creative writing on environmental justice
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 . . .
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 . . .
from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth
Ownership
CLIMATE ANXIETY: 5/12/16
Heat, dryness, really sick people, kind of barren landscapes. A lot of—as I’m listing things off it looks a little bit like what’s happening right now, in terms of economic and cultural devastation. A lot more complete separation of folks with resources and folks without resources, . . .
from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth
Ownership
CLIMATE ANXIETY: 5/12/16
Heat, dryness, really sick people, kind of barren landscapes. A lot of—as I’m listing things off it looks a little bit like what’s happening right now, in terms of economic and cultural devastation. A lot more complete separation of folks with resources and folks without resources, a lot more violence and globalization from below—people joining forces, people finding commonness where they couldn’t before because they thought they were in competition.
That part sounds—not exactly hopeful, but like something that you would like to see.
Yeah, that is.
So what’s the fear part?
Starvation? . . . but when you go to identify it, it’s different than what you think. I like to think of the world as an ecological system. Basically the fear is that turned on its head and nothing being able to sustain anything else. I don’t even know how to file that, where to put that.
CLIMATE ANXIETY: 5/28/16
I’ve been down here 10 years working with the homeless. Last year they had a sign that said there was no smoking in the park, so then of course people came and smoked out here, but now people are smoking in the park again. . . . I’d like to see people down here motivated to clean up the park.
What do you think might motivate people?
I think people need to take ownership of it.
But what makes you take ownership of something? Like, do you own your house, what makes you feel like the owner of your house?
I think you have to tap into what people can do instead of what they can’t do.
ALTERNATE HISTORY: 6/18/16
The story of competition is only one story.
D hangs laundry in his backyard, bees rocking and rummaging in the rhododendron pollen. He has a backyard, at the moment, that he can say “his” about. If he’s honest, it belongs also to the bees, to the rhododendron, to the grass; to the native trees that the rhododendron and grass replaced, to the Native people that his ancestors displaced, to the slaves that cleared the land of trees the first time; to the bugs that thread through the grass and the worms and grubs that tunnel through the dirt; to the microfauna in their guts and the fungal hyphae laced around them. All those whose speech is in their operation. The living and the dead. There’s enough backyard for all of them, if he does it right.
Until now, the other meaning of ownership has trumped this shared meaning in his mind: the getting of what you pay for, the holding of what you have. The recognition that he is always taking part takes him apart.
He does a few things. He and his neighbors on the one side work together on a pass-through through his yard between theirs and the street, breaking up the concrete of his driveway into pavingstones with moss between them, leaving half the fence to slow down noise and building the rest of its boards into a trellis. When he waters the plants or digs in compost, he treats it like an offering; when he poisons the carpenter ants that are gnawing down his house, he holds a funeral for them. When his neighbor on the other side comes out running from his other neighbor, her girlfriend, he sits with her on the porch and helps her make a plan about what to do next. Later he says to the girlfriend, “If you want to hit her, come talk to me instead. Whatever it takes for you to not hit her. Don’t do it again.”
“Or what?”
“What do you mean, or what? Don’t do it.”
The girlfriends break up and move away, taking advantage of the northward convoys. D doesn’t know what they do, what happens to them. Other people move in, turn the house next door into what turns out to be one of the first free clinics and build out a giant trellis to let the ivy and grapevine make it a superstructure of shade, stabilize its temperature in the increasingly sharp spells of dry heat and downpour. D chats with the people waiting to pick up their doses of hormones and makes tea for the people dying of cancer to wash down their painkillers—iced tea would probably be better, but he needs to repair the connection between the refrigerator and the solar cell. If the next storm doesn’t rip this house away, if food poisoning or accident doesn’t nab him on one of his work trips out into the countryside, he’ll probably die here, too. He belongs here, and so do the plants that scaffold or strangle each other, the tiny animal deaths that feed into insect and fungal life, the remnants of the dead, the visiting birds (ever fewer), the relations among all of these.
Many years later, on that same spot, a circle of people sit in a dry and ragged landscape, a stretch of dust punctuated by tree stumps and a few ragged foundations, in whose shelter the weeds grow and they can sleep. They are tired and dying, looking for the end of the wasteland. They pass an old thermos around. Each of them takes about half a sip. In the morning three of them are dead. The others form a circle, pass an old thermos around, each taking about half a sip. Then they keep walking, the slightly stronger ones bolstering the slightly weaker.
It doesn’t have to last forever, whatever it is, for you to be tender to it, for you to share with it; you won’t last forever, either.
Environmental Hazards
Routine releases means emissions in normal operation, emissions that might happen daily or more rarely, and they’re frequently regulated by permits . . . In accidental releases, planning is very important.
—Barbara Morin, Providence Department of Health
We’re always planning. We’re looking at every event.
—Michael Borg, Providence Emergency Management Agency
The next day, the hazmat teams descended on the Port of Providence, because they were responsible for reducing harm from hazardous materials. They were just doing their jobs when they gave the Univar and Motiva facilities and the staff at the Enterprise propane and National Grid liquid natural gas tanks a timeline and a protocol for distributing or neutralizing their fossil fuel and chemical holdings. The people working there were glad to cooperate, knowing that every day of dismantlement increased the chances of survival for a third-grader or an old man on oxygen or a school of fish, and knowing that as they did this work, their livelihoods were assured in the neighborhood.
There’s no good way to put natural gas or coal back in the ground—not every process is reversible, not every wound can be healed. A council of South Providence residents doled out the natural gas and propane to the rest of the city household by household, rationing it for heat and cooking, knowing that there would be no more when it was gone. They built big, ramshackle structures out of scrap metal and wood from dismantled houses across the train tracks, and colored them with chalk and festooned them with fabric to make sure the drivers could see them from far away.
The people of South Providence made room for the people who’d worked in the Port, and learned from them and the hazmat teams how to work with the chemicals without harm. Sometimes they were able to reduce them to inert compounds, or suspend them in substances that would neutralize them. Sometimes the best they could do was parcel them out into smaller quantities, to be stored above water. Filtration, solution, transformation. Prevention: better than cure. The people who’d worked in the Port, and the hazmat teams, learned from the people of South Providence other sets of skills: arguing, running repairs, improvisation, rapid calculation, code-switching, field medicine. They all breathed more easily.
The next hundred-year storm hit before the tanks were fully emptied. A lot of fish and seabirds died, too many to count, and two humans trapped in a car, and an entire long row of windbreaking saplings that the people of South Providence, old and new, had planted a couple of years before. They succumbed to the chemical-infused saltwater; they stood like thin gravestones.
It could have been worse, it could have been better. The rest of the city’s people took the people of South Providence into their houses elsewhere and took turns cleaning and airing the flooded buildings, breaking down the ones that were too badly damaged or too far into the floodplain to make sense saving; they took it in shifts so that no one had to have too much exposure to the poisonous debris. They noted and charted the lie of the land, where the water wanted to go. They thickened and lined the walls of their homes with torn fabric, scavenged wood, leftover office paper, dry grass; they cooked on tiny solar stoves outdoors in summer and saved their gas and wood for winter.
The people who were young during that storm were almost old when the next one hit, and things went very differently. All the tanks were long empty of poison; some were reefs for the shellfish that were just starting to come back. Long sections of train track ran quietly under the water, coated in algae that had evolved to digest the tar and creosote that soaked the railroad ties. People’s weather senses were better now, and with the help of predictive technology, they knew when to leave and let the water rush through what was left, if that was where it wanted to go. The city’s high points had food stores and hospitals; the city’s low points were thick with marsh grass shading into waterweed, and tiny crabs, and sand fleas, and lugworms, hunkering down to wait out a cleaner tide.
The Ocean State
CLIMATE ANXIETY: 5/8/15
I saw a thing in the paper about how a sea level rise of 3 feet is going to destroy the marshes and salt ponds, down in South County, that are breeding grounds for lots of fish and birds—plovers and stuff like that.
CLIMATE ANXIETY: 5/15/15
The city—pollution. Buildings, cars, power plants. People just like to litter, it’s just fun to them. Like when I was younger and I did litter, I felt bad about it. Like why would you do that.
What do you think would make people change that, those habits?
More influence. More influences. Maybe through music—I’m a musician, reggae, hip-hop, percussion. Inspirational vibes and dancing. If it’s there, more broadcasting of it, something in there for children—the inspiration needs to be there. Rhode Island is very depressing, people hate it. It’s depressing, it’s boring, there’s nothing to do. All it really is, is an ocean, which, sure, if you have money.
ALTERNATE HISTORY: 9/8/15
The next day, I’m going to ask you to imagine, C listened to D and D listened to C. They saw that each other had said these things; they knew this much, at least, of what each other wanted.
The people living near the edge of the water broke their houses down to make room for some of the water—to make paths for it, to build rising bridges and floating marshes. D’s music gave shape to their work; he toured from site to site, and so did other musicians and bands (not everyone loves reggae, or early-’90s rock, or bachata). Back in the cities and inland towns, some couples in houses too big for them moved in with friends, opening their houses to people from the edge of the water, or people from over the water. Some, to preserve their ability to be alone, repaired houses that had stood empty. There was time to do all of this, time grouped and divided by music and silence.
Twenty-nine years later, the ocean is where music is, at certain times of day: a parade winding like a slow current, a circle pulsing around a performer like the devouring mouth of a starfish, a skein of song nourishing a difficult task. You take care of it because it takes care of you, or you take care of it because it’s where the music is, where the bus-boats fueled by algae stop to drop off people from the city, where the far-traveling boats still dock or rest from time to time. It’s on the platforms that sink and hover with the tide and that everyone works together to draw in or anchor when the storms get bad.
At other times of day, the music drops. It doesn’t stop completely—air doesn’t, water doesn’t—but it ebbs to make room for terns and osprey to fish, sandpipers to stab for worms, the ears to recover their quiet. Some people learn the music, or the silence, because of the animals. Some people learn the changes of tide, the bugs, the tiny hungers, because of the silence, or the music.
Sometimes, the music turns somber. There are no more plovers. There are no more moon snails. Your home, your home, the place that you loved, the place where you learned to love, is no more, has become something else—you will never see it again, never. It will never again surround you, as this music does, as these people and other creatures do—known to you only so far, so much—as this air does, as this water does.
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 . . .
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
parched; his acrid exhaust burned the air
between us. Fertilizer we fed into tributaries
bloomed algae where it should not have been;
the glaciers of our filial strength
dissolved from below, slipped
beneath 34 degree indifference;
birds lost their way.
Now we return to the beginning.
We go below, realign Fibonacci
series, retune strings, pray
for rain.
When the first green appears,
luminous leaves, one then one
then two, we will cherish it, clarity
arrived at last with oceanfront property in Sacramento:
in the end there is only life;
in the end there is only life.
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.