In this essay, I use performative writing as a framework to explore the problem of climate change. Specifically, the shifting and accumulative nature of clouds serves as a trope for imaginatively restaging environmental issues. In the essay, I view the environment as a symbolic and material construction that is coproduced in connection to the personal, discursive, and collective unconscious. Through narrative, poetry, and performance, I argue for the concept of environmental performativity as a metonym for exploring the interdependent relationship among the individual, environment, and climate change.

This brief essay introduces a series of performative writing experiments including prose, poetry, and performance that explore ordinary objects from the window opened by theory, including new materialist, posthuman, and affect-oriented approaches.

Written in the spirit of Maggie Nelson's “autotheory,” this essay takes up José Esteban Muñoz's notion of “ephemera as evidence” to explore how the body-as-object (i.e., the body-as-book) might reformulate understandings of materiality as an ephemerality of “traces, glimmers, residues, and specks of things.” Bodies-as-books are distinctly material, though not always solid, and can be written and read as artifact-ephemera that end but do not disappear.

In this postmodern qualitative account of an interspecies relationship, the author argues for a posthumanist scholarly orientation that critiques anthropocentric trends toward knowledge construction. Following Sarah J. Tracy's 1 suggestion regarding more flexible and expansive literary styles, this essay appears in the form of a letter to a canine friend, Venice. The author asks us to consider a symbiogenetic perspective of qualitative research that recognizes philosophical perspectives that are less widely considered within the humanities, particularly those dedicated to an expanded view of world-making within a nature–culture network.