Carleton University’s Climate Commons with the Ottawa International Writers Festival presents an author reading and discussion on Ruthanna Emrys’ A Half-Built Garden.
A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys’s has crafted a novel of extraterrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth. A Half-Built Garden depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth cautiously entering into dialogue with. It’s not the easiest future to build, but it’s one that just might be in reach.
In this conversation, Emma D’Amico will engage Emrys’s work in A Half-Built Garden as a starting point to think through writing and reading climate fiction, asking how literature helps us imagine collective approaches to building non-dystopian futures.
Runnana Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden, Winter Tide, and Deep Roots, as well as co-writer of Reactor’s Reading the Weird column with Anne M. Pillsworth. She writes radically hopeful short stories about religion and aliens and psycholinguistics. She lives in a mysterious manor house on the outskirts of Washington, DC with her wife and their large, strange family. There she creates real versions of imaginary foods, gives unsolicited advice, and occasionally attempts to save the world.
Emma D’Amico is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at Carleton University. Her current research focuses on climate emotions, climate-changed futures, and pre-figurative politics in literature. Her approach in research and pedagogy is informed by decolonial, climate affect, and climate justice theories that work to produce new insights into how to address climate-changed futures. Emma is also the co-coordinator of Carleton Climate Commons, co-presenter of this event, which brings together scholars, students, and community members to discuss issues surrounding the climate crisis in relation to the humanities and social sciences, to share academic work, ideas, and resources.