ORGANIZER: Mary Woodbury
GROUP: Moon Willow Press
CONTACT: woodbury.mary@gmail.com
ECOFICTION BROCHURE ecofictionbrochure
FREE EVENT – No tickets required!
We are hosting an Eco-fiction stage at 2016’s Word Vancouver. Find us at the Community Garden tent on Homer Street, September 25th, from 11:00 – 12:30 p.m.
We’re excited to announce the following readers:
- Claudie Casper, reading from The Mercy Journals
- Stephen Collis, reading from Once in Blockadia
- Michael Donoghue reading from Winds of Change
- Clara Hume, reading from Back to the Garden
- Anneliese Schultz, reading from her short story “Water and Oil”
- Katie Welch, reading from The Bears
- And more fun!
Background
In an age where climate change, excessive resource extraction, water worries, and other ecological crises have given us a bleak outlook for our future, the arts can help humanity cope while imagining a better future. As curator of Eco‐fiction.com, which has a database of hundreds of environmental novels and other books, I see a great movement of fiction writers, poets, and other artists building our story through the lens of hope and warning as we celebrate nature and develop scenarios, characters, and plots to overcome the systemic issues that have led our world to an environmental crisis.
Carl Sagan said, “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.” Writers are key to combining scientific data with imagination to provide readers with powerful stories, which may enhance understanding of the world, inspire people to act, and entertain readers with scenes so unforgettable that they may be retained in the mind throughout one’s lifetime.
Working in conjunction with 100,000 Poets for Change, an international event that occurs in late September all over the world, I’ve led the event in Vancouver for the past several years. 100,000 Poets for Change has a goal of getting artists (poets, authors, musicians) involved with issues of peace and sustainability in their local habitats. The projects I’ve led meet this goal and include a community beach cleanup in Vancouver, followed by a poetic reading at the Carnegie Centre—the poets read nature‐related and First Nations works; an “Earthwalk” around Stanley Park—with a cultural and ecological history by Tyee Bridge, with poets reading during short stops; and a climate change short story contest resulting in an the anthology Winds of Change (which was given a thumbs‐up by Bill McKibben) and readings from the book at the Burnaby Public Library.
