It isn’t easy to write about animals, especially if the goal is to actually portray them as they are and not just use them, as so often happens, as symbols, metaphors, and mirrors. In order to confront these difficulties, Sangamithra Iyer recently launched The Literary Animal Project to bring writers and readers into conversation to explore the many quandaries in writing about animals and try to find effective, and literary, ways forward.

Sangamithra Iyer is a writer, engineer, environmental planner, and literary animal. Her first book, Governing Bodies, a lyrical reckoning of the ways bodies—human, animal, and water— are controlled and liberated, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. She served as an editor of Satya magazine, and her work has been published in numerous outlets and anthologies, including our very own Hen Press, which published “The Lines We Draw.” Most recently, she is the founder of The Literary Animal project, a habitat for conversations and writings about the ways animal lives are portrayed on the page and how we forge a more just and compassionate multi-species world, for which she was awarded a Culture and Animals Foundation grant.

RESOURCES

• • • Eat Differently Theatrical Commercial
    • The Lines We Draw ebook
    • Sangamithra Iyer’s Website
    • Literary Animal Substack
    • Invisible Cities
    • Writing for Animals (w/ Are You Willing Essay)
    • Satya Magazine archive
    • Small Days and Nights
    • The Carrying: Poems
    • Next of Kin
    • Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
    • Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
    • What We Fed to the Manticore
    • Fathoms: The World in the Whale
    • Experimental Animals: (A Reality Fiction)
    • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
    • The Ethics of Diet; A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh Eating
    • For the Birds: From Exploitation to Liberation
    • The First Step: An Essay On the Morals of Diet, to Which Are Added Two Stories

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This episode is sponsored in part by The Culture & Animals Foundation, which sponsors artists, scholars, and activists in our collective efforts to understand our fellow species more deeply and to further their rights. CAF provides annual grants, an arts prize, a lecture series, and a fellowship. Visit cultureandanimals.org for more information. The Culture & Animals Foundation: Think. Create. Explore. Celebrate. 

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This episode is brought to you in part through the generosity of A Well-Fed World. A Well-Fed World provides the means for change by empowering individuals, social justice organizations, and political decision-makers to embrace the benefits of plant-based foods and farming. Learn more at awfw.org.