BLUE Fellowship - Summer 2018
During the summer of 2018, I joined 15 other McGill students to form the first cohort of BLUE fellows, hosted at McGill University’s Building 21. Building 21 is an interdisciplinary learning space that hosts talks and events, runs various internships and fellowships, and supports student research. The 15 of us were selected from a pool of 120 applicants and awarded 3000CAD to pursue the research project of our choosing.
My research investigated environmental topics such as the Anthropocene, climate change, inter-species relationships, and micro-plastics through a literary lens. It included both theoretical and creative components. I investigated the following questions:
How can human interaction with non human entities, non living entities, and the environment be retooled in ways that are humble, pluralistic, and generous?
How can literature reimagine and help to reframe these interactions?
Who can be a character? Can a piece of microplastic be a character? How about a freak weather system?
Which modes of storytelling are best suited to stories that go beyond the human?
How can a story be told on multiple scales?
I began my theoretical investigations by reading Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Ghosh argues that with some recent exceptions, novelists haven’t really responded to the specter of climate change, perhaps due to the traditions of the form. In the modern novel, where nature is mentioned, it is often in the background—as setting. The novel focuses on daily life—but in doing so must render nature stable, comprehensible, and predictable, as a backdrop upon which human-sized stories play out. It doesn’t leave room for the unlikely and unimaginable events more commonly seen in science fiction, epic, and mythology. Thus, for Ghosh, as long as the novel is focused on human life, it may not be able to communicate the scale and seriousness of climate change.
The creative component of my project consisted of writing short stories and poetry, and journaling on these topics. I was interested in creating stories that play out over millennia, where humans aren’t the main characters. I experimented with how story components—character, plot, motif, symbol—can be modulated, how animacy and agency can be assigned differently, and how readers could be coaxed into empathizing with nonhuman entities. This project also served as an outlet to process my own climate grief, by channeling it into a creative project.
At the end of the eight week fellowship, I presented my work at our open house. My writing was accompanied by my embryonic watercolor illustrations.