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Late modernity is marked by profound changes in the natural world and in human-nonhuman relations, many of which are the result of environmental crises. Storytelling has become a method of "staying with the trouble" (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble), as humans attempt to fathom these changes and imagine how best to act going forward. As a consequence, researchers in the humanities focus increasingly on storytelling. At a conference of the European Society for Environmental History in Zagreb in summer 2017, researchers from all over the world were invited to experiment with "More than-Human Storytelling" (Lagier). The participants were interested in how animals story their places-how other-than-humans experience the world-as well as "guerrilla storytelling," focusing on the effects of storytelling against silencing in human societies (Iengo). They discussed the ways popular culture and art genres, such as graphic novels, have become important forms of narrating the complex story of the entanglements of life (Projecte Úter; see Springer and Dören).1
Even without decentering the human by narrating the world from the perspective of nonhumans, storytelling about human experiences with other-than-humans has the potential to change today's world. As literary animal studies and ecocriticism have argued, there is a link between narrating and doing, between fiction and facts, and between stories and lives (see Borgards and Pethes, Zapf). Narratives in their diverse forms and genres act as a force within social systems. Narrators create meanings based on their individual experiences, and they do so in social and cultural contexts. The remembered meanings of nature, for example, as represented by a person's narrative of her or his life, will change as the social meanings of human-nonhuman relationships change. In this sense, storytellers not only reflect their specific realities but also create them.
This special issue of Narrative Culture is based on a panel titled "Experiencing the Other-than-Human World," held in 2016 at the joint meeting of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research and the American Folklore Society in Miami. The panel conveners called for contributions dealing with human narratives about their experiences with other-than-humans.2 They asked what these stories reveal about humans' memories of animals and other nonhuman entities in their lives, about expectations for the future, and about how people narrate stories to reconnect themselves with the...