Michelle Obama is the second person I’ve known of who likens long-time friends to her kitchen table. Author Barbara Raskin also wrote so much about her kitchen table that I wanted to someday get something like it—imperfect, chipped, coffee-ringed, and a place for conversations throughout the years—a place where friends laugh, cry, have epiphanies, change diapers, drink coffee, drink wine, discuss politics, and eat feasts or even just pick at crumbs while reflecting on the mundane. I bought an old farmhouse table when moving to Nova Scotia. Of course, I’ve not been here my whole life, but intimately remember other such tables: my mother’s antique table handed down to her from my father’s Aunt Evelyn, my mamaw’s table where three or four families would crowd around the huntboard in the background, on which steamed a buffet of Appalachian food, my Aunt Helen’s little table where us kids always sat, the breakfast nook on Johnson Avenue, my best friend Amy’s fold-out kitchen table near where her siblings, and even me (like a part of the family), had our heights etched into the doorway’s wood, growing higher every year. It’s also where we tried our first beer.
What this has to do with ecological fiction is that Michelle Obama also talks about the light we carry, which has a lot to do with kitchen tables and the love she finds around her. It’s a light that exists despite pain and fear, and, to me, this same light is what we need to share in our stories. Yes, things are bleak. Yes, there’s a lot of ruinous people, with power and control, who spread disinformation and buy media so they can further promote hate, and, yes, there’s people who hurt us individually too. We all experience it, some way more than others. But when we share stories, we have to “go high” and rise above the darkness. Our novel’s characters don’t have to be perfect, but they can be courageous. We shouldn’t scare everyone into powerlessness, but show that the action to climb out of terror brings about fearlessness and inspires hope that we can strive toward a better world for all. Cautionary tales are fine and well, but rather than gratuitously lingering in the suffering, we need to tell that truth and then overcome. Because we can.
The balance is that for each hateful act, there’s also something kinder, and I am not trying to be too mushy when I say that kitchen tables are places we share both love and pain with our friends. Friends come and go, but the memories stand.
We’ve spent the last three weeks with friends and family. We had my mother-in-law for two weeks, and during that time we had a meadow get-together with friends and neighbors, watched the stars come out, talked, and made s’mores and Kentucky Mules at midnight. Through these times was also pain. Our cat of 17 years died suddenly. We went through a drought and then wildfires surrounded us, evacuating several neighborhoods just south of us. Many people were evacuated within a moment’s notice. Once that was over and my mother-in-law went home, we visited my family in Indiana. There’s an old saying that our family is full of nuts, and this is true for mine as well, but spending a hot morning splashing around a creek and nights around the bonfire were good, necessary. We came back home to a visit with friends from BC, and we babysat their dog. The day they left, my father-in-law and his partner arrived and are here for over a week. The kitchen table has its work cut out for it, including doing puzzles.
Book of the month
Speaking of light and stories, my book recommendation for the month is Lily Brooks-Dalton’s The Light Pirate (Hachette Book Group, 2022). It was recommended by my friend Sara in the Rewilding Our Stories Discord, and I read each night until I could read no more and then I’d be asleep, wildfire smoke creeping in whatever crevices of our house that let it in.
The story starts in what I would think of as a near-future setting in the Florida wetlands, near the coast, when a baby girl is born to a dying mother. The father names the girl Wanda, after the hurricane happening during the birth. The story travels through 17 years, in which time the unraveling of the world takes place. First is a slow attrition and then a drastically changed world, but Wanda and her grandmotherly mentor, Phyllis, discover that she has a special ability to light up water particles around her. Phyllis doesn’t get it; she’s a scientist and doesn’t know why the girl carries such light, but it saves her on a couple occasions. It’s a story about many things: love, climate change, friendships, extinction, and survival. I’m pretty sure what’s at the center is that Wanda takes the lessons of light she learned as a child, from people who loved her, and learns how to survive in a new, harsh world where the wild abounds and surround herself, once again, with people she loves and feels safe around.
June spotlight
This month we travel to Puerto Rico and the Yucatán with E.G. Condé as we talk about his upcoming novel Sordidez (Stelliform Press, August 2023). It’s an Indigenous futurist science fiction novella. Sordidez begins in Puerto Rico, where a band of rural people must rebuild their lives in the aftermath of a devastating climate change fueled superhurricane. E.G. calls the novel an example of Taínofuturism, a term he describes as a counter canon of the literary genres he grew up with, “class-climbing gentlemen or the sullen and suitorless dames of Charles Dickens or Emily Brontë novels,” which he felt, as a young student, he didn’t have much in common with. E.G. states that Taínofuturism “is inspired by the ancestral magic and enduring memory of the Taíno, the indigenous peoples of the Antilles… [his stories] imagine a decolonial future for Borikén, the Indigenous place-name for the U.S. territory known as Puerto Rico.” The genre rejects a return to a pre-colonial past.
Vero has always felt at odds with his community. As a trans man in near-future Puerto Rico, he struggles to gain acceptance for his identity and his vision of an inclusive society. After a hurricane decimates the island and Puerto Rico is abandoned by the United States, Vero leaves his home to petition the centralized government for aid and seek the truth about new colonists arriving on the island. But in the Yucatán, Vero finds a landscape ravaged by an ecological disaster of humanity’s own making—the hydrophage, a climate technology warped into a weapon of war and released onto the land by the dictator Caudillo.
Other news
As a big fan of fairy tales and fairy mythology, which is referenced in my Wild Mountain series (Back to the Garden and The Stolen Child), I’ve just ordered free tickets to Orion Magazine Presents: Fairy Tales for the Climate Crisis. The lineup includes Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Kate Bernheimer. While you’re at it, why not order their summer issue? I did and am awaiting it eagerly.
Some new eco-fiction added recently to Dragonfly.eco:
Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri (a regular contributor in our Rewilding Our Stories Discord)
Query by Zilla Novikov (another active author in our Discord!)
New book recommendations:
See Dragonfly’s book recommendations—some ours, some from others—including Rachel Rosen’s (a regular at our Discord): The best Canadian dystopian novels (that aren’t The Handmaid’s Tale).
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. This subreddit is currently paused.
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.
Backyard Wildlife: Now infused with some blog posts, this is 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