If you’ve ever found yourself thirsting for a pond, maybe you can relate: 
since middle school, I have been taught to believe in certain prerequisites for being an artist. You need, first, solitude; second, peace of mind, usually defined as someone else doing your laundry; third, your own place, preferably by a pond. We were shown Landscape Art and given Nature Poetry, with nature defined as an external place you could go to extract inspiration and landscape defined as the world, how much it pleases you (srsly, those lily pads, perfect 10). While species after species were going extinct, entire sections of the biophonic choir folding up their hymnals and calling it a day, I was encouraged to look up the definitions of copse, crag, and thicket for the sake of there-will-be-a-test. Because I (maybe you too), was queer, an artist, inept at my assigned gender, neurofabulous, etc, and therefore a bundle of unnameable wants, what I thought I wanted at the time was the thing offered to me. I wanted a damn pond of my own.
Now that the world is fully on fire, the biophonic choir going alarmingly minimalist, and every kind of grief (personal, societal, human, ecological, planetary) dominating our feeds, I want something else. I want to know how you make art when you’re mortal, grieving, furious, and crisping at the edges. I need books about finding home, resistance, and belonging in our shifting climate. I want stories that are wild enough to match living in this moment. And I want something to rise out of the pond/forest/ocean and fight back.
Green Fuse Burning, a magnificent and chilling swampcore/eco-horror novella by Tiffany Morris out of Stelliform Press1, plays in these muddy waters and delivers. Morris, a L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia, opens Green Fuse with an art gallery announcement for a new show: the recovered paintings of Mi’kmaq painter Rita Francis, who mysteriously disappeared during her residency in a cabin on a pond. Each subsequent chapter begins with the gallery’s description of one of the paintings. The descriptions suggest clues about what happened to Rita: she used elements of the pond in her work; she painted tortured figures; what is this red sticky stuff on the canvas? The painting descriptions provide a frame for the chapters in which we get to experience Rita’s residency, the moments up to her disappearance, in real time.
The heart of the book is Rita’s grief, which Morris renders alongside Rita’s climate change sadness as a loss of psychic habitat. Rita is reeling from the recent loss of her father. Her grief is tied to a sense of alienation: the loss, not only of her father, but of connection with Mi’kmaw language and culture. Her father’s funeral is in “prayers her tongue couldn’t shape” without either the full grasp of the Mi’kmaw language, or the religious background of her cousins or brother who grew up on the rez (p. 12). Rather than hold space for her grief, Rita’s white and slightly toxic girlfriend, Molly—freshly back from an MLM retreat in Bali—submits Rita’s art to a fellowship in a frenzy of positive thinking, and wins her a residency out by a pond, in nature, air quotes. This next detail says it all: Molly remembers going “down to the shore” of that pond during childhood summers (p. 22). Rita knows “the Mi’kmaq people were forced off the land.” Still, she goes. Maybe she can paint. Maybe nature will do her good. Maybe she can be the sunny productive artist her girlfriend wants her to be. If this were a never have I ever, I’m betting some of us would be taking a sip.
Rita carries the awareness that her art retreat is on her ancestors’ stolen land, but she nevertheless “imagin[es] herself painting in swaths of golden light each day, reading by candlelight, heating her food on a woodstove” (p. 16). Of course, almost immediately, out by the swamp, something in the night’s like: “BUMP!” Stuck between despair and the desire to create, eventually Rita wanders into the mud and experiences an encounter. Not quite a haunting, not quite a monster. Let’s just say that looking for belonging and inspiration, she finds it in the arms of the swamp.
Green Fuse Burning asks who gets to have the idealized art retreat experience? I know this question. A few years ago, I too was lucky to win a fellowship to write in nature with a friend and collaborator. We drove to the place where they said there would be woods and found “No Trespassing” signs and a redundancy of U.S. flags. When we stopped for gas, several white men in flannel shirts wandered up from their trucks. They put their hands on the hood of our car and leaned in, surrounding us. “We just wanted to make sure you felt welcome,” they said, unsmiling.
As soon as Rita arrives in a place where the names have all been replaced, she encounters racism of the “We weren’t expecting you to come here . . . .” variety (emphasis mine, p. 24). When this happens to QT/BIPOC/disabled/femme artists on art retreats in nature, should we consider these men/settlers/racists part of our landscape, or do we photoshop them out?2
Maybe the real horror is that in capitalism, there is occupied land that is set aside for contemplation. Some people are allowed to access it by application.3 Green Fuse Burning reminds me that an artist retreat is the restriction of a resource that should belong to everyone: land, time, art, space. Before there was a Thoreau Gift Shop where you can buy mugs that say “all good things are wild and free,” the pond (re)named Walden had history as a place where formerly enslaved people tried to build a life of freedom. Before that, ~12,000 years of Native American cohabitation, and before that, it simply existed, birthed by icebergs. Now, climate change and the impact of half a million visitors a year threaten its very existence as a pond.4
Green Fuse Burning also engages with the question of nature, art, landscape, and self as separate. The title conjures a coming riot of swamp-revenge, the explosion of the idea that we are separate from nature, the swamp, the cycles of life. But there is a secondary meaning: fuse, become. Midway through the residency, Rita looks in the mirror and finds a vision of the swamp: “the usually familiar shapes of her face not making sense, not cohering into a memory of herself . . . her hair a tangle of gnarled branches and her cheeks smudged pools of sludge” (p. 53). Morris is also a poet (Elegies of Rotting Stars, Nictitating Books, 2022), and it shows in her jaw-droppingly lush imagery. When she comes to these places, she throws down, with language soaked in life. You’ll want to read slowly, sink into it like so much mud, mouth open to salt and grit and lichen.
~ Spoilers below ~
The explosion of Green Fuse Burning is what you don’t see in the paintings: Rita’s encounter with Lichen Woman, a kind of hypernatural embodiment of the swamp. The scene with Lichen Woman is so muddy, sexy, swampy and alive, it could be one of my favorite descriptions in any book last year. Dripping, marshy, lichenous, earning the “core” in swampcore with glorious muddy vibes of grief and rebirth and resilience. This encounter leads to the triumph of the book and to the equation at the center of so much great horror: There is a monster. The monster is me. I will fight back.
Rita survives and is found. She gets to attend her art opening and give an artist talk. This is where I admit, as one reader, that the book and I diverted. I didn’t want Rita to return and give a speech, even a great one, to her community and her now-ex. I wanted to imagine her happily out there in the swamp, covered in mud, wild, hand-in-hand with Lichen Woman, helping settler homes sink into the bogs. And yes, I know this is quite Sapphic of me. If I disappear, you know where to look.
~ End of spoilers. ~
The good news is that the swamp endures. Because being human and being vulnerable to grief does not end. Because Death, Life, Mud—it’s part of us. And, more importantly, because there is something out there still, something that can’t be killed or sectioned off or painted. Something that will surely take us down with it or carry on gleefully without us, but if we’re very, very lucky, it will take us in.
I, for one, love a swamp that fights back. Give me eco-horror over any other climate change genre. I want the frogs to win. Spiritually, I know time to be circular and iterative, but I want land to be petty and vengeful. Give me the satisfying revenge of that final panel in a Tales from the Crypt comic, but it’s Earth laughing and Humanity crying no, mercy, we didn’t mean to, it wasn’t our fault. Eco-horror, as a genre, doesn’t care for the despair of Dennis Quaid just trying to rescue his son while the superstorm comes. Eco-horror doesn’t need you to reach some Overstory-esque sympathy for life forms that aren’t us, because nature wins—you don’t need pity from things you’ve pwned. Eco-horror is my favorite kind of queer aesthetic because it replaces extinction with extra. Take the heartbreak of climate change and give me a hundred frogs, a thousand moths, and mud that doesn’t care about your attachment issues. It’s the lichen curling around your ankle as you try to walk away. It’s the thing out there that’s worth fighting for because it can’t be killed.
As Eco-Horror and Swampcore both, Green Fuse has everything you could want: there is plenty mud, there is a hyperabundance of moths so well rendered I batted my hands around, there is a spitting-up-frogs scene so graphic I still can’t eat pickles. There are bioluminescent mushrooms. There is what she, Rita, wanted: “a language of her own on a secret part of the land. Her own suckerfish writing, her essence in the mud” (p. 90).
Green Fuse Burning contributes to making 2023 a great year, at least when it comes to eco-horror and indigenous eco-horror, alongside other titles like Bad Cree, Never Whistle at Night, and more. It’s also been a good publication year for swamps, marshes, and wetlands. Consider Annie Proulx’s Fen, Bog, and Swamp, B. Pladek’s excellent Dry Land 5, Grant Chemidlin’s What We Lost in the Swamp, and Nomeda Urbonas et al’s Swamps and the New Imagination (2024). Something is speaking to us from the pond. As Morris writes in the acknowledgments, “Wetlands are devalued for the same reason that death and trauma are ignored . . . we do not see the importance of holding space for pain or holding the literal space of the swamp, even though both are about life itself. Even though they help other areas of life thrive.”
Maybe in our grief, we’re craving what’s messy. Maybe we’re needing filtration systems to sift the information overload. Maybe we want mud because it marks us, like glitter off that queer on the dance floor, as part of this joyous, fractious messiness of the world we are part of. Maybe, covered in mud, we can crawl out and reclaim something that should belong to all of us. Green Fuse Burning is dedicated “to those in the swamps.” I for one have been in the swamps a lot this year, for better or worse. Maybe you have too. Maybe I’ll see you out there. We can mud wrestle.
Content Warnings for Green Fuse Burning: Suicidal ideation, anti-indigenous racism, grief, loss of a family member, loneliness.
1. Stelliform is a Canadian press promoting intersectional views of environmental justice, with a mission to “resha[pe] nature/culture relationships through the stories we tell ourselves and each other.” Their books come in eye-catching covers, like the cover of Green Fuse Burning by artist Chief Lady Bird: chartreuse, hot pink, and luminous, like moonlight on a mutating swamp.
2. If you’re not QT/BIPOC/Femme/Disabled and think you can just ignore this kind of thing and focus on your art, or if your eyeballs need a dose of WTF, allow me to direct you to Alex Garland’s 2022 film Men.
3. For a triumphant counter, read E.C. Barrett’s Swimming Whole.
4. This is not an inevitability. For a story of a lake’s resilience, restoration, and returning, read Vivian Underhill’s The Return of Pa’ashi, Colonial Unknowing and California’s Tulare Lake (2023).
5. Editor’s note: Find Bogi Takács’s review of Dry Land for Reckoning here.