Podcast Episode 34: Climate Writing Roundtable
Subscribe via RSS, Google Podcasts, Android, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Apple or Amazon. Welcome back to the Reckoning Press Podcast! I hope you've enjoyed these last couple of episodes featuring fiction from Reckoning 8 edited, produced and hosted by Aaron Kling, because there will be more of them! But for this month, it's me again, and we're taking a short interlude from fiction to run a roundtable conversation I had last fall with Reckoning contributor and editorial staff member emeritus Giselle Leeb and LCRW 33 alum Deb McCutchen, both of whom had new books out (and I had a novel forthcoming, which is now out). So as you'll see, some topical references here are a bit out of date, but the discussion of climate writing and its relationship to the state of the world very much continues to apply. I hope you get as much out of this conversation as we did. Michael J. DeLuca: Well, hello and welcome to an interesting discussion we're about to have about climate writing. I'm Michael J. DeLuca. I'm the publisher of Reckoning, a journal of Creative Writing on Environmental Justice. I also was the guest editor of an issue of Lady Churchill's in 2015, Issue No. 33, which featured both Deb McCutchen and Giselle Leeb, who are here with me today. And that's how I met the two of them. And in that issue was an excerpt from Deb's novel, which has just come out, Jellyfish Dreaming, so 2015 to now. That's way shorter than it took me to finish the book that I have coming out next year. Meanwhile, Giselle has been writing short stories that whole time and has had her debut collection come out, Mammals, I Think We Are Called from Salt, and it's great. The three of us thought we would get together and try and have an edifying and inspiring discussion about what we learned writing about climate, climate collapse, climate grief and all this stuff. But first, will the two of you introduce yourselves? Giselle, you could go first. Giselle Leeb: Sure. As Michael said, I'm Giselle, but just explaining the obvious. So far, I've written a short story collection. I think about four of the stories in there are overtly about climate change. Some also have other storylines running within the story, two at once. I've actually written quite a lot more climate addiction stories and I found myself writing more. I couldn't include all of those in that particular connection because it wasn't specifically all about climate change. But it's something that's I think about a lot. I'm sort of tentatively writing a novel about climate change at the moment. I think that's just in terms of writing. That's all I need to really say at the moment. I don't know if you saw my books. It's on the longlist for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. D. K. McCutchen: Congratulations. Giselle Leeb: Did I tell you about that? Michael J. DeLuca: I did not hear that. That's awesome. Congratulations. Giselle Leeb: Thank you. It's like the biggest—and only, actually—Short Story Prize in the UK and Ireland for a collection. So I was pretty, as they say in the UK, gobsmacked, to be honest, because the longlist is— Michael J. DeLuca: That's awesome. Giselle Leeb: It's 10 books and it's all connections. It's been won by really big writers, like Sarah Hall and Eddie Smith and people like that. Hilary Mantel, a shortlist and winner. So to be on the longlist is a major boost in terms of promoting the book and just, hopefully, being able to get some more funding at some point to write some more. Because it's always a struggle when you're writing and working, trying to do both at once, I find. D. K. McCutchen: Yeah, that's true. Giselle Leeb: I was also really pleased because I call my stories literary fantastical, but it's a lot harder sometimes in literary magazines to get stories of fantastical elements published even now. Someone like Kelly Link, who's one of my opposite hero writers, obviously George Saunders,
