Grist’s “Fix” has announced the winners of its short story contest Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, which “encouraged entrants to envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress.”
The three winning stories and nine finalists “create intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind.”
FIRST PLACE: Afterglow by Lindsay Brodeck, tells the story of Talli and her refusal to abandon the Earth.
SECOND PLACE: The Cloud Weaver’s Song by Saul Tanpepper, follows Semhar Ibrahim and her defiant journey to save her people.
THIRD PLACE: Tidings by Rich Larson, travels through several decades and shows the climate impacts that tie generations together.
OTHER FINALISTS
- A Séance in the Anthropocene by Abigail Larkin
- A Worm to the Wise by Marissa Lingen
- Canvas – Wax – Moon by Abilene Pascal
- The Case of the Turned Tide by Savitri Horrigan
- The Tree in the Back Yard by Michelle Yoon
- When It’s Time to Harvest by Renan Bernardo
- The Secrets of the Last Greenland Shark by Mike McClelland
- Broken From the Colony by Ada M. Patterson
- El, the Plastotrophs, and Me by Tehnuka Ilanko
Tory Stephens, Fix New England Network Weaver, tells “How Imagine 2200 came to life”.
…It was connecting, rather than storytelling, that we had in mind in the spring of 2020 when we invited climate and justice leaders to a retreat focused on envisioning a pathway to our climate future. With pandemic lockdowns taking effect, our gathering migrated to Zoom, and over the course of three days the group charted the next 180 years of climate progress. This assembly visualized a complete societal transformation: a dissolution of political parties and borders. Reparations. The return of land to Indigenous and Black stewardship. Restorative justice replacing prisons. Granting rights to the Earth and non-human kin. Food sovereignty and heirloom seeds triumphing over monoculture farming. An economy built on ecological restoration, mutual aid, and care work. The pursuit of right relationships in all our systems and designs.
Out of that visioning came a new idea: a climate-fiction contest to create stories of life in that future — not to just describe a better world, but to truly build it within our imaginations. Fix has largely focused on nonfiction storytelling, so an initiative to create imagined worlds would be a first for Grist and, as a network weaver now setting off to launch this new project, for me as well….
The contest judges were Adrienne Maree Brown, Morgan Jerkins, Kiese Laymon, and Sheree Renée Thomas. Story reviewers were Tobias Buckell, Andrew Dana Hudson, and Sarena Ulibarri.
[Via Locus Online.]