LoR arises out of some of the literary responses of the last hundred years to conventional literature and the dominant culture. It comes out of Surrealism, Woman’s Culture and Women’s Literature, the new writing, including Magic Realism, from Latin America and also, essentially, from Native American Literature and from Indigenous Literature across the globe. Over the years through alliances with writers, through reading outside the canon of western civilization and through the discoveries that come through one’s own writing, I was unwittingly led to forms, qualities and characteristics that might combine to form a different literary genre, something writers might want to study and aspire to on behalf of a primary intention of restoring the world. LoR is complex and multi-layered and references as many worlds as a writer can access and certainly more than the literal universe to which most conventional literature is confined. There is no requirement for linearity; it is inter-connected and relational.

Most importantly, conflict and the eroticism of violence are not required.  LoR does not respond to the too-common query: “What is the central conflict?” LoR, circular rather than linear,  is organized around a central magnetism, gathering stories which associate, layer, interpenetrate around a central theme. Not what is the (essential) conflict, but what is the heart of the matter? 

It is not simple to describe what a Literature of Restoration might be, might become. There is no check list, are no narrow categories. Although not all writing associated with LoR includes all its characteristics, there are certain fundamentals without which it wouldn’t be LoR. It is aligned with, committed to, sourced in, and honoring of the natural world and all its beings. In fact, it’s relationship with the natural world is crucial. It is also connected to the reality of the spiritual world and the multiple ways of knowing and being that characterize the imagination as a real world. And, equally important, LoR seeks the integrity of the writer to the work, a stringent level of truth telling, and a commitment to walking one’s talk.

It asks: Can we imagine a literature which does not lead to violence, social and political chaos, extinction, climate collapse and despair?

It asks: How might we together seek possibilities of bringing healing and new directions to a ravaged world?

When you read the pieces that are here and contemplate the field of vision they create through their relationship to each other, you will see that they were not written in response to commercial interests or to fulfill personal ambitions, but because they had to be written, because they had to be written the way they were written, because what is said in each of them has to be said. All of this because we are heartbroken for the Earth and for all the lives that are in such jeopardy and because the heart is a great intelligence that might be able to lead us away from extinction.

-Deena Metzger