Traditional western storytelling conventions aren’t up to the task of understanding the enormity of the climate crisis or the pandemic
, “storytelling is a form of cognitive play that hones our minds, allowing us to simulate the world around us and imagine different strategies, particularly in social situations … brain scans have shown that reading or hearing stories activates various areas of the cortex that are known to be involved in social and emotional processing …”
I think writers choose to believe in the power of stories because it gives us hope. It justifies the hours we spend toiling at our desks without guarantee of audience or remuneration. We need to keep this faith if we’re going to stumble on through the darkness.The problem is that some of the most urgent and lethal challenges our society is facing are too giant and unwieldy to fit into the little patterns our human minds are used to making.
In 2015 Amitav Ghosh delivered a series of lectures about how so few fiction writers dealt with the climate emergency in their novels, and the following year he published an adaptation of those lectures titled The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
Writer and advocate Astrid Edwards was the person who first told me about The Great Derangement. Before shifting to her current multifaceted writer-reviewer-podcaster career she was an economics and policy consultant specialising in climate and social policy for almost a decade. She is a woman with a disability, former national advocate for MS Australia and just spent three years on the Victorian Disability Advisory Council.
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