Materiality, cognition, agency and vitality: inter-relational exchanges with non-human forms in Vicki Hastrich's Night Fishing

This discussion of Hastrich’s 2019 memoir, Night fishing, examines the author’s inter-relational exchanges with materiality and natural, non-human forms. In considering her textured cognitive engagements with frames, including man-made material artifacts such as the television camera and visual art, as well as literary framing devices, my analyses underscore the frequently overlooked, yet integral dimension of materiality in the writing process. Drawing on Karenleigh A. Overmann’s and Thomas Wynn’s interdisciplinary investigation into materiality and cognition (focusing specifically on the interplay of stone tools, writing and materiality), I use these scholars’ explication of our evolutionary progression from “thinking through materiality”, to “thinking about it” (2019, p. 458) to illuminate Hastrich’s intriguing insights into the nature of her material engagements. By foregrounding her competing psychological approaches, I show how Hastrich’s life writing highlights both the challenges and rewards of pushing against this evolutionary progression—in terms of both the mental processes involved and their narrative explication. Informed by Jane Bennett’s philosophical perspectives on the distributive qualities of agency between human and non-human entities, the article also examines how this memoir draws out the agentic and vibrant dimensions of materiality and natural forms, including the ocean and its tidal forces. I suggest that Hastrich’s calibrated autobiographical investigation into the psychological minutia of her material engagements, and her marked ability to elevate the visibility of agency in non-human forms, can increase our understanding of, and sensitivity to, the competing modes of thought that can impact our material engagements, and the varying degrees of agency and energy that are intrinsic components of our inter-relational exchanges with both man-made material artifacts and non-human forms.