How are writers using stories to help readers – and themselves – process the experience of climate change? Author Jenny Offill felt a “creeping sense of dread” when she delved into climate science while writing her her new novel, Weather, which features a woman who produces a climate change podcast. As the gravity of the facts sank in, one day Offiil asked herself, “Why do I know this and believe this intellectually but I don't feel anything?”
As the book developed, she vowed not to load it with facts, which often cause readers to give up because they are more than they can bear. Weather artfully follows the podcast host Lizzie as she weaves between daily tasks of parenting a young child and a growing realization that tomorrow will be hauntingly different from today.
Roy Scranton, author of We’re Doomed. Now What? says Offill’s book and other novels can help us confront and process the stark realities of a climate that is increasingly destabilized. “Fiction allows us to participate sympathetically in scenarios that would destroy us if we actually lived through them,” he says.
Reading a dystopian book or watching a film such as Mad Max allows us to identify with characters while also remaining distant. “They can give us access to things that we can’t handle in our day-to-day lives.”
What’s the bottom line that both authors are asking us to confront? “The human world that we live in is impossible,” says Scranton. “We can’t go on living the way that we live this dependence on fossil fuel capitalism.” The transformation necessary to avoid climate catastrophe would make the Cultural Revolution “look like a momentary burp” and the Industrial Revolution like a “minor event.”
Jenny Offill doesn’t buy the notion that scale of change is even remotely underway. “All of the talk about hope always sounds kind of thin,” she says. “I don't think I ever really believed we were as secure as we seemed.”
Guests:
Jenny Offill, Author, Weather
Roy Scranton, Author, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
Tune-in Monday, May 18 at 7 PM on LakeshorePublicRadio.org.
