Million-Year Elegies: On Deep Time and Trauma
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
When we think about dinosaurs, we think about trauma. Maybe not immediately, maybe not consciously, but the association is there. We think about large, vicious predators ready to sink their teeth into us. And we think about extinction, because dinosaurs are extinct. We think about death, because all of the non-avian dinosaurs are dead - not just species and ways of life but whole types of ecosystem wiped from the world forever.
We live in a time of death, in the human present. Dinosaurs inhabit a time of death in the past.
The word predator is frequently used, not only for animals who eat other animals, but for humans who prey on other humans in a variety of ways. There was a specific time in my life when I was watching a lot of nature documentaries, and I found it deeply comforting to think about certain people as literal predatory animals. You can fear a predator, you can hide from it or flee or fight, but a predator doesn't provoke any existential crises about the nature of evil. It's just hungry. That's just how it is.
It's not a coincidence, I think, that so many of our depictions of dinosaurs focus on their predatory nature - or their vulnerability to predation, or the ways they fight predators off. Our depictions of wild animals in the present day often follow this pattern too. But dinosaurs are bigger than life, more monstrous than a lion or a bear, and they embody these themes for us even more starkly.
Similarly, a lot of our depictions of dinosaurs focus on the fact that they are extinct. In reality, dinosaurs ruled the earth for many tens of millions of years - but so many of our popular depictions focus on those moments just before or just after the asteroid strikes. Even children's movies about dinosaurs bring up these difficult themes of extinction and death - often with dinosaur protagonists, as in The Land Before Time or in Disney's Dinosaur, seeking a hidden place where life can still go on after the rest of the world is devastated.
There's joy in Million-Year Elegies, but there's also a lot of predation, a lot of suffering, a lot of the kinds of disasters that burn the whole world and a lot of difficult compromises made in the name of survival. Sometimes when I write these themes I'm writing about personal trauma or its aftereffects. Sometimes I'm writing more generally about the world and the conflicts that seem to plague it. Every once in a while that subtext about the world becomes text, as with "Capitalsaurus," a poem about the official district dinosaur of Washington D.C. - or as with the collection's epilogue, "Memento Mori," in which our trip through time finally has us caught up to the present day.
We shy away from depictions of human suffering and death, but there is something about animals and other non-human creatures that gives us just a little bit of distance, that makes it easier to work through these existential dramas by proxy. I'm thinking of something my acquaintance Anya Johanna DeNiro said on Twitter recently: "Genre forms are like looking at a solar eclipse indirectly." It's a paradox, but speculative fiction and poetry at its best can serve us to give us this distance, to put our deepest and most uncomfortable feelings into a symbolic form that makes them more bearable - that then, because it's bearable, lets us work through them even more deeply.
Meanwhile: it's one week until the official MILLION-YEAR ELEGIES launch! A few of you have ordered paperback copies early, but for those of you who pre-ordered an ebook or are waiting for the ebook version to become available, March 9 is still going to be the big day. And I'm planning a big Twitter party to celebrate the occasion. You can get ready for:
A mini AMA event (ask me any random question about the book! Or about dinosaurs! Or whatever's on your mind)
A giveaway (signed paperback copies for a few lucky, randomly-selected people who can tell me their favorite dinosaur)
A little microfiction challenge (similar to this one)
General merriment!
I hate Zoom meetings but love tweeting, so hopefully this is an online launch format that will work well. Mark your calendars!