By: Katie Koenig
On Friday, six speakers, from WLP faculty to Emerson MFA candidates, led by Christine Casson, a WLP assistant professor, hosted the Environment & Sustainability Writer’s Panel: Create/Communicate/Convince. This Writer’s Panel exemplified the Teach-In as a whole—a diverse panel of perspectives on how different people in different positions bring sustainability into their work in different ways. Very few of them emphasized the benefits of incorporating climate change into their writing, although those benefits certainly exist. Instead, many speakers looked at what it means to be a creator, and how to stay motivated in a world that so often feels defeatist.
The panel questioned what stories need to be told, and how to convince an audience that these stories are important, especially in a world increasingly affected by climate change. Just this semester, Hurricanes Milton and Helene hit the Southeastern United States, with even the Seattle area, on the other side of the continental U.S., experiencing a bomb cyclone that wiped out power to thousands this November.
As a writer, I’ve struggled with the question of what stories I want to tell, and what stories I feel obligated to tell, far beyond just the scope of climate disaster narratives. Sarah Cole, an assistant professor in WLP, explained the scope of the publishing industry, pointing out a history of doomsday narratives.
She questioned why climate change and climate stories haven’t had a similar political, moving effect as AIDs art has, and one potential reason is the common defeatist tone a lot of natural disaster stories have. Of course, you can’t discount the popularity of dystopian fiction, which clearly indicates there are other factors at play.
More recently, writing has shifted to a more hopeful trend. This hope doesn’t have to manifest as explicit hope, merely as a potential for change. Instead of hope as wishing, it can present as the opposite of defeatist, as a motivator for change. Writers can transform disaster stories into motivation for change powered by a sense of injustice.
Jenna Figeuroa, who presented as an Emerson MFA poetry candidate, focuses on inequalities in health care in her writing. She centers the existence and struggles with wellbeing, and read a poem focused on a state funded dentist’s office. It was revealing and a source of comfort both, a way to force the realities of unequal health care to an audience while acting as a shared experience to gather around for people who have experienced this space.
Steve Himmer, too, centers his fiction around sustainable thinking, although he discussed apocalyptic fiction. He posited that stories are driven by collaboration, not just conflict. Stasis, where often seen as the death of a story, can be reframed. What does it take to continue on, to maintain yourself, and how can that unravel into a narrative?
Another speaker, Vivian Wallman-Randall, a graduate student instructor, writes mostly speculative fiction about climate catastrophes, but tries to reframe these narratives from the traditional individualist, survivalist tropes to stories about community survival. Holly Walker, another MFA poetry candidate, presented her perspective on travel writing within the context of her poetry, and emphasized the connection between the land we live on, the literature we read, and the community that develops around that.
Writing is a source of community and understanding. Writing anything, and having it read, is at its most basic a form of communication. There are plenty of questions and answers alike about how to face the climate crisis as a creator, but to a certain extent, I feel that writing at all is a form of resistance and stasis, as Steve Himmer suggested.
Writing won’t solve climate change by itself, but it can be a way to maintain your drive for change against the injustice you see and experience in your life. This was one of many conversations about how to stay motivated when pushing against destructive behavior, whether on an industrial, governmental, or individual level.