Writing Climate Breakdown

Climate Breakdown poses great challenges to all aspects of human life - biological, technological, economic, political, spiritual, cultural, etc. It challenges human beings to rethink their conceptions of what might be proper forms of earthly existence as it also challenges us to rethink our relationships to the nonhuman world and the ecologies that sustain our lives and the lives of all other earthly beings. Clearly, Climate Breakdown also poses great challenges to artists and to writers. In this class we take up some of those challenges through the methods of Creative Writing, engaging some of the issues of content and form (including aesthetic form and content, cultural form and content, spiritual form and content and political form and content) that writers (and other artists) find themselves facing in this time of unprecedented, mind boggling, human caused climate shift and collapse. We will engage these issues across various texts and films. We will engage them in student assignments that move across genres of Creative Writing, from speculative fiction to poetry, non-fiction and hybrid forms.