More Eco-fiction

Our shelf of eco-fiction is expanding. Here is a new list that includes suggestions from a few sources, including those who commented on the previous post:

Black Sun by Edward Abbey
Good News by Edward Abbey
The Monkey-Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi
Almost everything by Nevada Barr (Bittersweet, Blind Descent, Blood Lure, Deep South, Endangered Species, Firestorm, Flashback, Hard Truth, High Country, Hunting Season, Ill Wind, A Superior Death, Track of the Cat, Winter Study)
A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
Looking for Peyton Place by Barbara Delinsky
Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman
The Lobo Outback Funeral Home by Dave Foreman
Everything by Carl Hiaasen (Basket Case, Double Whammy, Flush, Hoot, Lucky You, Sick Puppy, Skinny Dip, Stormy Weather, Tourist Season)
Dune by Frank Herbert, and all the Dune books
Many works by Tony Hillerman (e.g. The Fallen Man, The Wailing Wind, The Sinister Pig)
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Purgatory Ridge by William Kent Krueger
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Skyward by Mary Alice Monroe
The Beach House by Mary Alice Monroe
The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
He, She, and It by Marge Piercy
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
The Story of B by Daniel Quinn
Works by Elizabeth Quinn (e.g. A Wolf in Death's Clothing, Murder Most Grizzly)
Works by Kim Stanley Robinson (The Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars; Three Californias Trilogy: The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge; Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting, Antarctica)
Alaska Dragon by Benjamin Shaine
Works by Dana Stabenow (e.g. Dead in the Water, Play with Fire)
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
Grass by Sheri Tepper

Have anything more to add to the list? Once again, your comments are welcome!

What is Eco-Fiction?

Last week, in the small directed study I teach at Finlandia University on Environmental Writing and Literature, we started a unit on eco-fiction. This is our third focus in the class; previously, we covered nature writing and then environmental journalism. Books we’ve read so far include Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma; Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams; Stuff by John Ryan and Alan Durning; Bill McKibben’s Hope, Human and Wild; and Lisa Margonelli’s Oil on the Brain. We’ve also looked at nature essays and environmental journalism articles by various other authors.

With eco-fiction, we began by attempting a definition. First, and most obviously, eco-fiction is fiction, i.e., not a true story. At its basis, though, is some sort of truth – an environmental truth. Whether it’s classic literature (say, Jack London’s Call of the Wild) or eco sci-fi (maybe Frank Herbert’s Dune or Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed) it makes some sort of statement about the human relationship to the environment. It also in some way expresses concern for the non-human world, and/or human survival.

More could probably be said, but that’s what we have for our definition so far. Next, we looked at examples of eco-fiction. In class, we assembled a short bookshelf of some of the eco-fiction found in Finlandia’s library as well as in my own, including:

• The Monkey-Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
• Winter Study by Nevada Barr
• A Friend of the Earth by T.C. Boyle
• Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
• Looking for Peyton Place by Barbara Delinsky
• The Lobo Outback Funeral Home by Dave Foreman
• Flush by Carl Hiaasen
• Sick Puppy by Carl Hiaasen
• Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• Skywatch by Mary Alice Monroe
• The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols
• Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

This is hardly an extensive list, but with this as a start, I’d like to build one. If you’re reading this, I have two questions for you:

1) What eco-fiction titles would you add to this list? (Conversely, is there anything above you might delete?)

2) What would you add to or change about our definition of eco-fiction?

Your comments are welcome!

A Few SEJ Highlights

It's been a couple of weeks, but I'm still recovering from the jam-packed schedule at this year's Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Below are a few photo highlights.

On Wednesday evening, Tia Nelson -- daughter of Earth Day founder Senator Gaylord Nelson -- regaled diners at the opening plenary with tales of political deals done over drinks -- and more drinks.


Thursday, most of us took off on tours; I joined the "Wetlands, Wildlife, and Wind" trip which included a pontoon boat ride into Horicon Marsh, an internationally important wetland in central Wisconsin.


Of course it started raining as soon as we embarked on the boat ride. The canvas roofing over the boats kept most of us dry.


Our tour visited the 86-turbine wind farm that started operating near Horicon Marsh last year. It's hard to capture the scale of these towers, but the blade tips reach 400 feet into the air.


Back at the conference center, we encountered the usual sea of handouts. My eyes go about this blurry after reading the piles of material I end up bringing home from SEJ.


Friday morning, Andrew Revkin (right) of the New York Times hosted a breakfast session on climate change with Jane Lubchenco of NOAA and Jonathan Lash of the World Resources Institute.


Al Gore headlined Friday morning's plenary about climate change. That's conference co-chair Peter Annin of IJNR hidden behind the potted plants on the right.


Paul Ehrlich got chuckles with his usual outspoken style at a well-attended panel presentation on population.


On Saturday, conference co-chair Peter Annin interviewed UN water advisor Maude Barlow as part of a fabulous panel on water issues. Annin's excellent book, The Great Lakes Water Wars, won a 2007 Great Lakes Book Award.


Saturday afternoon gave some of us a chance for a bicycle tour of Madison -- which aims to become the best bicycling city in the U.S.


Saturday night, we bussed out to the LEED-certified Aldo Leopold Center for a great party, where I ran into some old friends and had a notable discussion with Mike and Pat Dombeck about the annual Trenary Outhouse Races (something you know about if you've ever lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, as the Dombecks did formerly and as I do now).


Sunday morning at the UW-Madison Arboretum, Wendell Berry headlined a wonderful panel focused on Aldo Leopold's legacy.


Nina Bradley (Aldo Leopold's daughter) and Wendell Berry shared a lighter moment during Q&A after the panel presentations. Curt Meine organized the panel, which also included former Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck and Aldo Leopold's son Carl.


Curtis Prairie displayed its autumn palette to those of us taking a final hike around the Arboretum grounds.


We departed the Arboretum after the hike to head home. I don't know how others feel, but SEJ conferences usually leave me in a state of combined exhaustion and excitement, full of so many fresh writing ideas I'm not sure where to start once I'm back at my desk. I'll probably do this again next year when the SEJ conference goes to Missoula, Montana. Looking forward to it!

A nice copy editor, in case you're looking ....

If you're looking for a copy editor to review your work, I just met one who comes highly recommended. A former journalist, Laurie Gibson is based in Monterey, California, and works freelance. Her clients include both publishers and writers.

I took Laurie's class "Book Publishing 1-2-3" when I was last in California, and I was impressed both with her knowledge of writing and publishing, and with her good humor. The many testimonials I've read about her say that she's a pleasure to work with, and I can see why! She can be contacted at wordworker1@earthlink.net.

Suzanne Strempek Shea and Two Pages a Day

The Writer's Journey series at Finlandia University ended last month with a flourish: a wonderful presentation by New England writer Suzanne Strempek Shea. She is the author of five novels and three non-fiction books, in addition to a slew of articles for newspapers and magazines.

I've read Suzanne's novel Becoming Finola, a delightful excursion from the U.S. to Ireland and through the realms of identity. I'm looking forward to reading Shelf Life, a memoir of her real-life experiences as an author working in a bookstore. And then there's Sundays in America, her most recent book and the one she discussed at Finlandia.

To write Sundays in America, Suzanne spent a year traveling to different Christian churches each week. She sat in on services from the very small – a congregation of Shakers in Maine, where the 20 visitors outnumbered the four actual church members – to the unabashedly huge – a stadium seating 16,000, where the televangelist's sermon, she said, consisted largely of diet tips.

Suzanne spoke of all this with humor and pizazz, the same engaging and approachable style I found when I paged through the book. Listening to her, I found myself thinking: what a great way to learn more about something that is so important to American culture, and to so many of us personally. Now Sundays in America is on my must-read list.

In keeping with the Writer's Journey theme, Suzanne also talked about her life as a writer, and stressed a point that appears over and over in the literature: If you want to be a writer, the most important thing you can do is write. Establish a discipline.

"Sit down each day, even if it's for two words or two sentences," Suzanne says. She herself writes two pages a day, at least five or six days a week, and notes, "When I'm really on a roll, it's every day." She departs from that schedule for "general life crises," and adds, "When I feel ill, I curl up and watch bad TV."

It doesn't sound like much, but with two pages a day she has produced eight books and 12 to 24 articles per year in the 20 years she's been freelancing (she worked as a reporter for almost a decade before that). Learning that writer Elinor Lipman writes two pages a day inspired Suzanne to begin this (Lipman just released her tenth book, The Family Man). It's not an uncommon practice: I heard years ago that Sue Grafton writes two pages a day, and that's how she's produced her alphabet of best-selling mysteries.

This underlines Suzanne's point. Whether it's two words, two lines, two pages, or two hours a day, persistence pays off. In my own career, I have observed over and over that this persistence, this steady practice, is the number one most common denominator for success as a writer. So I agree wholeheartedly with Suzanne. The most important part of any writer's journey is to write, and keep at it.

The Writer's Journey seminars are over for the year, but they were so well received that there has been talk of holding them again. My opinion: such a great series bears repeating. Kudos to Finlandia and everyone involved in putting these on, and I hope you, too, will keep at it!

Much appreciation again to Karen Johnson for providing these images of Suzanne Strempek Shea speaking and reading at Finlandia's Chapel of St. Matthew. Thanks, Karen!