Mires, ears, entrancements: immersive literary audio as eco-activism

Over the last few years, my creative practice has been expanding more and more from writing for the page into audio and immersive experience. This is partly because of my preoccupation with the environmental crisis, with the urgency of the need for more humans to rethink our interspecies relationships and our entanglement with the natural world, and with the challenge of making creative work to address that. Literary narratives are in themselves a brilliant way of exploring these themes, because of their power to invoke emotion and empathy while synthesising complex ideas. 

But there is a certain degree of anthropocentrism inherent in the written word, in that it is essentially the human voice expressed in human language through human-made technologies, notably the book. Audio, on the other hand, enables storytelling to become less anthropocentric and more biocentric by incorporating other ‘voices’ in counterpoint with verbal narratives: the voices of non-human beings, and also biophonic sounds – a breeze rustling oak leaves, for instance, or water trickling down a stream. In this way, audio narratives are able to engage collaboratively with more-than-human lives and intricate environments.

Audio can provide an entrancing way to experience a story, too, actively increasing the listener’s wellbeing, in part through the and role of nature-rich soundscapes, which are evidenced to have that effect ¹– while simultaneously challenging listeners to confront difficult issues about environmental risk through narrative. These difficult issues, articulated in stark, informative prose, might otherwise put some audiences off, even when arguments are backed up by clear statistics and irrefutable expertise. In this ominous era characterised by war, extreme nationalism, the rise of AI, antimicrobial resistance and the fracturing of the global order, as well as biodiversity loss and the climate crisis, hope can sometimes seem out of reach, and information about spiralling future risks can be hard to stomach. This arguably makes entrancement and immersion in storytelling ever-more strategically important in terms of communication.

But my fascination with sound and experience isn’t solely pragmatic in that sense; it’s also, partly, in my DNA. I have never been wedded to literature as something to be produced or consumed solely via the medium of text on a page. That isn’t to disparage books in the slightest – I’ve loved silent reading since I was a child, and now, as a novelist and academic, they are integral to what I do. It will always remain an incredible phenomenon to me that a world of ideas and characters and stories can be transmitted from one person to another silently and across time through a bunch of ink markings on pulped wood. I’m fortunate enough to have had four such objects published now. But I have never felt comfortable with being limited to working and thinking in that way alone. My first degree was in music, and I used to play the flute professionally. I pivoted, trained as a barrister specialising in human rights, and spent seven years working in and around courtrooms: work that entailed digesting rafts of written evidence into concise summaries, and then translating that into live, interactive, oral advocacy. While, on the face of it, music and law might seem like polar opposite professions, there is a connection between them: both involve performance – one foregrounding sound, the other orality. Which probably explains why, once I decided to leave law in order to concentrate on creative writing, I was drawn towards literary experiences beyond the page, and ended up writing a book about live literature².

For the last century or so, the publishing industry and literary education have been strongly focused on printed texts – and yet our literary culture is deeply rooted in orality. Ancient Greek writers performed their texts to audiences, often in competitive slam-style events, and Roman authors hired clappers to boost the reception of their latest works. Even in Austen’s time, reading aloud was common in people’s homes as a social literary practice; literary culture in the 18th and 19th centuries bloomed through salon culture, and Dickens famously performed his fiction to packed halls. In the 20th century, many of these practices faded away. But the 21st century explosion of not only live literature but also literary audio – audiobooks and podcasts – means that many people are now consuming literary narratives once again as an aural or as a performance experience, more often than as silent readers. And once you begin to think about literature as experience, myriad possibilities materialise. 

The more live literature events that I attended in the course of my research, the more intrigued I became by the narrowness of prevailing expectations as to what such events can and should entail. As anyone who has been to a literary festival will know, individual events tend to adopt a standard conversation-based format of on-stage discussions with authors about their work, punctuated by short readings aloud from the text, and followed by an audience Q&A. Although these formats are good for book sales and can make for excellent events, there are just so many other experiential possibilities for literary narrative. In the literary scene, I was entertained by slam events and cabaret-style literary salons which offered alternative approaches. In the live art world, I was captivated by events featuring performed texts involving projections, movement and dynamic physical performances, exploring space and audience interaction in inventive ways. And in the theatre world, I was struck by the popularity of shows in which full-length literary novels like Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby were performed to packed auditoriums. I decided to experiment myself with creating immersive literary performance experiences involving other art forms, and founded Ark: a project funded by Arts Council England which staged immersive short story shows in library spaces curated around a theme and involving multiple cross-arts collaborations. It was gratifying to see how these shows attracted younger and more diverse audiences than those I tended to see at more traditional literary events.

Over the last six years, I have been focusing on addressing the environmental crisis in my work, and on making creative work that seeks to connect diverse audiences afresh with nature and landscape, while engaging with research and activity that is aimed at making our environments more biodiverse and resilient. Collaborating with organisations like The National Trust, and with environmental scientists, and more recently with industry, I have been commissioned to make a variety of creative works in this vein, developing my practice in immersive literary audio. Audio seemed like the ideal medium for this kind of work, in part since spatial and site-specific sound recording is now so accessible. With a few taps, anyone with a smartphone can access an audio work that has the potential either to enhance their in-situ experience of a place, or to create a virtual experience of being present there. 

My audio work so far has taken two main forms: immersive fictional sound stories, produced with rich, spatial soundscapes, and literary soundwalks: long-form evocative essays following a walking route around a landscape. For instance, Riverlandia is a creative response to a landmark river restoration project at the National Trust’s Holnicote Estate, designed to appeal to older children and adults. A work of fiction, it explores the lives of ten inhabitants of the valley during the year in which a new wetland is created there, through a series of monologues, most of which are narrated by non-humans. Protagonists include a dragonfly, a bullhead fish, a skylark, an alder tree, and the river itself. This approach to storytelling inevitably requires a hefty amount of anthropomorphism, and I leaned into that, but worked hard to underpin playful characterisation and storylines with evidence-based scientific research about the behaviours and tendencies of these particular non-human species in this landscape, and the threats they face. The ten monologues are voiced with verve in the audio by actors and comedians including Gemma Whelan, Bethany Antonia, Mike Wozniak and Will Adamsdale, who bring out the humour and distinctiveness of each character. I have shared this work through immersive installations and listening experiences, including an installation at The British Library, and a screening event at the Brooklyn Public Library after it was shortlisted for a creative climate award. 

In contrast, my literary soundwalks are longer-form, narrated by me and recorded in situ, with the intention of evoking as viscerally as possible the real experience of walking through a particular landscape. They are observationally descriptive, giving a sense of what the walk is like to experience, but they also delve into some of the nature and conservation work being done there, and into the palimpsestic layers of the landscape’s history. 

For my current arts-led research project, Storying Water, I am ensconced with a group of scientists as artist-in-residence at CREWW, the Centre for Resilience in Environment, Water and Waste, based at the University of Exeter, and funded by South West Water. Working collaboratively, I am developing new outputs to engage diverse audiences with how the water system works, and key issues affecting its future resilience. A central part of the Storying Water project is a podcast that will follow a river from source to sea, interrogating different elements of the water system along the way, from peatlands to reservoirs to drinking water treatment plants to sewage treatment works. It has been a huge intellectual challenge trying to get my head around scientific vocabularies and approaches, and the vast web of complexity inherent in water system research on what has become a fraught topic, with highly sensitive political implications. But it has been refreshing to discover how open water experts are to the potential of immersive and creative modes of storytelling, not only to engage new audiences in their important work, but also to stimulate new conversations, inspirations, and fresh ways of working among themselves. 

Immersive audio is a vibrant and exciting space to be in right now, and as the technology evolves further, the possibilities for dynamic experiences involving binaural audio, multi-channel installations and performance are endless. I will never forget Simon McBurney’s pioneering and powerful theatre show from 2015, The Encounter, which I experienced at the Barbican: the audience wore binaural headphones, entering into a virtual auditory rainforest while he performed alone on stage. Comparable events are now proliferating. Recently, for instance, I have enjoyed discovering work by Darkfield, an immersive audio theatre company, whose shows are staged in pitch darkness in shipping containers; encountering installation work by audio artists like Kathy Hinde, Jason Singh, and BJ Leo; and seeing – and hearing – the work of expert nature sound recordists like Ellie Williams headlining on mainstream TV shows like Earthsounds.

But it’s time to circle back to the exquisiteness of a springline mire. To answer that quiz question: a springline mire is a type of bog – a rare and specific one, where permeable greensand (a kind of limestone formed from marine sediment in the early Cretaceous period) and impermeable clay sub-soils join in holy matrimony, creating a fertile wetland of springs and quaking bogs that offer a perfect habitat for particular plant and animal communities. So rare is the springline mire that, on this entire planet, you can only find them in a single area: the Blackdown Hills National Landscape, which borders Devon and Somerset. A gem of an example is Yarty Moor Reserve, an inauspicious place at first glance, tucked away off a main road. It’s not easy to find or access, and first impressions are of a messy, lumpy meadow that’s spiky with reeds and looks a bit damp. You do need to wear wellies or waterproofed walking boots if you want to avoid wet socks. But when you are in the midst of it, you can crouch down and marvel at a whole new world in miniature. 

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 penniwort, fluffy common cotton grass and cuckoo flower, devil’s-bit scabious and lesser skullcap (just to add a murderous twist), and two species of sundew – if you don’t know about sundew, they are remarkable insectivorous plants that look a bit like ruby red sea urchins and that tend to sparkle in sunlight because they gather tiny droplets of water on their spikes like beaded veils. There are unusual dragonflies zipping around, keeled skimmers and damselflies, there are bulbous crab spiders pottering across leafy obstacle courses, there are green hairstreak and pearl-bordered fritillary butterflies, hidden harvest mice, and rare birds like snipe and woodcock. Imagine yourself as one of these beings, with this wetland as your realm, and it seems like a rich universe.

Wetlands in general are precious places now, not least because they have become so scarce. Agriculture and urbanisation over the past couple of centuries have caused most of the Earth’s wetlands to be drained and built over, to the point that they now only cover about 6% of the planet’s surface – and yet they are home to 40% of the world’s plant and animal species³.

Around the corner from Yarty Moor is a little-known nature reserve called Otterhead Lakes: a wonderfully watery realm. As well as areas of springline mire, it is replete with mulchy soils, leats, lakes, and now expanding ponds, thanks to a growing beaver colony, whose impacts on the water system, including on water quality, are being researched by scientists I work with at CREWW⁴. It has a fascinating hidden history, too – and its topographic character, being surrounded by a wooded valley, away from major roads, means that the sounds of the water moving, and of the surrounding biophony, can be vividly brought to life through audio. Over the last six months, I have spent a lot of time there, working with fellow artists Arun Sood and Emma Molony on a new immersive installation responding to the waterscape called Springs and Seepages. My flute has enjoyed being taken out of its box again, and Arun and I have been improvising in situ, harmonising with the water’s melody, while Emma has been immersing large canvases in the wet silt, and painting them with natural inks, using the forms of its wetland plants. The work involves video, sculpture made from found materials, and wet plate photography, alongside the visual and audio work, and will be featured in an exhibition early next year: Shifting Waterscapes, which will be at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in January and February 2026. 

What will flow on from this project remains to be seen – or indeed heard. But the more I work with narratives shaped by sound and experience, through spending time immersed in places where more-than-human life is allowed to thrive, the more inspirations seem to bubble up, ready to seep into future projects.