Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl in conversation with Hayley Singer, an award-winning writer. Her research and writing practice moves across the fields of creative non-fiction, critical ecological feminisms, animal studies and queer embodiments. Her essays have been published in journals and magazines like, The Sydney Review of Books, The Lifted Brow, The Monthly and Writing from Below. Hayley’s first book, ‘Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead’, was published in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Stella prize. Hayley teaches environmental writing and creative non-fiction at the University of Melbourne.

Thank you Hayley, for taking time out to talk with The Wise Owl.

RS: The title of your debut book ‘Abandon Every Hope’ is very evocative. For the benefit of our readers could you share the significance of this title and how it relates to the book's content.

HS: The title comes from / resonates with words from Dante’s Inferno, Canto 3, which says, “Surrender as you enter every hope you have.” These words—actually their approximate “abandon every hope”—came into my head when I visited a photographic exhibition of images showing the insides of a boutique abattoir. At the base of the stairs leading up to the exhibition, there was a large trigger warning alerting viewers to the fact that the material in the exhibition might be distressing. As I read the warning, I thought that it would be more preparatory if the words “abandon every hope” were written at the base of the stairs instead. After that night, the words kept rolling around in my head. I wanted the title to act as a warning, and to signal to readers that they are entering a place of abandonment when they enter the text.

RS: The central theme of your book is death. Our readers would be curious to know (as I am) what made you pick this theme as the central pivot for your collection of essays.

HS: This book grew out of my PhD which examined a thing called the Fleischgeist. The Fleischgeist is a pun on Hegel’s concept of the zeitgeist. It is a German compoun, term I found early on in my research. ‘Fleisch’ means meat and ‘geist’ can be translated into English to meat ghost or spirit or mind or intellect. I found this term in a boutique culinary magazine called ‘this is meatpaper’. The magazine set out to explore the Fleischgeist in global meat cultures. Issues explored carnist culture in depth. Articles talked about everything from meat glue to offal, meat hats to DIY slaughter. I was fascinated by the way the magazine, and the people writing for it, narrated the life of meat.

I wanted to explore this term in parallel with, but differently to, meatpaper. Within the the fleischgeist there is this tension between love for meat and horror at slaughter. There are these incredible cultural juxtapositions positioning meat as a consumable and meat production as a haunting event. Within the fleischgeist love and disgust, consumption and avoidance or abstinence rub against and pull at each other. This creates a kind of friction that I feel like I see everywhere.

Examining this phenomenon through the years of my PhD and then as I re-drafted my study into a book, meant I spent a lot of time researching, thinking about and writing about factory farming, which is death-driven.

RS: In your essays, you discuss the exploitation of animals for commercial purposes. For the benefit of our readers please tell us what are some of the key examples or industries you examine, and what insights did you uncover during your research?

HS: My focus is on literatures of the slaughterhouse. And because of the literatures I engage with throughout the book, I mostly think about animals kept in situations of mass confinement, and meat produced at industrial scales. Examining texts like Jean Baptiste del Amo’s novel Animalia or Deborah Levy’s Diary of a Steak, I found a range of ways that writers engage with the big narratives of meat production and consumption. Realities and narratives of slaughter intersect with global disease, economics, intergenerational labour, culture, religion and intergenerational trauma. The more I read and researched, the more I realised that the world is absolutely saturated in the multi-valent violences of the industrial animal complex. I struggle now to think of an element of life that isn’t affected by it.

Throughout the book I think a lot about zoonotic disease. This is partly due to Levy’s brilliant work Diary of a Steak, which engages directly with the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) also known as Mad Cow Disease. It’s also because I was writing and re-writing the manuscript in an intensive way during the COVID-19 lockdowns and I felt like my world had very quickly become saturated with images of mass culls. This kind of killing continues, of course. Right now, where I live, bird flu is just starting to travel through regional egg production centres. Tens of thousands of birds are being killed as collateral, as industry waste, and its only early days of this infection of bird flu on this continent. The realities of mass culls are sickening, harrowing.

RS: How do you navigate the balance between raising awareness about these issues and avoiding overwhelming your readers with despair or hopelessness?

HS: I cannot balance these things. I tried for years to do this balancing but then I had to let it go. The enormity of violence produced by the industrial animal complex is overwhelming and I feel despair. The book is actually an exercise in writing despair. It’s also an exercise in articulating hopelessness. Maybe because I write these things, they get aired or purged on the page and so maybe there isn’t an expectation that these feelings will be generated between reader and text without being given an outlet.

Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure out how this book feels approachable. For me the book is overwhelming and I’ve talked to people who can only read it by micro-dosing it. The book is perfect for being read in bits and pieces. All the fragments speak to each other so you can pick up the book read a section and put it away again. It isn’t necessarily to be read cover-to-cover.

RS: The intersection of ethics, economics, and ecology is a complex one. How do you address this complexity in your writing, and do you feel there are some potential solutions which will correct the imbalance?

HS: My response to these intersections is to boycott companies and products that make meat, dairy, eggs, leather, wool and fur. There is no pure response though. Everything is comprised in one way or another. I am always asking myself what kind of world I believe in and how can I act in ways that support the emergence of that world. Reduce the harm I cause to others, of all species, is fundamental to the world I believe in.

RS: Can you share any personal anecdotes or experiences that influenced your perspective on animal exploitation and thanatography?

HS: My perspective on animal exploitation clicked into place when I was a teenager. I made a friend in high school who was vegetarian. I’d been to a vegetarian café before, but I didn’t know a person could actually boycott meat all the time. When I met this person, and they told about their food practices, it just made sense. Later, when I was in the second year of my PhD I was attending critical animal studies conferences and what I learned in those spaces made me realise that veganism was the only way I could be.

RS: As a writer, what challenges did you encounter while researching and writing about such a sensitive and often overlooked topic?

HS: There were many times when people got defensive just because I was writing about animal slaughter. In my experience, people can get so agitated just thinking, or hearing about, animal rights. Some people want to belittle the topic, to suggest it’s not a serious or worthy topic to spend time on. There are so many examples I have from the years I’ve been researching and writing the book I hardly know where to start.

I’ve been in many conversations in which meat, dairy and egg eaters want to tell me just how ethical their food choices are. I have been thinking about this as a kind of carnist confessional. I think some people want (need?) to psychically wash themselves of their connection to violence without actually divesting from the products that can only be created through violence. I find that challenging because, in my experience, those conversations are designed to allow people to air their grievance, while nothing changes.

RS: What do you hope readers will take away from "Abandon Every Hope," and what impact do you aspire for your book to have on its audience and society at large?

HS: I want readers to see the world that we are actually making for other animals. There is a lot of narrative work going on all over the place that skews reality in relation to how animals are treated. I want this book to refuse to participate in narratives that legitimise and normalise the industrial animal complex.

RS: Your book has been shortlisted for the Stella Prize. How does it feel to receive such recognition, especially for a work focusing on such a niche topic?

HS: This topic is niche only in the sense that there isn’t a huge amount of writing on it. But it isn’t niche in terms of the enormity of industries dedicated to animal slaughter. Because it is a subject people would prefer to look away from, it feels surreal and humbling to have it acknowledged by the Stella Prize judges. I am so grateful to the judges for going as deep as they did reading all the submitted and nominated books.

RS: Your first book has won you a lot of critical acclaim. What advice would you give upcoming writers about how to hone their craft of writing?

HS: So many distractions are thrown at writers, especially emerging writers. Find the people and the environments that allow you to get to work. Find people who encourage you to keep working even when the writing gets really hard. And it will get hard, so don’t listen to people who want to blow you candle out. Writing is a process. It never looks or sounds good or nuanced or mind-expanding when you first start so you have to keep going. Dig deep.

Thank you Hayley for taking time out to talk to The Wise Owl. We wish you the very best in all your creative and literary endeavours and hope that you continue to write on subjects that would make the readers pause, think and introspect.