creative writing on environmental justice
My Swedish cousins were very confused by the walk through the woods down to the Mississippi River. “How far are we from Minneapolis?” they kept asking. And we would repeat: we’re in Minneapolis. This is part of Minneapolis. We’re in Minneapolis right now. They gazed at us in frustration, unsure what part of their excellent English was not getting through. “But . . .
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 . . .
Like coronary occlusion, it began small, spiral shell and Sierpinski gasket, a vibration amongst the strings rippling outward into rising sea levels, Pacific hurricane, the exhalation of universes, sublime and terrifying– and then we were gone. Love and strings; they go together.
I poured into him my rivers with their poisons, my plains and valleys . . .
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: 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 everything I can to foster cross-pollination between Reckoning authors, artists, readers and yes, editors.
Johannes: I love how you write nature as something incredibly personal. Who do you write like, do you think, on your best days? Who would you like to write like?
Marissa: I want to write like my best self. I am inspired by so many other writers, but I have a hard time saying, “I want to write like Jane Yolen” or “I want to write like John M. Ford” or “I want to write like Octavia Butler.” I want to talk about relationship and society the way Octavia did, I want to have the interplay of ideas Mike had in his work, I want Jane’s range in talking to all sorts of audiences. I try to learn from everything I like, to see what makes it go. But at the end of the day, I can only write like me. If I’m lucky and work very hard, I can write like the best me.
Marissa: I’ve been reading more personal essayists lately as well as writing this piece–usually I write fiction. So I can say more particularly that I am inspired by Elizabeth Dodd and by Karen Babine, in this form, and I’m always looking for more inspiration.
Johannes: Since you wrote about wilderness—what is your favourite wilderness in writing?
Marissa: Since you’re Swedish there’s some chance you’ll actually know what I mean when I answer this! My first wilderness in writing was the robber’s woods in Astrid Lindgren’s Ronia the Robber’s Daugher, and I think that that writing about being a little girl in the forest, sometimes with her little boy friend, imprinted itself and the forest on my heart when that was me too. All the others since then have been paler echoes—some of them wonderful, but none as vivid as that first literary wilderness.
Johannes: Reading your piece, I couldn’t help but think about it and about how notions of private/public property shape the landscape and, in turn, those who grow up there. Have you and your Swedish cousins talked about Allemansrätten [A Swedish law that means that even if you own land, you can’t stop people from going there/temporarily sleeping there, &c. That’s the gist of it. In English it’s called “freedom to roam.”]?
Marissa: Yes! They had us out to their country house when we were visiting last year, and it came up then, because we walked out on the road but came back through a field and some woods that were adjacent. I had read about what a large percentage of Swedes go berry-picking or mushroom-picking—an even larger percentage of Finns, I think, under the same type of law—and it totally makes sense compared to here, where people mostly don’t do that. My best friend does urban foraging, but she always asks very carefully. She goes to the door and knocks and says something like, hi, I see your mulberry bushes are full of fruit going to the birds, would you mind if I picked some. And then she makes jam. And of course I don’t want random strangers wandering in and eating my tomatoes, but having a common understanding sounds appealing indeed.
Johannes: Related to the previous question: You write about wildness and wilderness, like a stewardship of nature almost. How do you feel about ownership of land, tamed, half-tamed, or not? (Is it something that elicits emotion?) obviously you wrote that the waterfall was “[y]ours” but the two feel like very different kinds of ownership, no?
Marissa: They’re very different indeed. My feelings about land ownership get complicated. We own a house on a third of an acre here, with woods in the back. When we moved in, the woods were part of a long strip of forested land that crossed ten or twelve people’s private property in going down to the city park. It wasn’t a large woods, but it was nice. Now several of our neighbors have chosen to cut and landscape that, which changes the feel of the whole. And of course that’s their prerogative, but it makes me gloomy.
The kind of possessiveness that I feel about Minnehaha Falls is an entirely non-exclusive possessiveness. It’s mine, it’s ours—and I want that “ours” to be as large as possible. I want all the people who live around here and even visitors to feel that they have some relationship with the Falls, some responsibility to see that it’s cared for. I think under our current system having it be a public park is the best way to do that, but if it can be a public park that makes people feel that they are part of the public, even better. I fear that too often “the government owns it” ends up feeling like “no one owns it, no one takes any responsibility,” when it should be a collective feeling of *everyone’s* responsibility. Ownership should feel more like “I need to take care of this [possibly with some other people]” than like “I can do whatever I like with this and no one can stop me.”
Johannes: Your piece discusses adjusting to disability. I got mine relatively early; I can hardly remember what it’s like to be “normal.” You seem to ground yourself with those memories and patterns; what do you do when the world is too xenoformed, too alien to adjust to? If it ever is.
Marissa: Oh, it is sometimes. Yes. There is a level of vertigo that results in dreams of being on a malfunctioning space station with the gravity going haywire, because that’s how completely disoriented my body is about up and down, and that’s the metaphor set my science fiction writer brain has to process those sensations when I’m unconscious. So my brain is literally saying: this is beyond our planetary reference frame, this is an alien environment.
What do I do practically: well, there is a practice my best friend refers to as “Marissa is brachiating again”: that is, going from branch to branch like a monkey. Only I am doing it in the house: getting around without falling over by reaching for the next thing to steady myself on, going from touching a wall to a chair to a countertop. That’s one of my best coping mechanisms in my small, immediate world. In the larger one–my assistance needs and coping vary a lot depending on how bad a day it is. Sometimes my cane is enough. Sometimes I need to take a friend’s arm. Sometimes the only thing that will work is patience, waiting for a day when the world and I are better lined up.
Johannes: And, lastly, it’s a new year and stuff. What are you looking forward to reading this year?
Marissa: I have Maria Dahvana Headley’s Aerie at the top of my stack of Christmas books. I loved Magonia, and I’m looking forward to Aerie very much. Last year I read Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, and I’m now going through the rest of Solnit’s work a little at a time. I also read my first Gerald Vizenor novel, Treaty Shirts, which I loved, so I’m reading the rest of his stuff a little at a time too. And of course there are new things coming out that I’m eager for—Thoraiya Dyer’s debut looks pretty great, and our mutual editor has been talking up Christopher Brown’s Tropic of Kansas, so I’m excited for that.
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 . . .
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 they are self-healing and can completely recover from wounds like shark bites, keeping their original body shape. Then I discovered that there is a rare hybrid called a ‘wolphin’ or ‘wholphin’, a cross between a female common bottlenose dolphin and a male false killer whale. I’ve always been interested in the question of what makes some people take political action and others not, and also in the fact that intelligent species like dolphins can’t protect themselves from humans simply due to their lack of hands and mobility on land. I imagined a future where humans are coming to an end, but dolphins (eventually) make it back onto land, with a little help from a courageous girl.
Michael: Your writing has a unique and I think delightfully black sense of humor. How do you approach humor in your fiction?
Giselle: Thank you! I have to say that I don’t ever set out to be funny. I’ve always thought there isn’t much distinction between light and dark – all part of life, I mean, and always weirdly related. Sometimes, the darker things are, the funnier they can be: experiencing the worst can make you appreciate the best. This is not to minimalize the seriousness of certain things, but humour helps to alleviate them and highlight the absurdity of awful actions—also to point the finger at the perpetrator in a way. I suppose once the character’s voice comes through, then the humour just follows. I often laugh a lot while writing and occasionally I cry, sometimes both at once! I think black humour can make the emotions more affecting, rather than less.
Michael: What would you say are your satirical influences? What writers most inspire you?
Giselle: I’ve got no idea if it’s affected my writing, but Kurt Vonnegut made a massive impression on me when quite young, as did J.D. Salinger and Joseph Heller. I read a lot of Anthony Trollope when I ran out of Jane Austen. Satirical writers I’m inspired by now include Lorrie Moore (who else can begin a story with somebody killing their friend’s baby by accident), the inimitable George Saunders, ZZ Packer, and Ray Bradbury. I haven’t read much Martin Amis, but loved London Fields (which seems to be a real Marmite book). Tom Lehrer’s songs are unbeatable for dark humour. There’s lots of others I love who are less satirical, but I won’t list them all here.
Michael: Does writing fiction have a cathartic effect for you? Does it make you feel better about the world? Worse?
Giselle: A killer question! Definitely cathartic: I love the process of writing and I enjoy life more because of it. I’m not so sure if it gives me hope for the world, but it helps me connect with it and I’ve learnt a lot of interesting things doing research for stories. It makes me think about the seeds of human peculiarities, both light and dark, which is hopefully useful information for the coming environmental battles!
Michael: Could you tell me a little about something you’ve done in the past year that has made you feel better about the world?
Giselle: A cycling trip from The Hook of Holland to Copenhagen, mostly along the coast. Lots of wind and even more wind turbines—people protest about them ruining landscapes, but I think they look amazing, like some sort of better vision of the future. People’s houses were often covered with solar panels. Also, the brilliant cycle lanes and number of people cycling in these countries—Copenhagen recently became the first city to have more bikes than cars. It made me feel that these things are within reach and that there is some hope.
It used to be that I didn’t dare stop driving around—people would notice; I’d make them feel guilty and they might attack. Now, on my walks through the harbour, all I have to do is duck the cars that smash through the barrier high above my head. And flinch when they hit the heap of metal that lines the sea wall.
Ride not riot. That’s the tiny government’s latest slogan. . . .
It used to be that I didn’t dare stop driving around—people would notice; I’d make them feel guilty and they might attack. Now, on my walks through the harbour, all I have to do is duck the cars that smash through the barrier high above my head. And flinch when they hit the heap of metal that lines the sea wall.
Ride not riot. That’s the tiny government’s latest slogan. Not that anyone’s listening since the election turnout dropped to 2.3%. But the people keep queueing up for their petrol. Fucking lemmings!
I follow the harbour wall that ends at the old customs house, tucked underneath the flyover, now the seat of the tiny government. I’m wondering what they actually do, besides doling out petrol, when out of the mucky water pops this wolphin and I jump a fucking mile.
I put my hands up. Wolphins aren’t stupid. It’s very likely to be pissed off: every time another car ‘forgets’ to take the curve and flies off into the sea, a wolphin floats belly-up afterwards.
Still, what on earth do I expect it to do? Gun me down? Wolphins don’t have hands.
I look closer. It’s way too big to be an English wolphin. Maybe the rumours were true, maybe it’s ex-Russian. Not that anybody cares. Even the Nationalists have given up—more important fish to fry and all that.
The wolphin half-rises from the waves and opens its mouth, as if it’s struggling to say something. I’m interested. Conversation is pretty scarce these days. I edge closer, keeping my hands up, but the wolphin moves back. You can’t blame it for being suspicious—I am a human, after all.
Though hardly anyone’s fishing anymore. Even the police just drive around. To be fair, there’s not a lot else left to do.
Whistle, whistle goes the wolphin and it flips over and wiggles its tail.
I wasn’t too hot at Wolphinese when everyone was into it—before the wolph-fishing started. Anyhow, I don’t even know if it speaks Wolphinese, let alone English.
I sneak a look at its undercarriage, but I can’t tell if it’s F or M. Oh well, nobody gives a shit since the babies stopped coming. It probably can’t tell about me either: I’ve shaved my hair off now Mom’s not around to tell me to act like a proper girl.
I’m trying to remember ‘hello’ when another wolphin swims up, a big grin on its face. Well, it’s hard to tell really when a wolphin is smiling.
Maybe it’s for the best I don’t speak Wolphinese: the fanatically fluent were the first to start eating their new friends.
I put on a lame grin and lower my hands.
Whistle, whistle goes the first wolphin again, and the second hesitates, then rolls over.
Fuck me! It’s got little hind legs.
I’d read about this during the wolphin craze. Super-rare. And these ones look like proper legs—like they might actually be going somewhere—not like the tiny buds in the pictures.
I’m literally at a loss for words, but I want the wolphins to know that I would never eat them—unlike some, I recognize their official person status. I’m not a fucking cannibal! I look towards the concrete bunker of the tiny government and I flip the finger and spit afterwards for good measure. The wolphins do a little jump and I know they understand. They start to swim away, but then they turn and look back at me and I wish I could go with them.
But I can’t. Sure, I’m a little mercury-toxic already, but it’ll be swiftly over if I so much as touch that water.
I can’t even say ‘tomorrow’ in Wolphinese, so I point to the sun, then roll my hands, and they do another jump.
I watch them swim out to the harbour mouth. I wonder if they’ve managed to get anywhere beyond this crappy island.
I meander in the direction of the customs house. The tiny government blew the remains of the budget on bulletproof window glass and fenced off the last working petrol pumps—conveniently located next to the customs house, underneath the flyover. Rumours are they even recruited a few ex-Russian wolphins to protect them on the ocean approach. Hush hush, of course: the soldier wolphins were officially all home-bred British. Fucking Nationalists.
There’s a ripe breeze coming off the cars that didn’t make it into the water and I pull my scarf up over my mouth as I stare out to sea. It looks almost beautiful, a grey gleam catching the sunshine through a break in the clouds. But I know what’s in that water.
Still, plenty of fish in the sea, if you don’t mind eating just a little mercury.
The wolphins frolic in the dim sunlight, a bit creaky, but basically survivors—the new roaches of the sea, as their ex-friends, the wolphinistas, took to calling them, just before they started eating them. After they conveniently forgot they had person status.
No one would dare eat them now: they are packed to the gills with mercury. But somehow thriving—like the tiny government is rumoured to be. Everybody used to want to know their secret, when they still cared about living forever.
I pull out a cigarette. Mom and Pops went on and on about it, before they started the big drive, but really, my lungs can’t tell the difference. I lift up my scarf and take a drag and pretend to blow the smoke out through the top of my head, like a wolphin.
The tiny government hasn’t been sighted outside their bunker for some time, except for their petrol people, doling out the rations.
I cough in surprise as a school of wolphins swims right past me—at least forty. They roll over and wiggle their legs. They all have the legs! Except for the leader, who I take to be the first wolphin I met. They clear their blowholes and swim in formation in the direction of the tiny government.
Once, I would have run to tell someone the news . . . now, I just stare. Who is there to tell?
But it’s a bit like old times. I haven’t seen a wolphin parade since before the wolph-fishing. As far as I was concerned, conscripting them was cruel, more soldiers for the useless cause. God knows what they were actually making them do.
The wolphins surface way past the customs house and swim back out to the harbour mouth.
I can’t help wondering what they’re up to. Do they have a plan? Or are they just stupid great fake-fish in the pay of the tiny government?
Still, what would they pay them with? Wolphins don’t need petrol, and even if they could drive, they’re already in the sea.
Whatever. I may as well try and find out. I don’t exactly have anything else to do.
It’d be less suspicious to get close to the customs house in a car and I’m sort of regretting my resolution to give up driving. But there are a few people who approach on foot if they’re dumb enough to run out of petrol . . . usually women, according to the government.
I never thought I’d count myself lucky to be a girl. How could I when the tiny government are all men? It’s kind of a sicko joke now that women are crashing through the barriers into the sea in equal numbers.
But I’m not stupid enough to just walk right up to the bunker empty-handed. I’ll have to go home for some props.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the house. The dead telly reflects slices of yellow grass between the window slats. Mom and Pops used to spend a lot of time watching the news; later, they just watched the crashes.
I run upstairs to their room, grab one of Mom’s wigs and Pop’s binos and run back down to the kitchen. I’m ravenous.
I open the cupboard and stare at the tins and tins of fucking fish.
“Eat your little fish, Monkey,” I hear Mom saying, and I force myself to move on to the garage.
I fling a rusty petrol can into the back seat of the saloon.
The keys are in the ignition. I haven’t driven my car since Mom and Pops sailed into the harbour, in a manner of speaking. I start the engine and collapse against the wheel, laughing. When I remember that mood incongruence is one of the early mercury symptoms, I laugh even more, until I’m weeping. Eat your little fish—what’s a little poison on the side? Mom and Pops couldn’t help it. What else was there to feed me? Ha ha ha!
I hoot and wave at my one remaining neighbour as I cruise past. Once she would have been so proud I’d started driving again. Now, she doesn’t even look up. She just carries on checking the petrol in her tank.
It’s dusk by the time I get back to the harbour. I drive right past the bunker. Hopefully they’ll pass me off as just another petrol junky, desperate for my next ration. I scan the sea as I take the entrance to the flyover.
I’m not supposed to stop up here, but it’s almost dark and I pull over to one side, where I can get a good view of the customs house. Just in time, it turns out. A small van accelerates through the hole in the barrier and lands way out. Talk about making a big splash!
I aim Pop’s binos at the bunker to avoid looking at the red stain spreading across the water. I can tell it’s blood, not petrol. They must have hit a wolphin. And that’s when I see the dinghy heading out from the customs house.
I didn’t know there were any boats left. It’s even got an engine and there are three MPs crouched in it. They have a long pole with a hook on the end. They putter out and snag the wounded wolphin as soon as it surfaces.
What the fuck? Its best chance is to be left alone. People know about the self-healing power of wolphins—that’s what got them started on eating them. And it’s the tiny government that banned wolph-fishing in the first place, once they realized about the mercury. Maybe they are trying to save it?
The wolphins surround the dinghy and start jumping out of the water. They almost knock the pole away, but the MPs speed away, back to the bunker, and haul the wolphin out onto the fenced-off slipway. It makes a strange, strangled scream and tries to thrash free. They deliver a swift booting, and I know for sure that they are not going to save it. They drag it hurriedly through the big metal doors, to the answering screams of its fellow wolphins.
Fuckers.
I can’t stop thinking about Mom and Pops on their final trip into the harbour. Did they even remember me before the big crash?
Whatever.
I sit until it’s almost dark, watching Mom and Pop’s mascot wolphin swinging from the car mirror. They used to worship the wolphins for being mercury-tolerant, but in the end they were jealous.
I’m badly tempted to just keep on driving.
I roll the car forward until it blocks the gap in the barrier, pull on Mom’s wig, get out and throw the keys over the edge.
I feel my way down the flyover, one hand on the barrier, petrol can in the other.
A weak moon lights up the dirty mist floating over the harbour. I imagine the wolphin ghosts, torn and twisted, rising healed from the water—like Jehovah’s Witnesses on resurrection day—and marching back onto the land, while the humans drop into the gloom, trailing red, clutching their precious steering wheels.
I put down the petrol can and creep towards the bunker. I make it to the wall that runs at right-angles to the sea. I inch along it, before I notice the MP sluicing the wolphin blood from the dinghy. It’s tied to the inside of the fence that juts out from the wall into the water. I press myself against the wall until he goes back in.
I slowly lift my head. There’s a small circle of light showing through a hole in the blackout cloth over the only window. I have to stand on tiptoe to peer through.
Luckily, the MPs have their backs to me. They’re sitting at a long table, watching a tall man. He stands facing them, eyes closed, hands uplifted, doing some sort of prayer, it looks like. There’s an enormous white plate in front of each of them. I strain closer, until I see that telltale black wolphin meat with the red edges like hot and angry coals.
I turn and shuffle away as fast as possible, my hand over my mouth.
Fucking cannibals!
I wish those wolphins would reappear. I need somebody to talk to. Nothing makes sense. Not because the MPs are eating wolphin—you never know what to expect from humans. It’s because I realize that there is not one sane person left.
Why am I so surprised?
I crouch by the wall until the night smudges into another grey day, half-hoping the wolphins won’t come. I’ve never touched a sliver of wolphin meat, but how will they know that?
The wolphin surfaces alone. I don’t expect sympathy after its companion has just been offed by its supposed fellows. But I remove Mom’s wig. I want it to recognize me. I want it to know that not all humans are the same.
“Sorry,” I say, and it does its little jump.
And it makes everything worse. I stand looking away from it, pressing my sleeve against my stupid mouth, trying not to laugh. Fucking mercury! I’m losing it!
“Sorry, sorry,” I say, and I look it straight in the eye and almost reach out to stroke its shiny poisonous flank, the red tip of its sore fin. I almost do. But I can’t. Even a few drops of water on my skin will . . . but what difference . . . .
The wolphin whistles at me, then turns its nose to point at its fin, then whistles again. My eyes have gone all blurry. All I can think of is Mom and Pop’s last drive and I realize I’m crying . . . . Better than laughing, I suppose.
It whistles again and I wipe my eyes. I finally understand what it’s trying to tell me when I see what it’s got wedged between its fin and body.
I look up, trying to clear my head. The school of wolphins have gathered at the harbour mouth and are swimming patterns in the water; it feels like they are showing me the way when they roll over in unison and wave their stubby legs.
I understand what it’s like to be them, I understand what it’s like to be ignored. What did the tiny government ever do for us?
I take off my scarf and wrap it round my hand. I lean down and gently lift up the grenade.
Pops was ex-military, like almost everyone since we became disconnected from the other continents and there was no longer any cause. He used to tell me tales about kamikaze Russian wolphins. “They couldn’t get the English ones to detonate the grenades,” he’d whisper.
I’m pretty sure he never dreamt I’d be dumb enough to try it one day. Even if I was a girl.
But now I’m finally a young woman. I breathe out. What next?
But I know already. I point towards the bunker, towards the remains of that feeble atrocity, the tiny government. “Now?” I ask, and the wolphin jumps up high.
My fingers are so numb that I let the scarf fall and hold the grenade with my bare hands. I can’t help flinching as the drops of water touch them, but I’ve got a feeling I won’t be needing them soon.
I’m shivering as I clasp the grenade and sneak over to the bunker wall. No sign of any MPs. I unbutton my shirt and tuck the grenade inside, then clamber along the outside of the fence and swing myself round to the inside where the dinghy is tied up.
The hardest part is getting into the boat. I still can’t stop trembling at the thought of all that water. Maybe Pops was right: those Russian wolphins must have been nuts to blow themselves up.
But then they didn’t have a good reason.
The dinghy rocks from side to side as I untie it and use the pole to push it close enough to the open metal doors.
The MPs stare at me as I bob into their line of sight.
The wolphins know that I’ll die in that water. And I know now for sure I will never join them when they march back out onto the land.
I may as well make myself useful.
“For Mom and Pops,” I yell, as I pull the pin and lob the grenade straight through the doors.
There’s a bright flash and I feel strangely illuminated from the inside out as I’m blown through the air into the poisonous sea.
The wolphins push me up to the surface to breathe, and the feeling of being carried aloft on their little hind legs almost makes up for the fact that it’s nearly all over for me.
But my rage has gone now that the tiny government is wolphin food. The grey water actually appears blue and fresh. An obvious delusion, but I have to admit, I’m enjoying it.
At least it’s better than just driving around.
Read Michael’s interview with Giselle about “Wolphinia” here.
Expect of me no high editorial remove. Not this year. I opened this project for submissions six months ago in a different world. Nothing is as I imagined it would be.
Yet I find that almost everything I wanted out of Reckoning remains the same—and suddenly it means a lot more. The individual, personal, visceral ways injustice and exploitation affect us mean so . . .
Expect of me no high editorial remove. Not this year. I opened this project for submissions six months ago in a different world. Nothing is as I imagined it would be.
Yet I find that almost everything I wanted out of Reckoning remains the same—and suddenly it means a lot more. The individual, personal, visceral ways injustice and exploitation affect us mean so much more; narratives of resistance mean so much more; acts of protest mean so much more, for one thing, because they give us a voice, they help us find each other. I’m proud to think Reckoning might be another way of bringing us together—all of us still committed to resist.
In these pages you’ll find the people on the front lines: activists, ecopunks, scientists, historians, workers of the land, teachers, students, immigrants, the marginalized, and yes, the privileged. Environmental justice isn’t just for the exploited. Neither is reckoning. For what it’s worth, we’re 66% white, 60% American, 50% male-identifying, 12% Asian, 11% Indigenous, 7% Black. Yes, I counted. (No, I didn’t count sexual orientation.) I needed to know if all that agitating for diverse submissions had done any good. And it has. But not enough. I can do better, I’ll do better. We all have to do better.
When I conceived of a journal of writing on environmental justice, I entertained the notion it might escape bias. I wanted a platform for the viewpoints of individuals, not movements, certainly not corporations. I learned with painful swiftness that the biases least to be avoided were my own: the confining nature of the English language, my education, my experience and lack thereof. I’ve tried to circumvent my biases, to balance them, but in certain ways they remain, and in certain ways, I am unashamed. You will hear no voice in these pages attempting to pretend climate change isn’t real, nor that we’re not responsible, nor that some of us aren’t more responsible than others, nor that there’s nothing to be done.
I wanted Reckoning to provide a means for perceiving the passage of time, a marker we can look back on and judge what’s changed. It can still be that. But watching the world change around us as this first issue has taken form has made the limitations of that ambition clear. Some of the darkest thoughts featured here look even darker since they’ve been written. Some of the most hopeful may begin to seem far-fetched. The outlook presented here on the world and humanity’s relationship to it became imperfect as soon as the words were put to the page. But I can also think of this as exactly the kind of reckoning I set out to do: seeking not blame or punishment, but new perspective, new understanding. It’s what humans do. We leave behind what we’ve done, we share it, we move on, we do better. I picked the winter solstice for Reckoning’s release because it seems in some ways to have always been a time humans used for looking forward, looking back. It’s the top of the cycle, when everything starts again, and we get another chance.
I cannot articulate how privileged I feel to get to be the one to pay these authors and artists for their work and put it out into the world, to encourage and in some fractional part help them to do more.
I hope their work encourages that in you.
If you’re reading this on the website, new content will be appearing weekly henceforth; links in the table of contents will go live accordingly. If you’d rather not wait, the full ebook is available now from Weightless Books (other outlets coming soon).
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 . . .
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 successful and multiple award-winning editors of Uncanny Magazine, Michael Damian and Lynne M. Thomas.
If you’re new here, the point of these interviews has been to help me learn how to be a good and conscientious editor, to practice what I preach, to understand whether and how and to what extent fiction can inspire and encourage people to change the world for the better, and hopefully to encourage others to do the same.
Michael (DeLuca): First of all, congratulations on your Hugo win! Uncanny has huge momentum despite being only two years old. You’ve won lots of awards, run a bunch of wildly successful funding drives…how did you do it? Is there a guiding principle?
Lynne and Michael: Thank you!
The guiding principle of Uncanny has always been bringing more art, beauty, and kindness to our amazing community. That is pretty much how we do it. We work hard, surround ourselves with the best staff and creators, and try to build our community by making them shareholders in the awesome.
Michael (DeLuca): Your guidelines mention specifically seeking diverse submissions, and the stories you’ve chosen clearly reflect that. Have you had to do anything more to encourage writers of color, queer writers, marginalized writers to submit?
Lynne and Michael: We are always actively talking to writers from different backgrounds online and in person. We try to encourage as much as possible.
Michael (DeLuca): How big a part of the motivation to found Uncanny was making a space for diverse authors and marginalized voices?
Lynne and Michael: It is a core principle of what we believe art should be– it reflects the world we already live in. We couldn’t run a magazine that wasn’t a home to marginalized voices.
Michael (DeLuca): How important do you think funding drives are to Uncanny’s success? They seem such a pervasive part of the field these days…do you think it would be possible to get the attention you’ve gotten without them?
Lynne and Michael: They not only give us a portion of our funding (we also get money from subscriptions, Patreon, and advertising), they build our community and make our readers feel like the shareholders they are. No, we don’t think we would be as successful without them.
Michael (DeLuca): What kind of impact do you think you’ve had on the field so far?
Lynne and Michael: It is much too soon for us to say.
Michael (DeLuca): To what extent do you think fiction itself has the power to change minds? Can stories teach people to be better people?
Lynne and Michael: Fiction has the power to create emotions, to show people perspectives that they might not have considered, and to help people escape daily life (these things are not mutually exclusive). There are studies that show that reading helps create empathy. Stories may or may not teach people to be better people, but stories may encourage people to think differently, to make different choices, and that may lead to them being better people.
Michael (DeLuca): If you were starting Uncanny today, would you do anything differently? Any advice for me?
Lynne and Michael: Honestly, we’re pretty happy with how it has gone and is going so far. Lynne might have gotten the business management software a bit sooner so that she wasn’t filling out tax forms by hand, but that’s about it.
Michael (DeLuca): What’s your next project?
Lynne and Michael: More Uncanny!
Michael (DeLuca): Yay!
Thank you so much for talking to me.
This week’s learning-how-to-edit interview is with one of my favorite people in the world. Full disclosure, I’ve worked with Gavin for years running Weightless Books, and for additional years before that performing various technological and zymurgical somersaults for his and Kelly Link’s much-lauded small press as “chief . . .
This week’s learning-how-to-edit interview is with one of my favorite people in the world. Full disclosure, I’ve worked with Gavin for years running Weightless Books, and for additional years before that performing various technological and zymurgical somersaults for his and Kelly Link’s much-lauded small press as “chief technical officer” and “head brewer”. In fact, if it weren’t for Gavin putting a bee in my ear about guest-editing an issue of LCRW, Reckoning would not have happened. I love Small Beer Press, I love what they publish. If Reckoning manages to be anything remotely like what they have, I’ll consider it a resounding success.
In the time I’ve known Gavin I’ve asked him for a great deal of advice over a great many cups of tea and pints of beer. So it is a singular and strange opportunity to get to interview him in this formal setting.
If you’re new here, the point of these interviews has been to help me learn how to be a good and conscientious editor, to practice what I preach, to understand whether and how and to what extent fiction can inspire and encourage people to change the world for the better, and hopefully to encourage others to do the same.
Michael: You’ve advocated for creative commons. You’ve advocated for women writers. You not-so-subtly celebrated Obama’s first presidential win with the cover of LCRW #23. You published Sherwood Nation, one of my favorite meditations on climate change in fiction. (Late edit: the back cover of the new LCRW #35 is pretty great too.) How do you negotiate the line between progressive politics and activism and the practical concerns of publishing?
Gavin: At this point I don’t spend too much time thinking about the line. I want a level playing field. (I sound like my 7-year-old: why isn’t it fair?!) I do want to sell a lot of books — two of the best days of the year are the royalty check writing days — so I guess I don’t want to get in the way of that but I think readers will find the books anyway. In some ways I would have expected to have published more environmentally leaning novels but while we’ve been sent a few over the years they have not been a good fit. We were very lucky with Sherwood Nation that we’d published Benjamin Parzybok’s first novel, Couch, so got a chance at his second novel. He takes on deeply serious themes while still managing to be hilarious.
Michael: What’s the most political thing you’ve ever published?
Gavin: Perhaps Angélica Gorodischer’s novel Kalpa Imperial which was originally published in two parts in 1983/84 in Argentina although by the time we published Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation in 2003 the government in Argentina had changed over.
Michael: Do you ever think, I’ve gone too far, this is going to put people off?
Gavin: No. I’m on the humanist side: we have one planet, one life, and I’d like it to improve for everyone, not just the historically privileged. I’m an immigrant but I’m still a middle-aged white guy in the US trying to get outside my own bubble. I’d like to find out (a little) more from the people who are voting in the racists and misogynists. I know that Trump et al have been sending jobs abroad for years — I was no fan of NAFTA when it was proposed — and now he has settled a lawsuit for ripping off thousands of people so I don’t see how people can vote for him on an economic basis. The only person he is looking out for is himself. I suppose looking for logic is foolish and I should pay attention to the victory rallies that he’s about to do. Scary? No. Terrifying? Yes.
Michael: Does fiction influence people? Has a piece of fiction ever convinced you of something you weren’t sure about before?
Gavin: I think fiction can at least introduce people to ideas, places, and peoples that might be unfamiliar to them and once someone is no longer the “other” it is (can be?) harder to treat them badly. That is my most optimistic interpretation. I’ve been convinced of how little I know about the world.
Michael: Have you actively sought work from marginalized writers? How? Do you think it’s important?
Gavin: More and more as time goes by — see above for why. Also I want to read about all parts of this world (and, hey, sf&f: other worlds!), not the same old, same old.
Michael: Small Beer Press has been around for sixteen years. In that time you’ve obviously had an influence on the field. There’s a certain kind of unclassifiable, unquantifiable fiction that might never have found a place otherwise. And you’ve given a lot of great writers their start. How else do you think you’ve influenced fiction and publishing? Can one small press really make a difference?
Gavin: We probably made a difference for the writers we’ve published and for the readers who found the books but I do think that anyone we have published would have been snapped up very quickly by other publishers given the chance.
Michael: If you had it all to do again, is there anything you’d do differently or do better?
Gavin: Apply for an editorial assistant job at a huge publisher at age 23 and have a multi-million dollar buying budget by now. Or probably not. I would not want to miss out on any of the books we’ve published and what if I did not see them?
Michael: Any forthcoming titles you’re particularly excited about?
Gavin: Yes! Some of them not even announced. How about two short story collections next spring and summer which I think Reckoning readers may like: Sofia Samatar’s Tender: Stories (April) and Christopher Rowe’s Telling the Map (July). Both have unique, very different, voices.
Michael: That sounds amazing! Thank you so much.
This is the next-to-last interview before Reckoning One comes out on the winter solstice. The next and final, at least for the nonce, will be in two weeks or thereabouts, with Michael Damian and Lynne Thomas of Uncanny.