I’m making the argument about how fiction might help people understand the climate crisis and that they are not alone or powerless.

Here’s a quick post about my guest blog entry and long essay appearing in ClimateCultures, where I discuss what should define climate fiction. Big surprise: I also talk about The Steep Climes Quartet, my literary climate fiction series.

What is ClimateCultures?

“Creative Responses to Our Nature & Climate Predicaments”

ClimateCultures is an online space that Mark Goldthorpe launched in 2017 for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments .“We are a growing network of artists, researchers and curators across the UK and around the world working across many practices, disciplines and spaces,” is how he describes the effort.

Who’s involved? ClimateCultures casts widely, including within the community of novelists, short story writers, performers, poets, playwrights, painters, composers, illustrators, photographers, filmmakers, sculptors, designers, digital artists, multimedia artists, gallery owners, online curators, creative producers, cultural activists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, geographers, environmental technologists, and climate researchers. Designed as an online space for creative minds to share responses to our ecological and climate predicaments. ClimateCultures is an approach to building creative conversations between and beyond different appreciations of what these predicaments mean, and of what they offer us as ways forward. It’s also a continuation of some of Goldthorpe’s encounters when working with the charity TippingPoint a few years back, where he helped bring artists and scientists together for creative climate change events.

Here’s more about ClimateCultures and Goldthorpe’s motivation in creating the publication and group, taken from the site’s “Welcome” page:

I’d always been interested in artistic responses to the problems but this was my first deep exposure to such a number and range of perspectives, enquiries and works-in-progress. Those events left a strong impression — with me, and with the artists and scientists who took part. ClimateCultures builds on this legacy, exploring the power of an environmental imagination to help us develop a sense of agency in challenging times, as I discuss in a short article I wrote in February 2019.