Thanks to readers
I’ve been getting more new subscribers than usual lately, and I appreciate ya’ll. I’m still around on some social media but have ceased using it except for rarely—I prefer direct and personal communication (family and group chats, phone calls, get-togethers, emails, a writers Discord, etc.), so however you are finding me, thanks for reading. This newsletter covers eco-fiction in various kinds of media, including novels, anthologies, graphic novels, films, and games. You can find out more here. As I wrote at Impakter, the genre is made up of fictional tales that reflect important connections, dependencies, and interactions between people and their natural environments. I continue to be immersed into how we tell stories about our changing world, in an ecological sense—though many more facets are inherently connected. Our human story is in there too, which adds layers of weird, tragic, mysterious, imaginative, and beautiful complexity.
Writer call-out
Rewilding Our Stories has a new writer call-out. The second contribution call is for personal narratives, ranging from 500-2,000 words, about any climate-related disasters you’ve experienced. This exercise is ongoing indefinitely and has no deadline. Submissions will appear at the site once they’re approved. All submissions must be free of typos and engaging, and may be subject to editing. Because this site is voluntary, no monetary payments will be made. You may send a brief biography with social media, and links to your piece will be shared on the companion Discord.
Updates from last month
After a fun-filled vacation last week in British Columbia—with family and new and old friends—as well as a fire pit and wine, two steep mountainous hikes, and driving a rickety pontoon boat around a lake, I returned to a garden full of beans, tomatoes, and one lonely lemon cucumber! I’d already dried eight pounds of beans for shucky beans for the upcoming holiday season, have five more pounds drying around the house, and just now picked about five more pounds before the hurricane hits soon.
Hurricane Lee is coming late tonight or tomorrow, so we’re battening down the hatches. It is now reduced to category 1 and will be a post-tropical storm by the time it gets here. We’re ready.
Film of the month
I’m finally doing it! I’m naming a film of the month, rather than book, like I’ve been wanting to do for a while. Beasts of the Southern Wild is an older movie, but I always think about it and how it impacted me when it came out in 2012.
Before I started the world eco-fiction spotlight, I did a spotlight on climate change authors. I featured the film’s writers Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar in 2018. Note that while I did not get a chance to talk with the writers, I did get an email saying that Lucy was appreciative of my site, so I’ll take that.
I like Patricia Yaeger’s thoughts about the movie in Southern Spaces:
The film’s rags and wastelands—its killing fields—become powerful emblems of the Southland’s (and our nation’s) commitment to toxic inequality.
But something else rages in this film; it refuses the realism of social critique and advances instead into hubris land, into a new realm of myth making for the twenty-first century. “We’s who the earth is for,” boasts Hushpuppy, echoing her father’s view of the racially mixed population of the Bathtub. This community bristles with carnivores, meat-eating women and men unashamed of their appetites, alcohol, and impoverishment. Nurtured, imperiled, the child creates a wild set of gods: demiurges, mother figures, aurochs, and sirens to inhabit a world dangerous and ecstatic. She forces us to ask: what myths do we need to live in an era of global warming where every coastal community may soon look like the Bathtub?
World eco-fiction spotlight
This month we head to oceans everywhere as I chat with animal behaviorist, conservation biologist, and novelist Gene Helfman about his new novel FINS: A Novel of Relentless Satire. FINS combines elements of the stereotypical shark horror story in a humorous manner that counteracts the reprehensible practice of finning. Sentient sharks, led by a matriarch, are intelligent, compassionate, maternal, and goal-oriented, in league with a female scientist and an African-American tech wizard, all battling malevolent white guys. Profits from FINS will be donated to shark conservation. We also talk about Gene’s previous novel about killer whales—Beyond the Human Realm—and his nonfiction books.
Book news
See Dragonfly.eco for new eco-novels, films, and games.
New in Turning the Tide is a link to a press release: Black Women in STEM Pen New Children’s Science and Nature Book for HBCU Green Fund’s MSITU: The Old-Growth Forest.
Jeff VanderMeer writes in Esquire about the fact that “climate fiction” will not save us as well as the shady origins of the genre.
The Los Angeles Times has a list of fiction and nonfiction reads if you’re interested in the topic of climate change.
The New Yorker lists Ariel Dorman’s The Suicide Museum with climate change and the death of Salvador Allende.
Read Scroll.in’s article: Assamese eco-fiction novels ‘Maajher Char’ and ‘Jalajaah’ reclaim elemental forms of the environment.
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.
Copyright 2024 Mary Woodbury