I’m delighted today to be opening the blog tour for Nothing Is As It Was, a collection of short stories about climate change, edited by Amanda Saint & Gillian Walker, and published by Retreat West on 22nd April to coincide with Earth Day.
A collection of short stories and flash fictions on the theme of climate change from established and emerging authors who all care about our planet.
A schoolboy inspired by a conservation hero to do his bit; a mother trying to save her family and her farm from drought; a world that doesn’t get dark anymore; and a city that lives in a tower slowly being taken over by the sea.
These stories and many more make up a poignant collection that is sometimes bleak, sometimes lighthearted, but always hopeful that we can make a change.
Contributors to this collection include:
- Rose McGinty, author of Electric Souk
- Susmita Bhattacharya, author of The Normal State of Mind
- Weibo Grobler, twice shortlisted for his Flash Fiction and Poetry for the Fish Publishing Prize, he has also had various stories published in Molotov Lit, National Flash Fiction Day, Reflex Fiction, Horror Scribes and more
My guest today is Cath Barton, winner of the New Welsh Writing Awards AmeriCymru Prize for the Novella 2017, whose story The Arctic Commandments is also featured in the collection.
A major reason why I write stories is to make sense of the world. That’s to say my personal world, especially in terms of my feelings. That doesn’t mean my writing is directly confessional, but I find that my stories tend to reflect things that have mattered to me in my life. One theme that recurs for me is loss, something we all have to face.
The world in which we live is altering at a phenomenal rate and it is impossible to ignore this. I think we also have to recognise the ways in which our individual lives and the wider world affect one another. It is nearly 400 years since John Donne wrote, ‘No man is an island, entire of himself; every man is a part of the continent, a piece of the main.’ The final line of his poem is, ‘And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’
This is the context in which the new genre of climate fiction is emerging. For me, writing a story about climate change makes me think more deeply about what it may mean for any and all of us, and in particular what we stand to lose. When I heard about the Retreat West call for submissions for an anthology of climate fiction I was keen to offer a story, as my contribution to making sense of the changes we are facing in our environment, both for myself and, I hope, for readers.
The melting of the polar ice caps is happening alarmingly fast. This is where I started in my story, The Arctic Commandments. My narrator is a man who is working in a research station in Svalbard, a remote group of islands in the far north where winters are long and dark. There is a set of rules on the station, designed to ensure the safety of everyone working there, for the darkness pushes people to the limits of sanity.
Polar bears live on Svalbard, but the melting of the ice means that finding food has become more difficult for them. In my story the hungry bears approach the research station; they can be heard circling it, out in the dark. The narrator of my story has a room-mate called Derry, ‘a taciturn man from Saskatchewan’ who he suspects, like himself and everyone else on the research station, is there ‘to try and escape some internal demon’. The two men keep themselves to themselves and barely communicate, but as John Donne wrote so presciently, ‘no man is an island’; our actions have consequences for others, and in the heightened atmosphere of the research station as the bears are heard getting closer, any man’s transgression of the rules has the potential to impact on everyone else there.
I don’t name climate change in my story, but I hope that it will make people think about their connection to others. Few of us live in such extreme conditions as the islands of the Arctic Ocean, but we all make choices about how what and how we consume, and our individual choices have, more and more, an impact on the communities in which we live.
Many thanks Cath – I’ll look forward to catching up with the collection. My thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for inviting me to be part of the tour – you’ll find all the other stops here:
About the author
Cath Barton is an English writer who lives in Wales. Her novella The Plankton Collector will be published in September 2018 by New Welsh Review. She is on the 2018 Literature Wales Mentoring programme, working on a collection of short stories inspired by the work of Hieronymus Bosch.
About Retreat West
Retreat West Books is an independent press publishing paperback books and ebooks.
Founder, Amanda Saint, is a novelist and short story writer. She’s also a features journalist writing about environmental sustainability and climate change. So all Retreat West Books publications take advantage of digital technology advances and are print-on-demand, in order to make best use of the world’s finite resources.
Retreat West Books is an arm of Amanda’s creative writing business, Retreat West, through which she runs fiction writing retreats, courses and competitions and provides editorial services.
Initially started to publish the anthologies of winning stories in the Retreat West competitions, Retreat West Books is now open for submissions for short story collections, novels and memoirs. Submission info can be found here.
How interesting, love short stories. Wishing you lots of success.
This is fabulous, thanks Anne x