Q&A with Gregory F. Tague, founder of Literary Veganism

What inspired you to found Literary Veganism?

One evening late in December of 2019, we were sitting in our living room in Brooklyn, and I realized – to my knowledge – there was no literary journal devoted to veganism. I don’t have many moments where I think, “Wow, that’s a great idea!” but it’s fair to say that was one such moment. Colleagues were trying to start a Brooklyn journal (not very original and at this point dormant), so I conjured something inventive with the vegan focus to create a distinctive identity. We are still going strong in our niche over five years later. We don’t advertise except for social media posts, and yet to date we have published 150 poets, writers, artists, and vegan profiles. 

What types of writing are you looking for? 

As stated in our mission and goals, we are looking for writing that is animal and environmentally friendly. One does not have to be vegan to submit, but we’ve published many vegan authors and some vegetarians. Our guidelines, mission, and goals are fairly straight-forward; but I must say, we often get submissions from writers who have clearly not looked at the guidelines. For instance, we’ve received love poems – and not expressions of love for animals. As a rule, we’re not interested in human-centered writing. 

What advice do you have for writers who wish to successfully address vegan and animal themes?

For authors who want to address vegan and animal themes, I’d advise them to eliminate emphasis on the first-person singular perspective. Enough with the memoirs, unless you engage in sanctuary work or field research (see Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man or Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist). Animal and environmental ethics is about other lives, not yours. While you certainly have thoughts and feelings about these issues, the animals are sapient and sentient too. Some authors even argue for intelligence in plants (see Paco Calvo, Planta Sapiens). Explore the non-human world, evident in Annie Dillard’s classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

I’d also suggest trying to understand what it means to be an ethical vegan. We’ve gotten to the point where we don’t volunteer that information any longer – people look at us like we are from another planet, and they just don’t comprehend what it means. One person in the food industry recently said to us, “Is that, like, gluten free?” Veganism is not a fad; it’s not a lifestyle; it’s an ethical choice one makes not to participate in practices (agriculture, fashion, cosmetics, etc.) that harm animals. To learn more about veganism (from great apes to early humans), one could consult my scholarly book The Vegan Evolution (London: Routledge 2022). Vegans are not perfect: it’s a continual process of revising yourself to turn away from, as best you can, businesses that use animals for perceived human needs and desires in a highly consumerist society. Understanding how animals are abused for us across so many industries is a crucial first step, though that’s difficult for many people to accept or even to acknowledge. 

You recently wrote Forest Sovereignty: Wildlife Sustainability and Ethics. Can you tell us a bit about the book?

My new book, Forest Sovereignty: Wildlife Sustainability and Ethics (Oxford: Peter Lang 2025) examines plants, animals, and political philosophy in a claim for a forest state of Gaia. The book argues that humans should set aside and leave to their growth vast tracts of forests, wetlands, and grasslands. Biologists surmise that immense and undisturbed interlocking networks of forests, wetlands, grasslands, seas, oceans, etc. constitute a thermodynamic system of atmospheric integrity maintaining environmental health. Modern human mechanical intrusion into nature’s realm has upset planetary homeostasis. One path to reestablishing climate fitness would not only be to preserve what remains but also to rewild additional forest, wetland, and grassland areas. There’s an ethical claim in saying forests have incalculable value because their intrinsic qualities of growth, metamorphosis, and decay are instrumental in creating and maintaining healthy ecosystems that constitute earth’s biosphere. That’s the official blurb.

Let me add: the book is a critique of Western Enlightenment ideas that are anthropocentric; instead, we should be learning how to preserve the lives of fungi and microbes that are so important to climate health. We could begin by cultivating more biopatina on city buildings. The natural world is an amalgamation of individualism, resilience, symbiosis, and mutualism. Darwin recognized those connections in the final paragraph of On the Origin of Species where he describes the interdependence of species in a tangled bank. Contrary to the poet Tennyson, nature is not all red in tooth and claw; rather, there are adaptive behaviors.

What do you hope readers take away from Forest Sovereignty?

I’d like readers to consider my proposal in the book (quoted here verbatim in one compound sentence): Local activists and young people could form a citizen panel, parliament, or community trust including Indigenous persons, guided and informed by legal, science, and ethics experts to inform their community about the urgency of forest protection; then, the citizen stakeholders could influence local, regional, state, and national elected officials to take action initiating legal forms of forest sovereignty by means of conservation, rewilding, or preservation. In other words, whom you vote for has tremendous implications on the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the future health of your children, to say nothing of the ethical implications for forest flora and fauna. I’d like readers to consider wildlife (see Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice), microbes (see Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet), fungi (see Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree), and lichen (see Vincent Zonca, Lichens). I’d like readers to walk away from the book thinking, “Yes, from now on I will strive to espouse an environmentally-conscious life” (see Patrick Curry, Ecological Ethics). 

What vegan authors have most inspired you?

In the past decade I’ve spent most of my time reading in philosophy, evolutionary studies, animal behavior, and environmentalism. There are some good vegan authors in the mix, but I think one who stands out is the late Tom Regan and his book The Case for Animal Rights. Another is the Finnish animal/environmental philosopher Elisa Aaltola who actively works for change – to alter people’s attitudes about animals, wildlife, and the environment: to see animals not as things but as subjects of their own lives. We could all try to be more eco-centric and less ego-centric. 

What’s your next writing project?

Recently, I re-read Michael Walzer’s book Spheres of Justice, and I’d like to write a long essay about climate as a social good. So far, other writers who might play into the argument include Charles Taylor (Sources of the Self), Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons), and Jane Bennett (Vibrant Matter). My projects are based on reading lots of material; consequently, the scope and shape of the writing can morph into different forms as I go along. I’ve been trained to analyze texts; then, I take that information to generate my novel ideas into a new synthesis. Since I’ve published so much already, this is a long-term project I’m not going to rush, and because academic book publishing is so strenuous, I’d like to keep this as a substantial essay (though I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes a short book). Additionally, I often think it would be valuable to collect many of the authors in Literary Veganism into an anthology (having done that before with our themed Bibliotekos books), but I’d prefer to get an established publisher involved to help with the work. Maybe Ashland Creek Press? 

About Gregory F. Tague

Scholar Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D. (1998 NYU) has authored or edited books on literary subjects, moral sensations and consciousness, evolution and human culture, art and adaptation, great ape personhood, the cultural ecology of food, and political philosophy regarding forest plants and wildlife. Broadly speaking, Tague’s current interests focus on environmental and animal ethics. For more, visit https://sites.google.com/site/gftague/