TheCottageFairy: Ecological Poetics and the Everyday Aesthetics

Living simply and being close to nature has become the emerging credo applauded and embraced by writers, artists and vloggers around the globe. This chapter discusses the prominence of TheCottageFairy, the YouTube vlogging channel created by Paola Merrill, a young Puerto Rican American vlogger in her mid-twenties living in a cottage in rural Northeast Washington, DC. Merrill’s narrative focuses on highlighting the beauty and calming effects of the ordinary and everyday rural life as she explores different meadow or farm landscapes and simple activities, such as brewing flower tea, baking cookies and muffins, drawing wildflowers and animal cartoons, meditative walking by the lakeside and decorating her home with plant-inspired wall paintings—which become her strategies for resisting the attention economy from the social media furore and fast-paced urban life. Using Kate Rigby’s framework of ecological poetics, this chapter addresses Merrill’s life-writing practice that emphasises the appreciation of everyday aesthetics as her poetic narrative and performing a mindful, sustainable living. This chapter also highlights the fact that her automedial practice paradoxically sustains the attention economy on social media as Merrill also uses it to earn a living.