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In tracing the waterways from Cornwall and on to Devon, Ellen’s piece immerses the reader-listener within an extraordinary wilderness: “Exquisite species live there – sphagnum mosses in soft hummocks, three species of marsh orchids with delicate flecked patterns, pale butterwort, bogbean and bog asphodel, marsh violet and marsh pennywort”. 

Ellen’s sublime writing on the powerful combination of nature and storytelling evokes a sense of belonging – and responsibility – in and for the natural world. As Ellen reflects; “audio enables storytelling to become less anthropocentric and more biocentric by incorporating other ‘voices’ in counterpoint with verbal narratives.” 

The benefits of water as therapy (particularly a love of cold water swimming) were the starting point for the collaboration between myself and Dr Polly Card. Filmed underwater in Cornwall (where I lived for 15 years) Polly’s piece, and the accompanying poem and musical score (composed for this film by my son, Inigo Scott, who was born in Cornwall), offer a multimedia encounter with loss and solace, explored through a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice’s grief. Foregrounding water as a medium of relationality, memory, and embodied knowledge, this short film resonates with hydrofeminist approaches to environmental humanities, in which we might envisage ourselves as ‘bodies of water’ and the hydrological turn in creative practice, where water becomes both subject and method.  [seafoundation.eu]

Looking skyward now, Richard Carter’s work is a sky-ramble, a swooping spirograph of sorts; at first glance, folly-in-flight. But Richard’s research methodology is also a creative form of mark and a critique of surveillance capitalism. In an article about the use of drones for military surveillance in The Guardian last week (5 October, 2025), Richard was quoted saying: ‘…since man used flight in war, one of the consequences was to “turn peaceful skies into a source of persistent threat”.’ 

And so within this issue of The Lit – our seventh, an accidentally but perhaps fittingly mythical number – we start to explore not just how stories can drive change, but how the ways of telling the stories can have power, influence and invocation far greater than other means.  

A pervading sense of an omniscient digital presence is also evident in Joskaudė Pakalkaitė’s PhD practice research project, which explores the intersection of design fiction, speculative user interface innovation, and literary illustration. Each of Yoshi’s three illustrated narratives offers a playful yet critical lens on the future of digital interaction, where hand-drawn aesthetics meet speculative storytelling.

Yandi’s work was perhaps the most surprising. She messaged me out of the blue asking if I would take a look at some of her writing. Reading it was exhilarating – a world of colour and contrast opened up, a cultural slippage between communism in Beijing in the 1980s and the brash consumerism exemplified by a bottle of Coca-Cola. The colour red can have so many different meanings. The more I pulled on this thread, the more creative outputs emerged. Yandi, it turns out, has an archive of photos and 50 drawings, each of which speaks to the writing and brings it to life in different ways. These small surprises are what makes the world turn. Or as Yandi writes at the end of her prologue; “Life moves in quiet circles, and I walk within them slowly.” Here, Yandi’s writing has been published in both English and Chinese, to mirror the cultural intersections prevalent in her work. 

Tracing back to How the Light Gets In, an issue of The Lit where we explored the interplay between the climate crisis and publishing; how authors were responding, and how authors could best respond, whether that be through polemic novels, poetry or climate fiction. In exploring this subject, which appeared on the surface a response to a modern crisis, we realised that perhaps this wasn’t a response at all, and perhaps just doing what storytelling has always done. As the issue editors write:  “changing with the times, testing and troubling its own formal boundaries in an attempt to convey new realities.” 

And in this way, we trace the ecology of storytelling over the past five years: one which is static yet ever-changing, on the page and off, analog and digital.  

This too is the world of experiential storytelling, in which a distinctive, exploratory and genre-bending selection of creative works gently and collectively refute technological determinism and, instead, playfully explore practice and embodied activism, drawing on – rather than being beholden to – digital possibilities. [iosrjournals.org]