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This week's topic, introduced to us through Paul Kingsnorth's article, centers on questions of our conception of the land and how it relates to the ways we write about the land, or rather the ways we don't write about it.

Generally we seem interested in the reasons why people don't tend to portray the land as its own character in stories. Some of the possible reasons we had were that it's hard or even unnatural for us to apply human-like thoughts and feelings to the land, and that casting the land, which is normally just a setting, as a character requires us to practice changing our established conventions of writing such as equating the "where" and "who" of a story to the same entity.

We seem to feel that we need to better embrace and appreciate nature to connect more with it and reverse this sort of "de-humanizing" process that's happened. There also seems to be a consideration of typical ways the land is represented in stories, such as natural forces being the destructive antagonist, and questions of whether or not it's wise to apply human qualities to non-human entities, and how to somehow personify the land without humanizing it.