乐播传媒

An interview with Elizabeth Rush Mueller, former Mellon Fellow and 乐播传媒 College instructor, on the Art of Telling Climate Change Stories

 

 

 

K: Tell me about your transition to nature writing. I know you studied poetry and creative writing in college.
E: I went to college out in Portland Oregon which has a stunning landscape and, as someone who grew up in new England in one of those families that thinks hiking is the best form of vacation, when I got to Oregon I thought, 鈥淥h my God, this is my landscape.鈥� I鈥檝e always liked rain. My parents always say that I was born and it rained for two weeks. In Oregon, there are these great lush trees, and something that鈥檚 very humbling. It鈥檚 nature that鈥檚 big enough for me not to matter anymore. I like that.

Exploring how nature and literature overlap grounded in my undergraduate education, but I think by the point I was writing my senior thesis I realized, 鈥淎m I going to be just another nature writer from the West Coast?鈥� That seems like (A) a hard field to break into because everyone in Oregon wants to write about nature, and (B) my nature writing isn鈥檛 good enough to compete. Initially straying from that dream was a very pragmatic decision. My thesis was about how the female body articulates itself in space and through language. It took a lot of my own response to the natural environment in Oregon and put it in a more gendered conversation.

After college I moved to Vietnam. Actually, first I rode my bike to Alaska by myself and went through bigger swaths of think woods than I鈥檇 ever seen before in my life. Sometimes I rode for six days between towns. I saw lots of bears.

Then I moved to Vietnam and lived in this massive city of 8 million people. I started working for an art foundation that supported controversial North Vietnamese artists and I was essentially the writer for the foundation.

K: Was it the job that drew you there, or did you go to Vietnam and then get the job?

E: I knew that there was this really interesting artistic revolution happening in North Vietnam where painters were finally able to paint what they wanted. Up until 1989, they had had to paint Soviet realist art in service of the state. As the country opened, a private market for art emerged and the rules on censorship were loosened. I worked there, and I realized very quickly that I could write and make a living doing nonfiction writing. I started doing long form articles for Le Monde Diplomatique, which is basically the French version of Harpers. I started out writing a lot about art, infrastructure, and the built environment, and how those three things were shaping the future of South East Asia. Le Monde Diplomatique sent me to the border of Bangladesh to report on cattle smuggling, I got set to North India to report on water sharing in the Ganges鈥� I got sent all over the place to do these stories.

K: Did those assignments reaffirm your interests?

E: My hypothesis has always been that Le Monde Diplomatique sent me on stories that were not policy heavy but rather ones that involved going to out-of-the-reach regions and getting people to talk to me. I didn鈥檛 meet my editor for 2 years. When we finally met, I think she was shocked at how young I was. I think it also clicked into her mind about how I was getting my interviews. I appeared very nonthreatening compared to a lot of other people they work with frequently鈥攎ostly 45 year-old French men. Through out my time in South East Asia I was really happy when I got sent on assignments outside the city. Working on my first book, which was on the former capital of Myanmar, I spent two years in this rapidly developing multimillion person city, as well as two years in Hanoi. As interesting as that was, the city has always been hard on me. I did move to NYC after that, but all these were strategic decisions.

I moved to NYC and started to write about sea level rise. I thought, 鈥淚f I鈥檓 going to live in a city, I want to have a beat, a niche, that really gets me out.鈥� I felt like I had paid my dues enough and gotten enough publications that I didn鈥檛 just have to write about Myanmar, the only place where every magazine didn鈥檛 have a correspondent. I could write about what I wanted. I thought, 鈥淢aybe I can be a nature writer now.鈥� At that point I felt like I wasn鈥檛 just one writer of 100 million in NYC. I had connections, clips, work鈥� So I polished my boots and started working the NYC scene. Right now, I鈥檓 actually where I wanted to be when I left college. The path was maybe unconventional, but I鈥檓 very grateful for the way that鈥檚 expanded my worldview and the way I think about nature. I鈥檝e grown to problematize a lot of the narratives that I used to really love. Now I鈥檓 writing a book about sea level rise.

K: I want to use this blog to continue to problematize some of those narratives and I鈥檓 not entirely sure how to do that. I think there are interesting ways to bring race, gender, and economics into the conversation. What do you think?

E: It鈥檚 true! Here we are, two excited white people in a beautiful college! I think there are multiple ways to answer that question. The sea rise book I鈥檓 working on takes place almost entirely in indigenous communities and underserved communities. They are the ones that are most affected by climate change. If we look at wetlands, they are the first ecosystems to go under. This country has tended to put people traditionally underserved by society in and around those areas that are not fit for the kind of infrastructure and buildings we now depend upon. Now they鈥檙e the first ones to feel the crunch of sea level rise.

K: Did you ever feel uncomfortable in communities that you didn鈥檛 feel representative of, interviewing people who have just had very different life experiences?

E: I think one of the most important things that I鈥檝e learned is that you have to make yourself vulnerable if you鈥檙e asking other people to make themselves vulnerable to you. I remember when I was spending a couple of months with a Native American community on the Louisiana Bayou. Beasts of the Southern Wild was vaguely based on them, they had had a lot of media coverage in general. I think they were sort of 鈥渦p to here鈥� with it. At that moment, I was leaving a long-term relationship, and I told them about grappling with my decision to leave. I said, 鈥淵ou鈥檙e staying in this place that you love even though it鈥檚 shifting under your feet in violent ways that you didn鈥檛 expect. How do you play with the decision to stay or go?鈥�

If you don鈥檛 make yourself vulnerable in meaningful ways, it seems like you鈥檙e just trying to record their lives as a set of problems. It feels like you鈥檙e the knowledge from on high that just comes in and leaves.

K: I know that you鈥檙e going to be the writer in residence at Andrew鈥檚 Experimental forest this summer. Tell me about that.

E: I鈥檓 very excited about that. I will spend a couple weeks in the forest, have a little cabin, and write about three sites around the forest that I will visit periodically while I鈥檓 there. They invite one writer every year and it鈥檚 a project that will last 200 years. That鈥檚 the amount of time it takes for a Doug Fur to decompose once its hit the forest floor, sprout, and turn into other growth. So, 200 years really represents the life cycle of this forest.

Lately I鈥檝e been thinking a lot about time scales and how difficult it is to represent, in language, the kind of changes we鈥檙e enacting on the physical environment. Sea level rise could last twice as long as human history. What does that even mean? I want to learn to write in ways that begin to collapse distances of time. I don鈥檛 think that just saying, 鈥淪ea level rise could last twice as long as human history,鈥� communicates, emotionally, effectively, the kind of changes that we鈥檙e seeing. I think that the sort of writing I鈥檝e been doing on sea level rise can interestingly be brought to bear on that forest whose timescale is longer than the human lifecycle but shorter than geologic lifecycles.

K: When you write about a subject for so long, do you find that you become repetitive with your language? Do you feel like your language evolves? How do you keep your writing fresh?

E: For two to three years, I wrote straight nonfiction prose about sea level rise, which, as a style, really doesn鈥檛 have much poetry. Then, at some point, a switch flipped and I knew how to write lyrically, I knew how to write in poetry. I knew the kinds of symbolic language to use. One of the essays that I鈥檝e been working on is called, 鈥淪omething Like Vertigo,鈥� and it reads my father鈥檚 struggle with vertigo, a loss of knowing which way is down and a spatial orientation in the world, as an analogue for sea level rise. It鈥檚 about how people react when the physical world changes enough to make everyday tasks fundamentally different but still appears like the same old world that you used to inhabit. I鈥檓 also writing about rot and how the earth rots, and thinking about all sorts of processes of decomposition. Its something we鈥檙e all familiar with, but what does it mean when literally our shores are rotting?

K: I had an English teacher in high school talked about every new idea in terms of decomposition: he said that every time you create something new, you have to take apart what you鈥檝e made before and put it to sit in a fertile place until it espouses new ideas. I really like that.

E: Maybe that鈥檚 like the switch that flips. You write it all, then you pull it apart and let it sit, and all of a sudden it turns into a daffodil.

During Short Term 2016, Professor Mueller taught a course titled “Climate Change and the Stories We Tell.” The course culminated in the making of a unique, immersive multimedia on-line archive that holds聽the stories of many Mainers living with and adapting to changes in the climate. Check out聽the final project of聽Climate Change and the Stories We Tell.