I have not done any creative writing lately, which is weird. But weird is the news of the day. Our spring began with a drought caused by low precipitation over the winter. By late May, as we had my mother-in-law visiting and were getting ready to visit my family in the states, wildfires began burning just south of us. The same night the wind shifted north, and ash began falling, we had to take our 17-year-old cat to the pet emergency hospital because he suddenly couldn’t walk. Turns out he had saddle thrombosis and had to be put down—our sweet, goofy, loving cat that we got as a gift to ourselves for our wedding, the cat we’d raised for so long. We cried together in the parking lot, numbly drove home to realize the wildfires had not come our way, and rushed the next day to visit my family, which was a very hot but fun-filled trip where my best memory was wading in a creek with my family. The day after our return, my father-in-law and his partner came to visit. We did puzzles on the farm table, had a bonfire, took our first trip to the Annapolis valley of rich, fertile beauty, and hiked along a beach for hours. Our visitors left, and then came the rains. And by rains, I mean floods, which killed four people and blocked parking lots and roads. We could not go to town due to flooded roads but felt we lucked out compared to many. Our friend’s 35 beehives washed away while he developed a new pond on his property. Since that time, we’ve had more rain events, including another coming this weekend. The continued weird thing is that this rain is not normal, and neither are the extreme thunderstorms, something we had not experienced so far in our four years on the east coast. So, creative writing? I guess I need to sort my thoughts. This is the first time I’ve written publicly about our storms, our losses, our sense of strangeness.
All the beautiful bean plants I planted after the wildfire, but before the floods, grew tall and lush. Yet, there are no beans at all. I’m not sure if it’s a pollination issue or is due to heat waves and/or too much rain. This morning we picked up eight pounds of beans grown in the local valley by Wolfville’s farmer’s coop. That’s a start in case the garden beans never come out. I lament the loss of people, plant, and animal life as well as homes and roads.
To a lesser degree, like Ali Smith noted in her novel Autumn—about only 100 harvests left in Britain—the slower attrition of climate change continues to disrupt seasons, which, if we live by them, also changes the rituals of our days. Without beans, how can I make shucky beans for holiday meals this fall and winter? With so much drought and new fire hazards, how can we celebrate summers, which builds ties with friends and neighbors, without bonfires on starry evenings? With increasing floods and storms, how can we maintain our shelters so our structures don’t rot? With so much rain corrupting roads, how do we get anywhere? So, this seems to be the most I’ve written about my personal life for a while. I’m behind on the backyard wildlife posts and journal blogging. There’s a certain numbness and grief, I guess.
This is a newsletter about eco-fiction, but I find that living with climate change and writing about it, whether in fiction or nonfiction, is our new reality, so we first need to adapt to what’s happening, and then we need to let it sink in, and then, if we’re writers or readers, we might look to storytelling to help us make sense of it all.
August Eco-fiction Spotlight
This month I talked with Andrew F. Sullivan, author of The Marigold. He described the novel as “an over-the-top, grimy version of Toronto with a sickly grin”. A mold called the Wet is taking over the city. Weaving together disparate storylines and tapping into the realms of body horror, urban dystopia, and eco-fiction, The Marigold explores the precarity of community and the fragile designs that bind us together. Andrew talked some about fungi fiction and the lovely idea that rot is not pure entropy. He also said, “Fiction is a place where we can embrace the darker possibilities of ourselves and our futures. It’s collaborating with the reader too, connecting us to build a vision together. We are complicit with each other, as we are with what is happening to our wider world.” I think this fits in with how we live through disaster, together, and find a way to make it through.
Book of the Month
Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1987. Joan is a microbiologist at Kenyan College and science fiction writer; her novel is part of the loosely related Elysium series that includes Daughters of Elysium, The Children’s Star, and Brain Plague. A ground-breaking work both of feminist SF and of world-building hard SF, it concerns the Sharers of Shora, a nation of women on a distant moon in the far future who are pacifists, highly advanced in biological sciences, and who reproduce by parthenogenesis—there are no males—and tells of the conflicts that erupt when a neighboring civilization decides to develop their ocean world and send in an army.
I found this book by way of the Rewilding Our Stories Discord in a recent book club vote. We’re all at different stages of reading, and some haven’t started yet—so it’s not too late to join. The Discord channels are set up so that you join the book part channel that you’re ready to discuss, or just join the general channel for spoiler-free discussion. I’m finding the book suspenseful, beautifully written, and full of flowery descriptions of biological and ecological environments that are important to the Sharers of Shora.
Rewilding Our Stories
Speaking of Discord, Rewilding Our Stories is slowly growing and has nearly 300 members. It’s not really the number of members who count, it’s the engagement that happens even with just some people regularly posting about the intersection of literature and the environment.
The companion website, Rewilding Our Stories, has a second contribution call for personal narratives, ranging from 500-2,000 words, about any climate-related disasters you’ve experienced. Everyone is welcome to join in the writing. Some prompts are:
Write a personal narrative type of creative nonfiction that engages others.
Describe the type of climate-change-related natural disaster you have been impacted by.
Did you have warning, or did the disaster unfold without warning? Describe when and where this happened.
Hone in on a couple interesting tidbits, such as what was the area like before and later, government and other resource availability during the event, emergency alerts, and so on.
During this event, what other “normal” life things were happening that added to your personal challenges?
Write with passion for the outdoors. Describe ongoing ecological changes since the disaster took place. What has recovery been like?
Share knowledge you gained during the event; this can include personal tips you learned about that saved you or practical resources you found from others, including news, books, and other media.
Integrate the human experience in these changes. How have you and others been affected by this disaster? Did you become more invested in your community or make new friends?
The Discord also has a new area of channels that discuss disaster preparedness.
Other News
August’s Indie Corner highlights David A. Collier and his newest novel Earth’s Ecocide: Desperation 2647. I enjoyed chatting with this fellow Kentuckian!
Check out Dragonfly.eco for new book posts about such titles as Saad Z. Hossain’s Kundo Wakes Up, Arif Anwar’s The Storm, and Kika Hatzopoulou’s Threads That Bind.
I added a new film, Jung E, by Sang-ho-Yeon, to Dragonfly’s section on Climate and Ecological Films.
I don’t back too many kickstarters, but have found two promising projects:
Manual Cinema’s Future Feeling. Part eco-fiction, part haunted-house tale, Future Feeling is a new short film about a family on the island of Nantucket bracing for a hurricane headed their way. As the storm comes closer and the power goes out, strange things begin to happen in the house that force the family to reimagine their relationship with nature and leaves them forever transformed in the process.
Twin Drums’ The Wagadu Chronicles: The Wagadu Chronicles is an Afrofantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game created by Twin Drums studios. The concept began as a pen-and-paper role-playing setting designed for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition.
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!
Climate Lit: I’m a new editorial advisor at ClimateLit.org, a resource hub for building young people’s climate literacy with literature, film, and stories in other media. Their mission is to promote universal climate literacy and climate literacy education as a means to transition to an ecological civilization.
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 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 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