Thinking with the Climate Crisis
Or rather, being/writing/making/sensing with it.
Greetings from the creaking gate of autumn. As I return to a more regular newsletter schedule here after the slowed summer pace, I thought it time to introduce myself again for new readers, and to give a glimpse (still partial, from right at the treeline, rather than above it) of what I’ve been writing here.
I’m in the midst of a fall book tour for Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal, my creative nonfiction (visual, hybrid) book about gender, nature, and feather fashion, and it seems to me that I’m enjoying it more than I have enjoyed events for my previous books.
Perhaps as I get older, I simply have more appreciation for these opportunities to travel and see new and old friends, engage in conversation about poetry, writing, art, and the world, and share material that is so intimately part of who I am and what I care about. Perhaps it’s because I’m using slides to show images from this highly visual book in my readings, and the novelty of this is fun. Perhaps it’s because since leaving academia four years ago and founding The School for Living Futures, I feel my writer, artist, teacher, activist, and personal selves more fully aligned, leading to more conversations about things that matter–things beyond my own work, with tendrils stretching out from poetry and writing into community, ecology, the wild world of being.
Yesterday I was gathering my notes for a panel called “Thinking with the Climate Crisis” I co-organized for this weekend’s inaugural Punch Bucket Literary Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and in so doing found myself distilling my current, central interests as:
How writers and artists are uniquely suited to this time of civilizational and ecological uncertainty.
How writers and artists can address climate and ecological crises in meaningful ways, formally or otherwise.
How writers can bring their work beyond the page into new communities and contexts and integrate more deeply in activism and culture changemaking.
Additionally, relevant to this publication (and to the non-self-identified artists who read this newsletter), I’d add these two:
What poems, stories, and art can teach us and help us to feel during this time.
and
Ways to stay grounded and connected to the world and each other in resistance to the ever-advancing noise of digital/algorithmic behavior-modification systems.
In a walnut shell, I’ve come to suspect that creative writers (and creatives more generally) have an advantage in this time of great uncertainty in which life as we know it has begun to change, and is on its way to transforming in ways we cannot now predict.
To use a Swedish idiom I learned from my friend Steve, “the cows are on the ice” when it comes to modernity. We all feel this in some way (even those of us privileged enough not to be suffering the largest impacts), a troubling sense of shakiness in the world, a permeating anxiety. This deep sense that things are “off” can cause some folks to batten down the hatches, becoming clannish and partisan, clinging to scraps of certainty. It can cause some folks to fall into perpetual despair or apathy (numbness), while others deny the depth of our predicament and insist upon perpetual hope and optimism.
I’ve come to suspect that creative writers (and creatives more generally) have an advantage in this time of great uncertainty in which life as we know it has begun to change, and is on its way to transforming in ways we cannot now predict.
However, many of us artists are already trained—and perhaps temperamentally predisposed—to be negatively capable. That is, according to Romantic poet John Keats, the ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” or, in Donna Haraway’s words, to “stay with the trouble.” This, I suggest, is a gift that artists and creatives—those of us whose vocation is reimagining the world—have to offer during this time of profound loss and transformation.
There are specific ways we can do this–from formal techniques to models of community engagement–and I’ve recently begun writing a book that explores them. I plan to share more about this as it develops, perhaps testing out some of my ideas and hearing from you about how they’re resonating or not. I also use this space to send missives from The School for Living Futures, and to share poems and books that make good companions. I’m grateful for all of you who are choosing to come along, and who offer your own wisdom and experiences here in the comments or privately.
Meanwhile, if you happen to be in the Asheville, North Carolina area this weekend, come by the Punch Bucket Literary Festival, which promises to be a lot of fun. Here’s where I’ll be:
Friday, September 20
7pm, Rapid Reading
Wortham Center for the Performing Arts
Saturday, September 21
10-11:15am, Panel: “Thinking with the Climate Crisis”
(with Kristi Maxwell, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Belle Boggs, Sharon Kunde)
Renaissance Hotel
4-5:15pm, Reading from Feathers (with Allison Blevins & Joshua Martin)
Renaissance Hotel
And next weekend, I’ll be a keynote presenter at the Fall Convergence on Poetics at the University of Washington-Bothell amongst a truly fantastic lineup. If you’re in Seattle, Washington, come on over for some or all of the events. Registration is free!
Friday, September 27
6-8pm, Offsite Reading
Vermillion Art Gallery
Saturday, September 28
3:15-5pm, Reading and Conversation
(with Ronaldo Wilson and Mita Mahato)
North Creek Event Center, UWB