creative writing on environmental justice
“Everything looks worse in the dark, you know”6, writes Tove Jansson, famous Finnish painter and children’s author, in her first book The Moomins and the Great Flood during the last years of World War II. I imagine her sitting hunched over a wooden desk stained with paint and covered in pencil shavings, interrupting her writing every few minutes to glance anxiously . . .
Going from Kyiv to my mother’s native land, a village in the Cherkasy region, we used to take a road that ran like a thin ribbon across the endless dark blue water body. I have always been fascinated by these enormous reservoirs and this overarching lake called the “Cherkasy Sea”. As a child, I knew that Ukraine had two seas in the South, far away from where I live. . . .
This issue of Reckoning is devoted to works about war and conflict viewed through the lens of environmental justice. What is seen through that lens is, by turns, grim and hopeful.
It is through writing that we remember freedom, as Le Guin puts it. Writers are capable of probing into the heart of the crises of our time: extinction, genocide, climate catastrophe. . . .
“Everything’s environmental justice” is something I used to say around the shop back during Reckoning 2 or thereabouts, a way of indicating what kinds of environmental writing should go in the magazine: all kinds, from everywhere and everyone.
Ten years in, I stand by that statement, even as I acknowledge that “everywhere” for our purposes refers, with far . . .
As Michael says, “Everything is environmental justice”, and well “everything” is a lot, but it’s also true. Take fair elections. They may not seem at first glance to be connected to environmental justice, but in places without fair and equal representation, those who stand to suffer the most have the least power to protect themselves from environmental injustices . . .
“If we ever wanted to, our friend group could transition nicely into a BDSM circle,” I announce to my friend George as we stare at nearly $1,000 worth of locks and chains in a pile on the living room floor.
“Is that a thing? A BDSM circle?” he asks, looking up from his project of color-coding keys to locks with iridescent nail polish.
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “You can . . .
This story begins and ends with the X that means both death and hope.
Three Xs, two strikes, one message: Solidarity.
26 November, 2017.
The Australian government would prefer that we forget this crime against humanity, this X in flesh in the air.
It’s a humid, sweaty, overcast day at a protest at Federation Square in the centre of Melbourne. Shen Narayanasamy . . .
In the US this year, we neurodivergent folks have heard a lot about what we cannot do or will never do. Our differences have been increasingly pathologized, demonized, and used to deny us basic respect and decency. Our diagnoses have been dismissed, our personal autonomy, access to medications, and medical care threatened. All because we will never write a . . .
The smell of burning wood is pouring in the open window over my bed, filling my nostrils before I even have the chance to open my eyes. The last time I smelled smoke this strong was two summers ago when the corner of my trailer was on fire. I don’t jump out of bed, though. These fires are an emergency of a different kind. The winds have been blowing from the northeast for . . .
In Egypt, at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), a South Pacific leader asks the world to bear witness to the death of his homeland. He is speaking from a screen. In a full suit, flanked by the flags of his country and the UN, he stands behind a lectern on the shore of a nondescript island. His voice carries over the sounds of water on sand, wind . . .