How to Write with Trees: Material Ecocritical Strategies for Multispecies Care in Contemporary Fiction

This study explores how contemporary literature writes with trees, rather than merely about them, attending to the entangled lives of humans and nonhumans. Drawing on material ecocriticism perspectives, it examines how storytelling can foster care, attention, and ethical imagination in multispecies worlds. The analysis focuses on three novels: Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees , Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest , and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer. Each text employs different writing strategies against anthropocentrism. In Shafak, a fig tree witnesses and remembers alongside human characters; in Le Guin, the Athshe forest enacts a collective consciousness that resists human mastery; and in Kingsolver, chestnut trees participate in relational ecologies that intertwine with Appalachian human and nonhuman lives. Across these narratives, trees are not passive symbols but active, communicating participants that co-create the worlds they inhabit. The authors employ three key strategies for multispecies care. First, affective intimacy draws readers into close, empathetic encounters with nonhumans without projecting human consciousness onto them. Second, temporal layering and attention to collective memory situate human and nonhuman lives within shared histories and ecological rhythms. Third, ethical engagement with nonhuman suffering allows literature to recognize damage and loss in nonhumans, fostering moral reflection and interspecies responsibility. Through these strategies, this study demonstrates how writing with trees can function as a multispecies practice of attention, care, and ethical imagination, offering a framework for understanding literature as a site of relational and ecological engagement.