creative writing on environmental justice
What it’s like. When the death of your home is someone else’s lesson learned (p. 118).
These are the thoughts of Dario, who lives in a vertical city after sea-level rise claimed his childhood home and forced him to resettle. He watches, captivated, as the artist Yeong-cheol Min sculpts clay into a representation of Dario’s former homeland, a series of . . .
Living in the Necrocene, and being somewhat cognisant of environmental change as it happens around me, has its disadvantages. There’s a constant, low-level preoccupation with death: of species, of ecosystems, of potential futures. This tends to be reinforced by my choice of reading material. As a speculative writer myself, and one who often focuses on climate . . .
Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri, solarpunk writer and editor, depicts an ecotopian community thriving through the climate crisis after the collapse of the current global economy. In dialogue with current trends in politics and environmentalism—as well as timeless themes like the weight of history over individuals, the conflict for power between . . .
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 . . .
Sometimes I like to fantasize about how I’d cope with the end of the world—or, at least, the end of our relatively comfortable and stable society. I’m hardly a doomsday prepper, and I’m pretty sure that my gangly, over-friendly self would barely last a few days into the apocalypse, but it’s a fascinating hypothetical for two reasons: firstly, because . . .
The question, as a form, courts: wide-spanning and invitational, it provides the grounds for voicing provisional answers and desires, variously. The works that comprise this issue of Reckoning provoke essential questions for our current historical conjuncture, questions which defy the treacherous narrows of business-as-usual and open instead toward . . .
Claire G. Coleman’s debut novel, Terra Nullius, is a difficult and powerful book set in an Australia under occupation. It starts in medias res with the flight from slavery of a young Native man named Jacky. This sequence may seem historically familiar, as may the word “Native.” But Terra Nullius contains a revision of perspective at about the 120 page-mark that . . .
Pladek’s debut novel, Dry Land, is a historical fantasy set in the First World War, focusing on an uncommon topic in fantasy literature: forestry. In addition to its environmental and war themes, and its careful engagement with queer realities, Dry Land also offers a refreshing take on magic. Yet perhaps most importantly, Dry Land is a story about personal . . .
“This is my home,” my mother says to me one overcast day.
Picture this: mother and daughter are sitting on the couch together, our ponchos pooling and swallowing us whole. We are looking at a picture on the internet, a snapshot of the valley in Petorca. My mother was born in that Chilean city, a tiny bird nestled in the bosom of the Andes, gasping through thin air and . . .
Magic! That is the word I could use to describe where I came from, my island. It was not owned by any individual but a collective of small dwellers surrounded by bodies of water, a small place where I knew our neighbors’ names, where I woke up to the serenity of the waves greeting me. I almost took this view for granted and lost my wonder of her.
I once lived close to the . . .