death is a verb · field guides
Literacies & Imaginings for a composting world
Guides for noticing what is — and for imagining what could be.
A field guide helps you notice what is there. These do that — and ask something more: that we learn to be in relationship with change itself. With endings that are also beginnings.
So they come in two wings. The Literacies are plain-language groundings in earth, death and grief. The Imaginings are speculative — invitations to writers and dreamers to world otherwise. One helps us understand the ground we stand on; the other helps us picture where we might grow.
wing one
Plain-language groundings in earth, death, and grief. They move in two strands — practical guides for ecological death care, and literacies for re-cognizing the living world — and they are meant to feed the Compost Heap, not to end on the page.
strand one · ways of sensing
Ways of re-cognizing the living world. Few of us in the modern West are taught how to die, or to grieve in a way that feels like belonging instead of exile — but that silence is not universal. These guides join the slow work of decomposing the colonial logics in how we meet our endings. Citations & Sources →
strand two · practical
For meeting death and its choices with more freedom and less fear: what human composting actually is, the law where you live, the human company of doulas, how to sit with the dying, and how other cultures have long tended their dead.
respond · the guides teach, your response finds its room
These guides aren’t meant to end on the page. If one moved you, let your response find its room: a few lines, an image, a field note belong in The Compost Heap. A developed piece belongs in The Imaginings below.
Respond in the Compost Heap →wing two
If the Literacies help us notice what is, the Imaginings help us picture what could be. This wing is for speculative fiction and worlding — the ancient practice of imagining otherwise. To compost a world is also to imagine the soil it becomes.
A developed story belongs in this wing. A spark, a fragment, a few lines of a dreamed-otherwise belongs in The Compost Heap. The seeds below open both doors.
in the lineage of those who world otherwise
Speculative fiction is not escape, but a way of loosening the grip of the nouns that fix the world in place. A few of the dreamers we follow:
Emergent Strategy
Parable of the Sower and the Earthseed books
What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
Sultana's Dream (1905). Hossain imagined a decolonized world that nurtures the living rather than plundering it — proof that worlding otherwise is neither new nor Western.
Always Coming Home
This lineage is unfinished. It grows as new voices imagine the soil we might become.
seeds · prompts to begin from
Begin anywhere. Let it come however it wants to: a few lines? Leave it in the Compost Heap as a field note. A whole world? Offer it to the Imaginings below.
It is 2150. Composting your dead is as unremarkable as burying them once was, and the forests are thick with people. Write us a description of that world. What human stories composted along the way? What might be yet to come?
After Bohm’s rheomode and Kimmerer’s grammar of animacy. Build us a scene in a tongue with no nouns in it at all, where the hill hills and the rain is raining itself and you are only ever you-ing. What can be felt in there that cannot be felt here?
an open call · for writers and dreamers
The Imaginings are just beginning — a few seeds, and an open field.
Imaginings are read by the Death Is a Verb circle. Offering one is the beginning of a conversation, not a guarantee of publication. You keep authorship of your words; contributions stay-with the language they were written in.
a living field · grow it with us
These guides are not finished, and they are not ours alone. They decompose and recompose as others tend them.
This is an invitation to suggest a topic or offer to write one with us.
Suggestions are read by the Death Is a Verb circle, who tend and curate the guides. Offering a suggestion is not a guarantee of publication — it is the beginning of a conversation. Knowledge shared from a living tradition is held with care and attribution.