms like Jack Underwood’s ‘and I asked of the lemon’, as well as other sorts of cyclical nested poems as ways of starting with the microscopic and ending up in the galaxy! We looked at other sequences like sonnet crowns and how they can dive deep into a subject and we also considered different sorts of language like Fran Locke’s use of pronouns in her hyena poem us says.
Hilary: We wanted to think about salvage, recycling, retrofitting and repurposing existing forms, facts and language, into new forms. We’ve also invented completely new forms. We’ve created the duplex crown (taking inspiration from sonnet crowns and Jericho Brown’s duplex).
Ilse: One particular form that I came to know of through the Cumbrian poet Mike Smith (who writes as Brindley Hallam Dennis) is the valanga or avalanche poem that uses repeated lines pattern in an amazingly expansive and joyous way, which we’ve dubbed The Rob Hopkins valanga because it really seems to speak to Rob’s ‘bring them down from the mountain’ analogy.
Alice Willitts: I run a mile from form usually but here I am, willingly inventing poetic forms and even enjoying some of them! I mean, the form seems important suddenly, relevant and necessary as a way to carry new thinking. I appreciate that this must always be why new forms emerge, and I love that we’re experiencing that, I suppose.And I’m addicted to the valanga!
Ilse: We have had a lot of fun with it!
We live in a system that has been locked into a false sense of inevitability. Hope is a discipline.
–Mariame Kaba, organiser and educator.
Alice:- With thrutopoems (yes, I just made that up!) we’re feeling our way past the obvious obstacles of doom and into the possible If I had to pin down what we’ve concluded so far for the poetry side of Thrutopia, I’d say that thrutopoems imagine a realistic, liveable and thriving future on Earth; write from that place to create longing in the reader; may include practical or instructional elements to reveal a path to that desirable future from where we are now; and accept unpredictability and turbulence as foundational to the times that we’re living into but don’t dwell in that fear.
These are more than hopeful poems, they are poems of intention and longing, to change our belief in ourselves as people who can and will make a future for our species on Earth. For example, thrutopoetry might explain how to fit a solar panel but only if the solar panel is on your heart. Thrutopoetry could world-build a community living a solarpunked life but only if in line by line, it made you want to leap up and shout, yes, that, I want that! So Thrutopoetry is going to be where we meet each other openly in our struggles and link arms, wipe our tears and choose to do better.
Ilse: One quote we really liked was from Jim Dator, an American futurologist, who said ‘any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous’. The perverse kind of logic of this really rang true and we feel that we are writing to dispel the current myth of inevitability, to show how desirable and attainable the future can be and not ridiculous.
Alice: So if what we write seems ridiculous now, so much the better, it could mean we’re on the right path to living better than we do currently. The key thing for me is accepting unpredictability though, there will be no new normal for a long while. We’re at the beginning of a new era, one humans have never experienced before and activists, philosophers, thinkers and scientists who have been exploring the non-legibility of what’s ahead will say that we’re crossing a kind of barrier, going beyond what humans know how to do. What can be interesting to writers, and poets in particular, are the cracks opening up for telling the anchoring and necessary stories of ourselves, as we transition. Let’s imagine writers digesting the dead matter falling from the dying systems and returning the nutrients to people as stories to sustain new kinds of spaces, systems and narratives of possibility.
Hilary: Right, because death is part of a cycle, not an end… you just need to look at fungi to see that at work.
Alice: Throughout 2024 in particular I was feeling a strange warping and rippling of some important continuum. I was aware of it in my body with acute bouts of fatigue and pain, but also in the way linearity wobbled around me. Time sped up or slowed down both suddenly and simultaneously so that I’d think it was a month or week ahead or behind where we were. More generally, I saw that others were finding it hard to keep track of themselves, feeling detachment and confusion both internally and externally as ‘business as usual’ misbehaved. I think we’ll look back on 2024 and recognise it as the turning.
Hilary: You know, in 2024 it did feel like that for me too in many ways, but since the US presidential election and subsequently, Trump coming to power, there’s a real struggle with knowing where that tipping point is… in fact, the need for a yearning for a better future has never been more real now in 2025. There’s a real need for this work.
Ilse: I think it’s so easy to fall into the abyss of despair when you think about the climate, political systems and the abuse of power.
I fundamentally don’t believe that the current deathscape of incrementalism is somehow more “practical” than radical transformation
–Harsha Walia, activist and writer
Alice: For poets the most important work of the coming years might be speaking directly to our audiences, from our actual mouths, to their actual ears. I also wonder how other poets will respond to the principles of Thrutopia and the new forms we’ve invented, whether the forms are robust enough to carry poets into a new thinking, and inventiveness of their own. I’m excited to find out.
Ilse:- Definitely, discovering Thrutopia for me feels like being given a choice again, because a lot of current eco-poetry is so bleak it leaves me with a feeling of despair and no autonomy to change anything. It almost feels like the role a lot of ecopoetry has adopted is to just document the climate emergency and nothing else. Documentation is obviously vital but people also need to see possibility and to be able to feel they have some sense of purpose.
Alice: Of course, asking readers to feel something, anything, about the trouble we’re in is useful, and can be good for poets too, to express their own grief and tell the truth about what is being concealed by those in power. But we need more than that now, we need to move out of shock and paralysis at the losses and damage. We need convincing parables and practical notes on how to actually make that better future, give people a way to move their bodies forward.
Hilary:- This is the issue that I feel deep in my body when I’m faced with the current approach. It’s that despair leads to a fight-flight-freeze response and a declaration of ‘we’re totally f*cked’ so there’s nothing to be done, nothing I can do, so I won’t do anything. I was attracted to the concept of Thrutopia because I saw that the despair I associated with some climate collapse movements – whether poetry or broader – were not going to lead to a positive change. Instead, I was much more interested in finding out how bad things are, yes, but also what we can do to at least have a better outcome for the future than the worst case, supposedly ‘inevitable’ scenario.
It is my belief that we will create the future we long for only because we are able to master the art of telling the most compelling stories. Stories that are delicious, irresistible, mesmerising. Stories that cultivate a deep deep longing.
–Rob Hopkins, author and founder of Transition Towns
Hilary: It feels like we’re living through an emergency of yearning right now, as our friend Clare Whistler described it.
Ilse: Yes, to be able to see a way to the future and be able to yearn for it, to be able to believe in it is so important. We have been working our way through Manda Scott’s Thrutopia course which had a series of lectures and presentations from some of the leading people in the movement for sustainable and regenerative futures, covering all aspects of living and interacting with our planet and gave us a great store of knowledge to use in our work. People like Janis Birkeland, the architect and urban designer, and Patrick Holden, who talked about regenerative agriculture and sustainable food production. We haven’t invented a form based on his ideas (yet) because we’re too busy eating his delicious Hafod cheddar!
Hilary: Yes, Thrutopian literature can rapidly imagine the multiplicity of scenarios ahead to model new ways of living and we can see which ideas stick. Changing the story about our future will change the future. Time and again we’ve seen that a frightened person, or population, is unable to make changes, less able to be generous and compassionate, and crucially less able to act in the wider interest, and sometimes unable to act in their own interest either. So as writers we can help create believable ways through the multi-crises troubles we’re already experiencing and the many that are to come. This movement extends beyond art and literature and into ‘real lives’, in real places and can be adopted in all ways of thinking.
There’s also been a shift in daily practices wider than the writing – because these ways of thinking offer suggestions to subtle changes. Learning that there are shifts in how I do daily things like garden or shop, that align with regenerative practices and transition town concepts has been really interesting and very empowering.
Ilse: I agree, I looked online to find my nearest transition town and found it was my local town, Kendal, and I now volunteer at the Food Larder there!
The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.
–David Graeber, academic and writer.
Hilary: And that’s been so fantastic to learn about and see in action while grappling with these huge issues and how to write into them. We’re not working from an existing framework so much of our discussion was looking at existing ecopoetry and how it differed from what we imagined a Thrutopian poem could be. Asking ourselves questions like could a beautifully embodied, eco poem be ‘accidentally’ Thrutopian, even if the poet hadn’t been applying a specific lens to it while writing?
Alice: I’d say not, because we’re starting from now, with a specific set of requirements or rules for writing that’s never existed before. So, I don’t think any poems can be Thrutopian, until now.
Hilary: Ah, but often we found that potentially yes – existing eco poetry does sometimes pull on that longing for a different or atypically connected relationship with nature.
Alice: Maybe, but the ‘through’ element to a realistic future has been missing.
Hilary: I agree. This is something I’m grappling with in my own poetry. For example, if I think a more embodied experience of the world is an essential ingredient to the Thrutopian future, is it enough to concentrate on this element within a poem destined to sit within a Thrutopian arc or is more precision needed? I still think that if certain poems sit within the context of a ‘through-ing’ collection, it could be considered part of the movement.
Alice: Agreed, there is a possible space where context gives any poem a new reading, even if the intentionality wasn’t there in the way we’re thinking about it now, but also the intentionality is perhaps key to how we evolve into Thrutopian writing. I do think that poetry of all genres can be Thrutopian though.
Ilse:- Yes, we’ve had some huge discussions about what makes a Thrutopian poem and how that differs from ecopoetry!
Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
–Ursula K Le Guin, writer.
Alice: Also, can we talk about the ways this work is challenging and changing our own writing?
Hilary: Well, Ilse who is a total queen of form will be pleased to know that I have surprised myself by becoming a formalist! I’ve absolutely relished the creativity that comes with constraints offered by a form. Suddenly, I get what all the fuss is about and find writing in different forms very satisfying. I spent a whole weekend writing a duplex crown (after inventing the rules for what that was) while my partner was away. She just laughed when I told her what I’d been up to! Just before she left for her trip, I’d invented a myth for a new constellation. I mean, something’s going on!
Alice: One thing’s for sure, new myths and legends in capitalist societies are needed now as humans literally tackle challenges no humans have tackled before and we need a collective approach — stories, poems, lyrics and prayers are technologies that have always created collective action. Let’s start telling Thrutopian stories to the people who already come to our books for escape, inspiration, visibility, encouragement and thrills. New narratives are needed and they’re needed now. Agents, start commissioning! Editors, start commissioning! Publishers, set up imprints for cross-genre Thrutopian themes, it’s time and the time is now! Joking aside, this is urgent work in our culture and everywhere I talk to people about this work there is a huge appetite for uplifting, believable versions of existence for them and for their children. People want to know what to do, how to do it and that any kind of liveable future is possible.
If a story is set in the future, I want there to be some part that’s about how we won this fight: people got together and thought and solved this problem. I’m so excited about the idea that we could solve this.
–Aya de Léon, climate novelist, slam poet, activist, and teacher.
Ilse: We’re excited about where the future will take us now.
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