April 21, 2024, 5:54 p.m.

April 2024 - Earth Day Edition

Dragonfly.eco News

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Welcome

Dragonfly.eco has been around nearly 11 years and began as a curated list of novels that address climate change. The site has grown ten-fold since those early days, and the focus has expanded to eco-fiction, a literary mode that explores changing ecological systems in our world and how we conserve, preserve, fight for, lose, grieve, re-imagine, and cope with the changes. The database contains nearly 1,100 titles, and the site includes around 240 contributors and 160 interviews. We’ve also expanded the site to include community discourse at the Rewilding Our Stories Discord.

Earth Day!(Books of the Month)

This Earth Day, the Rewilding Our Stories members came up with an Earth Day reading list. Some of our most active members share with you their top reads. The article also gives you some insight to our book club reads.

Made in Canva

World Eco-fiction Spotlight

This month we virtually travel to Australia to talk with author Donna M Cameron about her new novel The Rewilding (Transit Lounge, 2024). What others have said about the novel:

“A breathless chase thriller with a warm ecological heart.” -Inga Simpson, author of The Last Woman in the World

“Fiction at its rebellious, fast-paced best with hope as its touchstone, making The Rewilding an urgent novel for our times.” -Sally Piper, author of Bone Memories

Both an electrifying cat-and-mouse-chase and a love story, The Rewilding captures the essence of what it means to be alive today in this cusp of change pulsing with possibilities. It is a passionate intimation of hope.

Courtesy Transit Lounge

The novel takes place throughout the wilds of Australia, including coastal sandstone country, in a 1500-hectare national park peppered with caves and hidden beaches; a lower alpine region, which is snaked through by magnificent snow melt rivers and flora unique to that area; a hidden valley in one of the oldest rainforests in the world; and the outback, in red soil desert country, which has also been poisoned by fracking.

Indie Corner

I revisit one of my previous books of the month in an interview with WR Woodbury, author of the The Botanist. The novel’s protagonist, an ethno-biologist, travels the world researching local food production and slowly finds himself transforming into a plant-human creature.

Courtesy WR Woodbury

Other News

  • I’ve got this on my TBR: Naniki by Oonya Kempadoo. I’ll also have an interview with the author this summer. The novel is part of a cross-platform story project. “Time-bending, world-bending, heart-bending, Naniki is truly luminous, a lyrical spiritual Afro-Indigenous epic set in a climate ravaged Caribbean,” -Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
  • Just in time for Earth Day, my friend Nina Munteanu lists “10 Works of Eco-fiction Worth Celebrating” at Reactor Mag.
  • Netflix is adapting a 16-part series of Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, my favorite book of all times. I’m excited for the show, but not 100% positive it can be adapted to film as amazingly as it was written. We’ll see!

    Courtesy Goodreads

    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 where you can find resources, reading, and writing fun in fiction that relates strongly to nature and environment.
    • 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 over 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.
    • Artists & Climate Change. This site is no longer being updated but still has a wealth of info. I was a core writer for their team, and I’m both honored and grateful. Look for my “Wild Authors” series there.

Copyright 2025 Mary Woodbury

You just read issue #41 of Dragonfly.eco News. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.

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