Earth Day
Earth Day is never one day for me. It is every day. And every year I say the same thing. But it’s become a tradition to do a project on Earth Day. Last year, for instance, we erected a bat box in our meadow in order to provide a roost for bats as well as to reduce mosquitos. Bats in Nova Scotia have been declining in population due to white-nose syndrome, which affects little brown bats, as well as habitat loss. If you want to learn more, my interview with bat specialist Karen Vanderwolf is in Ecology Action Centre’s spring issue.
Well, the bat roost we built on a 15-foot pole last Earth Day is no longer there. Despite a great base with cement and the pole extending a few feet into the ground, the whole thing snapped and fell over during Hurricane Fiona last fall. This year, our project is to build a new roost on a stronger and wider wooden pole, with a pully system so that we can easily check for bats. We found out that the previous roost did not attract bats but possibly wasps. According to Karen, it can take a couple years for bats to find home-made roosts like ours.
Other meadow projects are ongoing. We’re planning our garden, planting a couple trees that didn’t make it the first time around (out of about 50 trees planted in the last two years), and continuing to attract wildlife. We’ve seen fox, coyote, and many deer on the trailcam. Though they’ve evaded the camera completely, we also have a male pheasant, who I named John Boy, and at least one female that are bold and constantly strutting about.
Flights of Foundry
Join the Rewilding our Stories Discord at Flights of Foundry’s annual convention from 4-5 EST, April 15, as we host a hangout and chat about science communication in speculative eco-fiction. We hope to have time to hit on the popular new genres of solarpunk and lunarpunk, and we have scientists and authors who will be happy to answer any questions. Just search in the program for “Rewilding our Stories”.
Book of the Month
I’m getting involved with ClimateLit.org, and the first book I’m reading and reviewing for them is Ben Okri’s Every Leaf a Hallelujah. It’s my second read of the book, and I enjoy it immensely. Climate Lit builds climate literacy for children and teens around the world, from grade K-12, and is a terrific global educational project by professors from the University of Minnesota, whom I had a great chat with recently. The book’s illustrations, by Diana Ejaita, immerse readers into the story, which is about a 7-year-old girl named Mangoshi who gets a quest to find a rare flower—which will cure her mother’s illness—in the forest neighboring her African village. The flower only lives where trees are healthy, though, and she learns that trees are dying at the hands of loggers. An aging baobab tree magically takes her around the world to learn about the diversity and importance of trees everywhere. For a tree-lover like me, this story spoke to my inner child and to my adult self.
What’s New at Dragonfly
World Eco-fiction Spotlight
One new interest of mine is a genre called lunarpunk, so I was happy to talk with Justine Norton-Kertson, who edited Bioluminescent: A Lunarpunk Anthology (Android Press, 2023). According to Justine, lunarpunk is a subgenre of solarpunk. "Where solarpunk and lunarpunk primarily differ is the aesthetic that’s found in the art and literature within the two genres. While solarpunk tends to lean into the art nouveau style and uses bright colors like orange, yellow and gold, sky blue, as well as light earth tones like green and brown, lunarpunk is draped in silver, black, purple, dark greens, and blues. It’s a darker and more gothic aesthetic."
Indie Corner
Zilla Novikov’s novel Query is a unique perspective on an author’s frustrations in getting her eco-fiction book noticed and published. Buttered with satire, Query makes you nod and laugh, even though you’ll recognize the annoyance we all feel when having to constantly repeat ourselves in order to be heard. When chatting with Zilla recently, I was reminded of a quote from a novel I read during college: “We all feel that our generation didn’t get a chance to make any positive political contributions because we were totally occupied with just trying to stop the madness.” The book was Hot Flashes, by Barbara Raskin, published in 1987. Decades later, we are still trying to stop the madness (continued climate, political, economic, and social regression and unrest—along with much hate and inequality), and sometimes we get stuck in this rut of protest when we just want to move forward, past the same-old same-old, and experience a better world already. Balancing ecological concern, style, humor, and publishing woes, while still telling a solid story, Query is a must-read for these times. Read Zilla’s Indie Corner essay about her book.
New Books
Several upcoming and new books are added to Dragonfly:
Everything the Light Touches by Janice Pariat
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Bellevue by Allison Booth
Madukka the River Serpent by Julie Janson
More to come later this month. Check Dragonfly.eco.
Updates on Author Quotes
I finally updated the quotes section up to and including my interview with Waubgeshig Rice last month. See Author Quotes.
More broadly than just ‘stories’ and ‘art’, I believe in the power of literacy to bring about a just world. The entire Sweatshop movement was inspired by the work of African-American civil rights activist, feminist, and writer, bell hooks, who argues that, ‘All steps towards freedom and justice in any culture are dependent on mass-based literacy movements, because degrees of literacy so often determine how we see what we see.’
Resources
In case you’ve missed these exciting resources at Dragonfly, which are constantly being updated, check ‘em out!
LinkTree: Find out more about me.
Rewilding Our Stories: A Discord community, now expanded into a website, where you can find resources, reading, and writing fun in fiction that relates strongly to nature and environment. There’s a new submissions call-out for place writing!
New subreddit: Ecofiction. A place to find almost daily news about novels, articles, news, and films in the field of rewilded and ecological fiction.
World’s biggest playlist? Our environmental/nature song-of-the-week playlist goes back to 2015.
Book recommendations: a growing list of recs.
Eco/climate genres: They’re all over the place, and here’s an expanding compendium.
Inspiring and informative author quotes from Dragonfly’s interviews.
List of ecologically focused games.
List of eco/climate films and documentaries.
Eco-fiction links and resources.
Book database: Database of nearly 1,000 book posts at Dragonfly.eco.
Turning the Tide: The Youngest Generation: Fiction aimed toward children, teens, and young adults.
Indie Corner: The occasional highlight of authors who publish independently.
Backyard Wildlife: A hidden gem exploring how we are rewilding our own backyard and meadow. Also check out our new meadow cam!
Artists & Climate Change. This is an extraordinary resource delving into all kinds of the arts focused on climate change. For a while now they’ve been rerunning my world eco-fiction spotlights. I’m a core writer for their team, and I’m both honored and grateful. Look for my “Wild Authors” series there. Note that this site is indefinitely paused at the moment, but the owner let me know that the content isn’t going away.
I’ve been helping with the social media at Climate Fiction Writers League. Check them out!
Copyright 2024 Mary Woodbury