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ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9102-489X
Document Type
Campus Access
Degree Program
English
Degree Type
Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)
Year Degree Awarded
2019
Month Degree Awarded
May
Keywords
Creative Writing, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Climate Fiction
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/14197554
Abstract
An Earth of Foxes: A Novel opens in 2073 and explores the realities of daily life if environmental change unfolds in particular, ever-more-likely ways—as well as the kind of collaborative action that will be required to survive. In North Dakota, a woman struggles with being an outsider and the only fertile woman in a former fracking town; in Idaho a girl weighs whether or not to run away from the militia that’s raised her; in Arkansas a young woman contemplates futility as her town erodes. Climate change is not a catastrophe or an apocalypse. It doesn’t end, there can be no clearly defined after. Heat and storms and earthquakes become an invisible routine. People defend what they have or set out from one corner of the country to another, hoping for better.
A work of speculative climate fiction, An Earth of Foxes attempts to marry the extrapolation of science fiction with literary fiction’s empathy to the relationships and choices of individuals. The book considers complicity, futility, and sacrifice as climate change unravels with slow and intimate violence, a problem that cannot be solved by some single character’s hero journey but demands collective action.