Teaching Climate-Themed Literary Fiction
The 2023 Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club, hosted by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education
It’s August, so it’s time to reactivate the Utimate Cli Fi Book Club blog, which is a reflection tool to accompany the monthly meetings of the interdisciplinary faculty, counselors, librarians, and campus sustainability coordinators who make this the “ultimate” book club. It’s about how literary fiction can help us hold difficult conversations about climate change, to change the way we think and how we teach to the existential crisis of our time.
I love these people and can’t wait for the 2023 cohort, which begins next week. My favorite thing is when I attend Zoom meetings on other topics related to climate education or campus sustainability and get PMd in the chat “Hey, I was in the book club two years ago!” The book club is a great network of thoughtful readers and change agents.
Last month we had a kickoff webinar in which I revisited the core ideas of the book club and the gyrations of the genre. The term cli-fi is generally credited to Dan Bloom, whose early blog, The Cli-Fi Report, along with the scholarship of Adeline Johns-Putra, is what shifted my interest in postapocalyptic fiction into cli-fi or climate-themed literary fiction. In 2016, Amitav Ghosh published a book of literary criticism, The Great Derangement, which was the call to arts that seemed to spark a lot of new novels. Since then, several summers of fire, flood, and record heat have brought climate change into the plot, character, and everyday background setting of life in the anthropocene. So, here we are.
My experience as a reader and teacher continues to evolve as the climate crisis manifests in our now-lives. The polycrisis of overshoot changes our work as faculty, and we have an ethical responsibility to understand and translate what is happening, to tell students the truth (as best we understand it) and hold space for difficult emotions and information because, what else is a college classroom for, in an existential crisis?
I have learned so much from my incredible colleagues in Geography, Biology, Economics, Conservation, Indigenous Languages, Political Science, Psychology. The Humanities are essential and a love of reading and talking about books is a lifelong skill that can hold us, personally and in community, through challenging and transformative times.
How can we receive these climate novels as offerings from the writers, and what can we do with them? The book club is not a top ten cli-fi novels list, though there are many of those, and it’s not about literary analysis, although there is a lot of great work in that department as well.
This summer I attended the American Society for Literature and the Environment (ASLE) meeting in Portland, OR and pretty much had my mind blown by offerings in Indigenous and AfroFuturism, Ecopoetics, “the Ecocritical First person” “Restoring the Land with Stories”, and much more.
I had a lot of great ideas and conversations at ASLE, which was colocated with the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS)— putting Environmental Studies, Sciences, and Humanities together for the first time (and I hope it might stay that way!). A couple sessions really stood out: I was a lucky participant in Tea Party at the End of the World, a multiplayer “game” and work in progress by the up and coming game designer and genius, Jessica Creane. (More on this in a future post.)
And I had a lovely chat with Phoebe Wagner, the coeditor of the anthology Sunvault and the author of the solarpunk novel, When We Hold Each Other Up, which Phoebe kindly ascribed for me in the spirit of radical optimism:
I bow to all of this work, and I cast a wide and inclusive net around my reading in these genres. But what we do in the UCFBC is still a little different. We empower non-literature professors to consider including a novel or story in a science course. We take interdisiplinarity to new levels with books like Ministry for the Future which, in my mind, is the most important book of the decade, being the only book in which real solutions are explored in brilliant worldbuilding detail describing the messy pastiche of problem-solving that finally cracks the damn hockey stick. I envision a multidisciplinary graduate course based on this novel, including economics, biology, political science, psychology, religion, and all the other academic disciplines that appear in the novel and that educate and inspire everyday protagonists for a very uncertain future.
This year’s kickoff webinar was titled after a 200-level literature course that I developed a while back called Cli-Fi, Sci-Fi, and the Culture of Sustainability. It was a long path and more than a decade of reading to create that course. I started teaching sustainability with a service-learning campus recycling project in 2003. (I’m a bit embarrassed at my former naïveté about recycling, but it was an entry point.) In 2009 I did focus groups with students about sustainability curriculum, for my doctoral dissertation, and it was around that time that I got interested in the Mayan Calendar and apocalyptic zeitgeist of 2012. For a long time, Harry Potter was the favorite book of my first-year students, but then suddenly it was all about the Hunger Games, and Pretties. Middle-schoolers were consuming a relentless lineup of bleak and terrifying futures in YA novels, and they brought that imprint with them to college. Surely this was a contributing factor to what has become a generational climate anxiety. Novels influence imaginations, and imagination is what creates the future.
So what happens when we actually imagine the end of the world? I distinctly remember telling my students, back in 2010, that of course the world would not really be ending in 2012, but that writers like to consider and imagine it because…? That’s the question we talked about. These students are now in their thirties, and wrestling with the question, “should-we-bring-children-into-the-world”? In 2010 I published an essay titled, “Pedagogy of the Apocalypse”, in which I wrote about teaching The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. In that essay, I asked, “What can teachers and students gain from imagining postapocalyptic futures?
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time now, and I think that literature and the act of reading are important aspects of climate change education. These are some of the central ideas of the book club:
1. Reading can penetrate the mind’s defenses against climate change.
2. Reading slows us down, by using a unique and specific type of attentional control to hold an imagined reality.
3. Reading engages the sensory world, helping us imagine new details.
4. Reading transcends time and space, allowing us to be in the future or the past, or an alternative present.
5. Reading engages the affective domain, allowing us to feel empathy and complex emotions.
I studied reading theory with Helen Gillotte in the Comp Rhet program at San Francisco State. I worked at Project Read in the San Francisco public library and met many adults who had slipped through the cracks and never learned to read, masking their embarrassment with spectacular compensatory strategies. Many writing problems are actually reading problems. Unfortunately, we’ve phased out reading along with other “remedial” courses in a push toward co-requisite “acceleration”. (A rant for another day…but this had more to do with Pell grants than pedagogy.)
Many college students can’t actually read at college level, but…oh well.
The main thing that I want for students is that they have the chance to develop a lifelong love of reading, and the skills to talk about books with others. And also, every opportunity I get, I advocate that everybody on campus needs to carry some piece of climate education, so that students can put together their own understanding as we reinforce and view the complexity of climate change from different academic disciplines. I also advocate that faculty need support, time, and strategies to know how to hold space for a spectrum of different emotions. So the book club is for all different types of faculty and staff to learn how they might integrate fiction or short stories into sustainability across the curriculum.
Another factoid I like to mention is that when my colleague Matt Lynch and I did the “Worry & Hope” focus groups, asking students what they knew about climate change, how they felt about it, and where they learned it — college faculty came in dead last, following lived experience, documentaries, high school, the news, social media, and peer interaction including “at the bar” (mentioned more than once). How is that possible? Because many faculty are by and large sitting this one out. They think it’s not their job, or not their area of expertise. Well guess what, YOU just became a climate educator. It’s all hands on deck from here on out.
So, here’s a quick overview of the 2023 lineup. It’s not too late to join the book club, or I invite you to follow along here on the blog, where I’ll post highlights from our conversations.
August: Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson
This book is a stunning example of solutions thinking and futures thinking. I recommend my blog post, “Reflections for Teaching Ministry for the Future” and the “Missing TOC” which tracks the interdisciplinary threads in the 563-page novel.
The opening chapter is a shocking description of a wet bulb heatwave event in India, and you can read it on the publisher’s website, here. (Great Slate essay about the first chapter also, here.) The protagonist survives the event but has PTSD, which provides an opening to talk about climate anxiety.
Kim Stanley Robinson is my favorite writer of all time! He has said that Ministry would be his last book, and there are tons of podcasts and interviews with him. Most recently, in The MIT Reader, he talked how the novel is read differently now than when it came out, just before Covid.
The pandemic as a shock has sped up civilization’s awareness of the existential dangers of climate change. Now, post COVID, a fictional future history might speak of the “Trembling Twenties” as it’s described in “The Ministry for the Future,” but it also seems it will be a period of galvanized, spasmodic, intense struggle for control over history, starting right now. With that new feeling, the 2030s seem very far off and impossible to predict at all.
September: Canticle for Leibovitz, by Arthur Miller
I love to consider the question “what is literature?” with students (and I love this 2014 Harper’s essay, of the same title). If I’m an English professor, is literature what I say it is? Am I supposed to know? I do have kind of a “feel” for what qualifies as literature, but just as the purpose of college is changing, so might the purpose of literature change. One criterion I think is important is that literature has lasting impact. The book or story resonates in your mind, and/or the book or story remains meaningful in posterity.
Canticle meets both these requirements, and because gosh darnit I do happen to be a literature professor, I hereby declare it to be a literary novel. Academic futurist Bryan Alexander, I think, will second this nomination, as he says it’s one of his favorite books of all time. (In fact, Bryan is a frequent guest at the Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club, and I never miss a chance to recommend his book, Universities on Fire: Higher Education and the Climate Crisis, which is basically the playbook for what colleges and universities should be thinking about.)
Canticle is set in a post nuclear-holocaust, where monasteries have preserved the relics of Western science into the far-future, through the time of book burning and the Great Simplification that followed armageddon. I have been reading a used copy covered in strange but exuberant annotations like “Important! Read again!”
I interpret Canticle as a book about the role of Universities in curating and creating and translating knowledge. I picked it for the book club because I frequently hear Gen Xers refer to the Cold War as our version of the existential fears around climate change that Gen Z (and every generation to follow them) has to live with. We’ll use Canticle as a “third thing” to talk about climate crisis as an existential threat to civilization and the biosphere.
A “third thing” is a term I borrow from Quaker practice via educator Parker Palmer, who wrote:
In Western culture, we often seek truth through confrontation. But our headstrong ways of charging at truth scare the shy soul away. If soul truth is to be spoken and heard, it must be approached ‘on the slant.’ I do not mean we should be coy, speaking evasively about subjects that make us uncomfortable, which weakens us and our relationships. But soul truth is so powerful that we must allow ourselves to approach it, and it to approach us, indirectly. We must invite, not command, the soul to speak. We must allow, not force, ourselves to listen.
We achieve intentionality in a circle of trust by focusing on an important topic. We achieve indirection by exploring that topic metaphorically, via a poem, a story, a piece of music, or a work of art that embodies it. I call these embodiments ‘third things’ because they represent neither the voice of the facilitator nor the voice of a participant. They have voices of their own, voices that tell the truth about a topic but, in the manner of metaphors, tell it on the slant. Mediated by a third thing, truth can emerge from, and return to, our awareness at whatever pace and depth we are able to handle — sometimes inwardly in silence, sometimes aloud in community — giving the shy soul the protective cover it needs.
— A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward An Undivided Life, Welcoming the Soul and Weaving Community in a Wounded World, by Parker Palmer
October: Night in the World, by Sharon English
In fall we turn to this exemplary place-based novel set in Toronto, Canada. Set in Toronto, this is the story of brothers Gabe and Justin, a biologist and a restauranteur, living in modernity…
“…the world of nightclubs and coke addiction, of anti-fracking activism, of academic research and perhaps most unforgettably, of moths. Shadowing all three lives is the fact of climate dissolution, and a relentlessly extractive and dissociated human world.” — Review by Lise Weil.
I’m fortunate to know author Sharon English (and Dark Matter’s brilliant Lise Weil) through the community of writers who sit at the feet of Deena Metzger, the author most recently of La Vieja and Rain of Night Birds, most astoundingly (my favorite) Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing, and most prolifically of many other novels, essays, and books of poetry. For decades this community has gathered for the Writer’s Intensive in Topanga, California and now, on Zoom, to learn and practice what Deena calls The Literature of Restoration, a literature that “actively seeks through form and language, content and focus, to create and inspire a cultural shift, developing a body of literature that radically seeks the restoration and vitality of the natural world.”
The November book club will be participant-led, on the theme of “Stories about Water”. I’m bringing Memory of Water, by Emmi Itäranta as my suggestion, along with Water is Life (audio) by Craig Santoz Perez. We’re also going to talk about Zines and the art of imperfection. Stay tuned!
I’ll end here with my personal criteria for a teachable climate-fiction book (even though I might make exceptions, especially for zombies):
1. No aliens, no zombies.
2. No silver bullet technology.
3. An identifiable time and place.
4. Direct description of some aspect of climate change: Sea Level Rise, warming, drought, flood, migration, pandemic. Climate change can be the setting, the plot, or a character.
5. Fine Sentences and “literary merit”.
6. Teachability (access, cost, length, triggers, and other issues)
If you are new here, this post has been an update of my opening post from previous years’ book clubs. Reading is my superpower and I hope these thoughts can be of service to readers, thinkers, writers, and teachers.
Blogs in this series cover: Fire & Water: Stories from the Anthropocene, Anthem, Station 11, A Rain of Night Birds, Blaze Island, Solar, and The Grapes of Wrath. If you are a podcaster, some of these appeared as audio essays in the Art House feature of Citizens’ Climate Radio. Follow me on Medium, Connect on LinkedIn, or leave a comment below.
