Volume
80Issue
1Pagination
64 - 70Publisher
MEANJIN COMPANY LTDISSN
0025-6293eISSN
1448-8094Language
EnglishResearch statement
Background:
Climate fiction is literature that engages with climate crisis. In the short story The Weathermen, the researcher addresses the emotional dimensions of climate crisis. The story asks, how are our affective experiences, and emotional interrelation with others shaped both by climate crisis, and by the way it is narrated in the media and via social networks? With this short story, the researcher demonstrates Trexler's (2015 p.233) assertion that 'Climate change is not just a 'theme' in fiction. It remakes narrative operations [...] It alters the interactions between characters and introduces entirely new things to fiction.' How, asks the researcher in this story, do we continue to reproduce socially normative behaviors in the midst of crisis?
Contribution:
‘The Weathermen’ is a formally innovative short story. It works between genres, with elements of realism, surrealism, the speculative and domestic. It plays with tropes of threat and dread common to horror and thriller stories in order to characterize relationships between self and other. It is part of an ongoing creative project on behalf of the researcher to consider how fiction can 'overcome some of the representational challenges of climate change.' (Mehnert, A. 2016 p.11) In this instance, by drawing attention to the narrative dimensions of our experience of climate change the researcher prompts the reader to consider the psychological implications of life in the present moment.
Significance:
The Weathermen was published in Meanjin quarterly, Australia's oldest literary journal. The researcher was a guest on ABC radio with David Astle to discuss the work, and the project of climate literature in general.Publication classification
JO3 Original Creative Works – Textual WorkScale
NTRO Minor
