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Material ecocriticism invites us to rethink the traditional idea that storytelling is an exclusively human practice and that humans are the only species able to spin yarns and to make history. What if the world in which we live with myriad nonhumans is never mute but instead filled with stories? How might our understanding of nature change if we recognize its stories, conveyed in codes, signs, shapes, colors, sounds, gestures, and signals? How might these stories encoded in material forms shed light on questions of gender and nature?

These are some of the questions material ecocriticism asks about material agencies that are so astonishingly expressive that the anthropocentric framing of storytelling as a unique human enterprise is easily undone when their narratives are discovered. Material ecocriticism posits that, endowed with meanings and thick with stories, matter is a site of creative becomings and dynamic expressions. This expressiveness is the defining property of all matter. Whether organic or not, matter in every form is a meaning-producing embodiment of the world, the world of storied matter manifesting itself in the form of ontologically hybrid forms of expressions, assemblages, and collectives or as narrative agencies through which ‘‘we read embodied narratives of social and power relations, biological balances and imbalances, and the concrete shaping of spaces, territories, human, and nonhuman life’’(Iovino 2016, 3). When these narratives congeal in material forms, we have narrative agencies actively producing configurations of meaningful expressions that merge with our modes of knowing and being, making us, other species, and …