Imagining More-Than-Human Kinship through Epistolary Praxis

Book chapter, 2026

While epistolary practices have traditionally bridged distances between humans (Altman 1982), this essay explores their potential for imagining kinship with more-than-human others. Drawing on Kimmerer’s conception of kinship as a reciprocal relationship (2013) and Haraway’s notion of “making kin” (2016), we examine epistolary practices that emphasize responsibility (R. Bower 2017) over anticipated replies (A. Bower 1997). These practices reconceptualize response as an affective and ethical engagement beyond human boundaries.
 
By exploring several examples in contemporary art and literature, we examine how letter-writing makes visible both the possibilities and challenges of interspecies communication. For example, in Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, a pregnant woman writes to her unborn child in a world of reversed human evolution, cultivating kinship that transcends potential species divides and linguistic barriers. Yours Sincerely: The Climate Letters is an initiative that  invites the public to creatively engage with multispecies kin through the epistolary form. In Christa Donner’s Dear Human letters adopt non-human voices to address humanity and contemplate kinship in a time of climate crisis. By proposing unborn children of uncertain species, plants, and animals as potential addressees, these epistolary practices expand our understanding of kinship beyond anthropocentric and blood-based definitions. Together, these works demonstrate how epistolary practices can both imagine radical forms of kinship and expose the limits of human understanding and empathy.