In January 2026, Gabriela Denise Frank and Jessica Gigot co-led a workshop about the Pastoral and the Necropastoral. In this generative, team-teaching model they explored where these literary forms overlap and diverge and the gray matter in between. Their rich exchanges during class led to a deeper questioning of the role of the contemporary pastoral, why we might actually need more sentiment in our writing, and what the apocalypse—as in revelation—of the Necropastoral leads to next.
Jessica Gigot: What is the Necropastoral and how does it show up in your work?
Gabriela Denise Frank: The term Necropastoral comes from the poet, translator, and critic Joyelle McSweeney, who was just awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize in poetry. I first encountered her writing in the essay Plath in Cold. She exposed and reveled in the entrails of death-in-life—which has been my experience of living since my mother died when I was a kid—a way of navigating the world that few of my peers shared;I felt like her writing grabbed me by the collar and verified the existence of an enchanted realm beneath the surface world. Here was a poet revealing the secret truths of the universe that I had tried and failed to accurately describe! I immediately ordered The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (University of Michigan Press).
Joyelle defines the Necropastoral as, “a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of ‘nature’ which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects. The Necropastoral is a non-rational zone, anachronistic, it often looks backwards and does not subscribe to Cartesian coordinates or Enlightenment notions of rationality and linearity, cause and effect.” She wrote a post describing the Necropastoral for the Poetry Foundation’s blog.
For me, the Necropastoral explains why I am a ‘spooky girl.’ I’ve always been drawn to dead things because the Western culture I live in aims to deny death as a reality and yet death is undeniable. Already, we live in paradox. This unvarnished truth emerges where the pavement falls away to reveal old bricks, and beneath the bricks, the mud brims with squirming creatures and bones and crystals and rocks—which is to say, layers of time, life, and death. Always, there’s digging involved and we never really stop searching.
Joyelle’s work spotlights the ways that Homo sapiens has profoundly changed planetary systems: human empires insist that we dominate and control nature—that we are separate from nature and that we live on factory clock time—yet evidence abounds that we actually control nothing, which (again) feels like a paradox. This illusion of human supremacy appears real until you question it. The Necropastoral makes space for Death to live in our art-making, our thinking, our day to day perceptions, and it lays bare the impact of human enterprise and expansion on the planet while reminding us that we’re not in control, though we’re powerful chaos agents. It’s helped me appreciate the way everything is entangled and that has fed into my writing. It’s taught me that a study of Death can become a study of Life, if we let it be. Death marks the closing of cycles and the threshold of beginnings, and there are different kinds of ends.
JG: What are some similarities you see between the Necropastoral and Anti-Pastoral?
GDF: Actually, I’d love to turn that question back to you because I came to the Anti-Pastoral through the Necropastoral! My half-answer is that they share a point of view. It’s not cynicism, but a critique of the purity and idyllism related to the classic Pastoral. Anyone who keeps animals or goes camping knows that nature is messy: it burps, farts, shits, bleeds. Nature doesn’t hide or contain her bestial processes (which humans share) with manners or cleanness, yet we idealize nature by designing highly controlled paradise gardens and writing poems about the passionate shepherd whose love wears gold-buckled shoes and a gown of finest wool…in a pasture. Like, the worst place to wear your nice clothes, unless you don’t mind getting muddy and grass-stained and dodging sheep pellets! What’s unnatural is the notion that we can cordon off “nature” from daily life or that nature is “out there,” meaning outside of our daily lives and the choices we make. The cityscape, with its rats and fleas and upturned bricks, is part of nature, too.
The Anti-Pastoral and the Necropastoral share a political stance, I think. Both consider the pollution, industrial impact, and extractive harm that humans have committed to lands, waters, air, and more-than-human creatures—in addition to fellow humans, especially communities disenfranchised by structural racism. The Necropastoral has revealed to me that every humanitarian crisis is an environmental crisis and vice versa. This comes up in Joyelle’s work when she talks about the effects of Hurricane Katrina and the government’s utterly disastrous emergency “response.” I’m curious, since you are coming from the other direction, what do you think are similarities and differences between the Necropastoral and Anti-Pastoral? How has your thinking about the Pastoral changed because of it? Can we still write Pastorals in 2026?
JG: I cling to the Pastoral. Pastoral from the Latin pastoralis ‘relating to a shepherd’ is bucolic by nature. It’s an appreciation for the natural world, but more specifically domesticated nature. The farm, the simple life, an idolization of country life, getting back to the land—most often from the vantage point of someone struggling with the tropes of city life such as overcrowding, concrete, pollution, smog. While you call yourself a “spooky girl,” I often refer to myself as a sheep person. For a long time “shepherdessjess” was my social handle.
That longing for away-ness has resonated with me. It’s what drew me to move to a rural place, and stay. In fact, I have never lived in a big city. It has also pulled me towards a lot of American nature writers, like Robert Frost in Vermont, Maxine Kumin in New Hampshire, Wendell Berry in Kentucky, and Mary Oliver in Rhode Island. Writers who are rooted in place and in conversation with the rural, even, in some cases, actively involved in tending land.
I am a poet and also a farmer who raises sheep (and writes about them), so it is understandable that some of my work falls directly into the Pastoral category, in many cases almost subconsciously. However, I am hypersensitive to being overly Pastoral in my writing and to romanticizing the rural. One of my goals in my creative writing, both memoir and poetry, is to accurately depict my experience of farming, both as an intern and farm owner..
I loved when you said that “Nature doesn’t hide or contain her bestial processes (which humans share) with manners or cleanness.” On the farm, there is constant movement, unending projects, and (especially with any form of livestock) a strong tether that makes it hard to travel or have any mobility. We also contend with loss, a lot of manure, and teeter on the edge of burnout every summer. Yet, beauty is intertwined with all the toil which is what keeps me here, it is what fills me up. I think the Pastoral has room to hold these harder realities and there is a need for more accurate stories about agriculture specifically—who does the work, the human and environmental costs, the sacrifice.
I appreciate that you came to Necropastoral through an essay about Plath,motherhood, and loss. Landscapes and mother-bodies have been idealized in writing, to the detriment of both. After becoming a mother, I have a lot to say about the messiness of it all (and the dark parts no one has talked about) which collides with my feelings about how labor and farm work are often misrepresented in art. The UK author, Lucy Jones, has popularized the term matresence in her recent book of the same name (Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood; Penguin Random House). There is actually a campaign to get this word into the Oxford English and Merriam-Webster dictionaries (it is already in Cambridge). This new term offers a more holistic and accurate way to think about the joyous and brutal transformation one’s body and mind goes through (over years!) in the process of becoming a mother. After having my daughters, I reread a lot of Plath’s poems and realized how important her honesty was in describing motherhood in its entirety.
I agree, though, that the Pastoral is not perfect and writers in this category have been largely homogenous. In poetry, the term “ecopoetry” has come to supplant “nature writing” in many spaces because this newer lens goes beyond praise and admiration to acknowledge the degradation of Earth’s resources and ecosystems and human’s role in that, in some cases, irreversible process. It also tackles social issues and hierarchies that dictate who gets access to nature and why. However, I think that evolving the Pastoral into newer terms, like Anti-Pastoral, Post-Pastoral, or Pastoral elegy, does not require abandoning the Pastoral altogether. I believe it can be a way to commit to ecological balance and surrender to what nature (including our own bodies) can teach us.
Terry Gifford wrote that the Anti-Pastoral was “brought in as a corrective measure to rid the pastoral of its romantic and mythic eulogization.” The Anti-Pastoral, like ecopoetry, requires witnessing a wide spectrum of events that are at times serene and at other times horrifying and grotesque. This also aligns with the Necropastoral. In some cases, these derivations on the Pastoral remove humans from the center, taking on non-human perspectives or dwelling in deep sadness and ecogrief which is a consequence of our actions as a species.
To admit to what we have done to nature and also grapple with our current ability to connect with nature is a big part of the Anti-Pastoral. Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems (WW Norton), winner of the Pulitzer Prize, speaks to this when in “Postscript” she writes, “the ocean grew teeth.” Tommy Pico’s, Nature Poem (Tin House), is a book length exploration of “how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as a young, queer, urban-dwelling poet.” I love the tension in this poem. Pico writes, “I hate nature—hate its guts.” The Anti-Pastoral can’t help but be political in nature, as you have mentioned, and it welcomes new voices and perspectives (like the ocean!) to the conversation.
However, from what I understand, I do think the Necropastoral has more creative ground to explore and less limitations. It dives into underworlds and ghosts, burrows into deep wounds and scars. I appreciate the opportunity to look into darkness without any expectation or need to find resolution, which can sometimes be the case with the Pastoral. Unpacking the deep history of Pastoral writing and Christianity is beyond me, but as a Pastoral poet, I often feel a pressure to write about a place, animal, person with a positive spin, an undertone of hope and love. The Necropastoral can be what it wants to be, altered or unaltered, real or mysterious, dead or alive. Do you agree with that?
GDF: I’d like to pick up with your feeling of being “too” pastoral. I receive or translate this as not just sentimental but “too” sentimental. I’ve guarded against this in my own writing, and only recently has it occurred to me why. In workshops, confessional writing and sentiment are flagged as “bad” craft. But why? Who determines what “good” craft is? No single rule can speak for all world literatures.
Yes, treacly writing is probably not going to achieve a poet’s desired impact, however, I think it’s worth probing who sets the standards for the “too muchness” that both you and I are sensitive about transgressing, particularly as women writers. Anti-sentimentality is coded against the feminine. I mean, we’re not just talking tender but—ew—soft and sentimental. Mushy. Gushy. We wouldn’t want that! It doesn’t matter what your gender is, passive and active antifeminism is the water we’re swimming in; I think the Necropastoral, with its swoons and “rude” fluids and swollen-bellied mommy rats can help us question what is deleteriously coded as feminine under the umbrella of sentiment or sentimentality.
In an era when missing and murdered Indigenous women, rising femicide, and the genocide of Palestinian children and families is something one can swipe past, where world leaders and international courts stand inert while a humanitarian and ecological crisis “unfolds”—this is how the obliteration of homes, schools, and hospitals in Gaza and Iran are described, in passive voice—I think we need to reckon the state of human caring, feeling, and emotion in our writing and how they’re related to the acculturation of gender and gendered violence.
In art, have we become so fearful of the potent ferocity of tenderness and deep animal intimacy that we can see only “brutal” truth and “spare” prose as creative options to describe our world? Have we been so utterly cowed (pun intended) about “overemotion,” (meaning emoting, period) that we struggle to demonstrate true sentiment? Must sentiment always be “raw” and our prose “bleeding,” as if pummeled and abused? (Here, see Ocean Vuong on masculine language.) The one kind of sentiment that seems to excel is sentiment for show: All those black Instagram squares that did nothing in 2020… That, to me, is treacle.
JG: What happens after the Necropastoral, then?
GDF: One idea comes from CAConrad, I think: “To save what’s left, we have to love the world as it is, not as it was.” It’s common to see critique of the Right’s fascination with the past, embodied in nostalgic sentiments like Make American Great Again, but Liberals and Progressives cling to the past when we yearn for “normal” days to return. I’m not saying we shouldn’t mourn for what’s been lost or catalogue our progress and harms such that we learn from both, but if we get stuck in memories of a “nicer” time rather than face the present, we’re doing ourselves and future generations a disservice.
Recently, I encountered Martine Syms’s Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, which rejects alternate universes, revisionist history and the “magical” dismantling of systemic racism and white supremacy. The seed of her manifesto’s imaginative challenge echoes CAConrad: “Earth is all we have. What will we do with it?” Syms notes that “[t]he chastening but hopefully enlivening effect of imagining a world without fantasy bolt-holes” will produce a “surge of bedazzlement and wonder that awaits us as we contemplate our own cosmology of blackness and our possible futures.” Rather than pretend these complex problems disappeared—poof!—the truly creative challenge is to imagine a real-world way through them.
It’s tempting to yearn for what feels like more positive, simpler times, but that’s a privileged view. Though we have made progress, what we Gen Xers knew as “normal” times—say, from the ‘70s environmental movement and the inaugural Earth Day to the end of the Obama years—weren’t more just or equitable for people of color, particularly Black and Indigenous people, our immigrant brothers and sisters, LGBTQ+ people, or women. Here’s where sentiment—the emotional reaction that powerful writing can spark—can carry the day. Our unfolding work entails documenting our history so that it’s not lost through book bans and erasures of public record. This is where docupoetics come in, and it’s worth saying plainly: Human technology isn’t just digital technology or machines, it’s also our art, humanities, and creative innovations. As a species we create terrible and wonderful things! They are tools without an inherent moral tinge; a scythe can be a tool of harvest or a deadly weapon, depending upon the holder’s intent. This applies as much to AI as to media and books.
Another example I’ll give comes from a poet who I know you’re an admirer of, too: Joe Wilkins. I attended the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop last summer and fell hard for his poetry and fiction. Everything he writes is big-hearted, generous, and deeply tender. He gets into the nitty gritty of rural life—you smell the rust and creosote—and he entangles it with genuine sentiment. In a poem called “Manifesto” he writes about love and heartbreak and, at one point, you hear the patter of teardrops on the kitchen table after his father died—except he never tells you that. You hear them between the lines as he slicks an iron skillet with bacon grease and fries eggs for his grieving mother. There is death and life in his poems and he backs away from neither. I think that’s where the Necropastoral is taking us: A place where fierce tenderness is part of both death and life. This requires us to know, name, and stand in our vulnerability, values, and beliefs. Joe’s manifesto begins with belief in “lilac, dogwood, and wisteria — such suddenness and color, indecency and mess, always opening and opening, and fading, and falling away” and ends with the “scarred bark of the cottonwood, all those carved hearts and arrows.”
The fracture or glitch in the system creates room for possibility. In walking the winding road between life and death—the opening and fading that Joe writes about—our challenge is to reconcile the hearts with the arrows, the tenderness with the harm, and learn to find beauty in the scarred bark that we wear, which signifies the joys and pains of this mortal journey. The intrusive push marketing from tech oligarchs benefits from convincing us that we’re alone and that the best answer is AI, robots, and bunkers to hide in, away from society. This is where sentiment and the Necropastoral can help us find joy in each other again, including in shared grief and collective action. Both remind us that we’re existentially entangled, that we’re part of ancient systems and cycles. From the red wigglers in the earth to the lambs in the field to the bacterial flora in our gut biome, we are all connected.
JG: Whew, ok. I am glad I asked. I do want to add that Joe Wilkins was raised on a sheep ranch, and his work exemplifies the important learning that comes from direct connection with the land. It comes up in his poetry, but his memoir and novels, too. He writes in The Entire Sky, “Ranching was life distilled: birth and death, the hard winter giving way to spring, and spring to the heat and fast black storms of summer. There was a violence in it, a violence you tried in all ways to diminish but a violence you nonetheless had to know and hold.” I feel like the violence he describes, something you have to “know and hold,” helps me reconcile the Pastoral with the Necropastoral.
I also love this idea of “fierce tenderness” you mentioned. The Necropastoral allows us to get out of the beautiful painting of a wheat field at sunset and experience all sides of a place on a sensual level. The worms, the air pollution, all of it. I agree that it is hard to witness ongoing political and environmental violence, especially as writers. I, personally, tend to go a bit numb which is a privilege and a coping mechanism. I would much prefer to watch a beautiful sunset, which I often do.
I wonder if we can describe the Pastoral and Necropastoral, as a spectrum versus static categories—a movement from an external, outward facing view to a more nuanced, internal experience? How do we let ourselves be affected authentically and “find joy in each other again,” to echo you? It seems that the Pastoral and Necropastoral are two sides to a larger and more complex experience, something we are still trying to describe.
GDF: I think you’ve got it: a connection between internal experiences that we share on a species level. It’s a system, a process, an undulation of organs—here, Joyelle would likely add convulsions—changing and evolving, inside-out and outside-in. I had to cut this text from my interview with her due to word count, but maybe this is the place to note that even Joyelle wasn’t resolved to a fixed definition or experience of the Necropastoral. She sees the Necropastoral as “durable, and it keeps opening. It’s a kind of valve…Something I really like is that people touch it. People come to it, change it, take it in other directions, bring it to bear or better fit their experience of literature, language, culture, politics, and futurity. I love that it works as a fungible site, a site I don’t know everything about. It feels like a model that people can change, expand, bring in new content, and it keeps going. It’s a relief not to have to know everything about it but open it up to something new: some new, faceless face.”
Rereading her quote years after we spoke made me realize that you and I have become part of the Necropastoral by collaborating on the class and this text! I’m grateful for the chance to explore this fungible site with you. As a way to conclude this chapter of what I sense will be an ongoing conversation, I’ll pose the question Joyelle asked herself in writing her most recent book, Death Styles: “How could I reconcile grief’s desire to look backwards with survival’s command to move forward?”
JG: That is a profound question. Today (April 10, 2026) as I respond, I am anxiously awaiting the return of the Artemis II crew to Earth. Watching their journey around the dark side of the moon (via livestream on Netflix) has been an incredible experience that I shared with my children over their spring break from school. Simultaneously, more dead gray whales have washed ashore in Washington (most likely malnourished, but autopsies are pending) and Emperor penguins might be going extinct due to rapidly melting ice. It feels almost impossible to hold the future and reconcile the past at the same time or even digest all this information that came out of one news episode.
My poetry over the past six or seven years has subconsciously veered into ecogrief, especially the guilt I feel as a mother. However, I also find myself blissfully ignoring the many complicated political and environmental realities to focus on raising healthy, happy kids. The world is on fire, but we have soccer practice and a birthday party at the roller skating rink and do you want to stop and get some fro-yo? Parenting has its own version of survival mode.
I guess my adaptation is to have faith in the gifts and insights this new generation is bringing the world. We have to look back to learn from mistakes—but not at the expense of joy and noticing. The reconciliation Joyelle is talking about is a daily practice versus a concrete solution. How alive can we be in the present?
GDF: You’ve surfaced a fertile wound—a question that yields infinite answers: How alive can we be amongst Death in the present? The Necropastoral has taught me that it’s less about arriving at one correct answer than deepening the questions, digging down and down to find the network of hyphae connecting how we choose to live with the effects of those choices in the world and the art we make from peering above and below the surface.
