creative writing on environmental justice
Read “Agapostemon” in Reckoning 1.
Michael: A disclaimer: I have just had a kid (three days ago as I write this) and thus am just a little sleep deprived, so I have gotten a bit of help with these questions from Johannes Punkt, who wrote “The Honeybee-Maker’s Kiss”, another heavily bee-centric piece in Reckoning 1.
Johannes . . .
Read “Four Found Poems” in Reckoning 1.
Michael: Your poems provide a fascinating human perspective on the ways people’s relationship with land and water has changed over time as a result of colonization. I confess they’re the first instances of the found poetry form that have really caught my imagination–of the many poems . . .
This interview, per Johannes’s preference, shall be in epistolary format. Note: contains some gentle spoilers.
Read “The Bumblebee-Maker’s Kiss” in Reckoning 1.
Michael: Johannes,
Here is some rambly gushing about your story with questions wedged in between. Please don’t feel like you have to answer all of them, if there . . .
Read Goldie Locks’s story “2222” from Reckoning 1.
Michael: You live in Moscow. What’s your experience of nature like? My only knowledge of Moscow is through Russian literature in translation. Are there public parks? Do you visit them? Can you walk down to the Volga in winter and watch your fellow city-dwellers ice skating in winter? . . .
Read Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s poem “Rivers Lament” from Reckoning 1.
Michael: We hear a little here in the US about Bangladesh’s low-lying areas being one of the most heavily populated places in the world under threat from rising sea levels, but not much comes through to us about it in the way of media reporting. What has been your experience . . .
Michael: Kate Schapira’s Climate Anxiety Project is a fascinating creative experiment in which she sets up a counseling booth (in the style of Lucy from Peanuts) in a city square, invites people worried about the future of humanity to come and talk to her about it, records the results, and finds creative ways to respond. Her “Three Alternate . . .
Michael: I asked Johannes Punkt (whose story “The Bumblebee-Maker’s Kiss” is in Reckoning 1 and goes live on the site next month) to interview Marissa Lingen about “How Far Are We From Minneapolis?” because he’s from Sweden and I thought he might have interesting things to ask her, and because I’m trying to do . . .
Michael: My brilliant friend Erin Hoffman has ideas spilling out her ears and plates spinning from here to the next century. To celebrate the occasion of publishing her poem, “Transition”, in Reckoning 1, I managed to corner her to ask how she might envision a community forming around Reckoning not just to foster new ideas and beautiful art on the . . .
Michael: What inspired “Wolphinia”?
Giselle: I’d written a few stories about the environment, when somebody showed me a video about a dolphin asking divers for help to remove a fishing hook. I started reading about dolphins and found out that they can have vestigial hind limbs and probably used to live on land. There is some evidence that . . .
The first issue of Reckoning comes out in ebook form one week from today–preorder it here from Weightless Books! Kermit flail (because as we all know, Kermit is an amphibian-American, and thus under significant threat of extinction due to climate change)!
In the meantime, here we have my final learning-how-to-edit interview of 2016, with the incredibly . . .