When Words Meet Weather: Climate Fiction’s Role in Redefining Contemporary Literature

In a Chicago conference room, four accomplished writers gathered to discuss something that wasn't quite a genre yet but had become an urgent necessity: literature that grapples with our changing climate.

Key Takeaways

• Climate fiction and poetry serve as essential spaces for collective grieving in a culture that struggles with processing loss
• Writers are becoming "micro reporters" of climate change, documenting how it affects different communities at different times and in different ways
• The speed at which we're forced to process natural disasters exceeds human psychological capacity, making art crucial for processing the incomprehensible
• Literature helps bridge the dangerous compartmentalization between science, policy, and human emotion that characterizes much climate discourse
• The concept of the "old future" captures the profound loss many feel about the world they expected to inhabit versus reality
• Art offers a necessary slowness that counters capitalism's demand for fast, easy solutions to complex problems
• Climate writers form an unusually collaborative and hopeful community, driven by the urgency of their shared mission
• Personal vulnerability and storytelling prove more effective than data alone in communicating complex climate realities
• Place-based writing helps readers develop intimate connections to ecosystems under threat
• Joy and engagement with the natural world provide essential antidotes to climate despair and paralysis

The Art of Collective Mourning in an Age of Denial

Here's something that might surprise you: American culture is terrible at grieving. We don't do personal mourning well, and we certainly don't create visible, communal spaces for it. Other cultures throughout history have made grief recognizable - torn clothing, specific rituals, ways of signaling to strangers that someone is processing loss and deserves compassion.

Climate fiction and poetry are stepping into this void, creating what poet Claire Wamholm calls "places where the grieving is maybe not just front and center, but is sort of the point." These aren't just books about environmental destruction - they're invitations for readers to recognize their own climate grief on the page and realize they're not alone in feeling it.

Aaron Kafal, author of "The Mourers's Beastiary," draws fascinating parallels between living with generational chronic illness and experiencing the generational impacts of climate collapse. Both require what she calls "touching down into those feelings" rather than letting them remain terrifying and abstract. When we avoid the emotional reality, our actions to address broken systems end up driven by fear rather than authentic engagement.

• The difference between private grief and public mourning matters - mourning includes rituals that become part of the public space
• Art creates safe containers for processing feelings that might otherwise overwhelm us individually
• Collective acknowledgment of difficult emotions helps communities figure out how to move from stasis into action
• Writers are essentially asking readers: "Do you feel this too? Does this resonate with you?"

What's particularly powerful about this approach is how it counters the gaslighting many people experience around climate emotions. Not everyone agrees that what's happening to our planet is worth worrying about, which can leave environmentally conscious people feeling isolated and questioning their own responses. Literature validates these feelings and creates community around them.

Processing the Incomprehensible at Inhuman Speed

We're being asked to emotionally process natural disasters at a pace that the human mind simply wasn't built for. Ashley Shelby mentions Hurricane Helene to a friend, who can't remember which disaster she means until Shelby says "Asheville." The California wildfires already feel like ancient history. The Texas floods that left girls still missing have dropped from the news cycle entirely.

This represents a fundamental break from how communities have traditionally dealt with catastrophe. Shelby's first book documented the 1997 Grand Forks, North Dakota flood, which at the time was the most expensive natural disaster in American history at $5 billion. That seems quaint now. More importantly, she was able to spend significant time with that community, observing how they took years to recover from a single event.

Now we're ricocheting from "incomprehensible natural disaster to incomprehensible natural disaster," as Shelby puts it, without time to properly process any of them. This creates what philosopher Timothy Morton calls "hyperobjects" - things so big and multifaceted that we cannot fully comprehend them. Climate change itself is the ultimate hyperobject.

• Traditional journalism and policy discourse can't adequately address this emotional overwhelm
• Writers are experimenting with non-traditional forms - menus, fake pharmaceutical ads, podcast transcripts - to capture the absurdity and fragmentation of our current moment
• Ursula K. Le Guin's insight that "we cannot ask reason to take us across the gulfs of the absurd" has become a guiding principle for many climate writers
• The psychological isolation created by this speed contributes to the siloing effect many people experience around climate emotions

Erica Mitner notes that climate change affects everyone, but "not at the same time and not in the same ways." She opens her weather app in Madison, Wisconsin to find the forecast is simply "smoke" from Canadian wildfires - a different reality from friends in Brooklyn or California. This makes writers into "micro reporters" for their particular slice of climate experience.

Beyond the Science-Art Divide: Synthesis as Survival

One of the most damaging aspects of climate discourse is how compartmentalized it's become. You're either a scientist, an environmentalist, an activist, or just "a human being who is grieving." This division obscures the reality that everyone is processing the same fundamental changes to our world.

Ashley Shelby spent years as an environmental journalist, giving her unusual access to scientists and deep curiosity about their work. But she noticed how people get categorized and siloed: "You're a scientist, you're a writer, you're an environmentalist." This misses the point that we're all trying to make meaning from the same overwhelming reality.

Writers serve as synthesizers, taking complex scientific concepts and spending years mastering small pieces of them to find deeper meaning. For "South Pole Station," Shelby included both a climate denier and a cosmologist, wanting both characters to sound completely plausible to actual scientists. The goal wasn't just accuracy but integration - bringing together policy, science, human emotion, and meaning-making into something hopefully readable.

• Scientists themselves are experiencing profound climate grief, often feeling unheard despite their expertise
• The artificial separation between emotional and intellectual responses to climate change creates dangerous blind spots
• Art serves a unique function in connecting abstract concepts to lived human experience
• Writers translate between different communities - scientists, policymakers, and general readers - who might not otherwise communicate effectively

Mitner points out that working in language itself becomes political in an era of predictive text and AI-generated content. As someone who's taught for 30 years and watched students increasingly rely on artificial intelligence, she sees creating "new kinds of language" as essential for witnessing, mourning, and ultimately developing "modes of resistance and survival."

The Collaborative Spirit of Crisis Literature

Something unexpected happens when writers engage with climate themes - they become unusually collaborative and generous with each other. Aaron Kafal describes never meeting "a more collaborative group of artists than the people who touch into this work." Instead of the typical competitive dynamics of the literary world, climate writers are constantly sharing resources, recommending each other's work, and trying to lift each other up.

This shift happens because the work feels so urgent and important. As Kafal puts it, there's a feeling that "this is the most important work we could be doing, and if you're going to join the fight, let's bring you into what's ultimately often a competitive space." The collaborative instinct overrides normal professional territorialism.

The writers also note that people doing climate-adjacent work - science journalists, researchers, policy makers - tend to be among the most hopeful and interesting people to spend time with, despite working on such difficult subjects. There's something about engaging directly with the problem that generates energy and community rather than despair.

• Climate writers function like "people passing slips of paper across" to communicate with each other about shared concerns
• The community actively works to connect newcomers with existing networks and resources
• Hope emerges from collective engagement rather than individual struggle with overwhelming problems
• Working on climate issues creates bonds that transcend traditional professional boundaries

This collaborative spirit extends to how the writers view their relationship with readers. They're not trying to be authorities delivering definitive answers, but rather people reaching out to ask "Do you feel this too?" The vulnerability in that question creates space for genuine connection and shared processing.

The Language of Loss: Finding Words for "The Old Future"

Perhaps the most haunting concept to emerge from the discussion is Claire Wamholm's phrase "the old future" - referring to the future we thought we were going to inhabit before climate change altered everything. It's a perfect example of what poetry does: creating language that immediately resonates with shared but previously unspoken experience.

Wamholm wrote much of "Meltwater" while pregnant with her second child, grappling with the question of whether bringing children into this world was still "worth it." The book contains painful poems that honestly engage with "maybe yes, maybe no" before ultimately landing on yes - but a yes that comes with profound responsibility.

The "old future" poems imagine how parents might explain to children why all the glaciers are gone, trying different approaches and languages to make sense of choices that led to irreversible loss. It's an attempt to find words for something almost too painful to contemplate directly.

• The phrase "the old future" functions as what Ashley Shelby calls "a tomahawk missile to the heart" - language that opens rather than destroys
• Poetry's power lies in creating immediately recognizable expressions for previously unnamed experiences
• Parents face unique psychological challenges in climate writing, processing both their own grief and responsibility for the world they're leaving children
• The search for adequate language becomes part of the healing process, not just documentation of loss

Wamholm notes that despair is no longer in her vocabulary after becoming a mother - "they did not ask to be here," she says of her children, making it her responsibility to help them "fall in love with the world" despite everything. This shifts the entire frame from individual grief to intergenerational responsibility and hope.

Place-Based Writing and the Politics of Attention

All four writers root their work in specific places - Florida beaches, Wisconsin prairies, polar research stations, flooded New York City. This isn't just literary technique; it's a form of resistance against the abstraction that makes climate change feel unreal and distant.

Erica Mitner's poems document "coastal erosion, rising seas, and environmental degradation alongside intimate human rituals," contrasting ecosystem resilience with climate violence. Her collaboration with photographer Anna Barry Jester documents sea level rise in Miami's built environment, creating a record of changes that might otherwise go unnoticed.

The writers emphasize becoming "micro reporters" for their particular geographic experiences. Climate change affects everyone, but the specific impacts vary dramatically by location and time. Mitner's weather app showing "smoke" from Canadian wildfires represents a different lived reality from friends in other cities experiencing different climate impacts.

• Place-based writing creates emotional connections that abstract discussions of global warming cannot achieve
• Specific geographic details help readers understand climate change as immediate and local rather than distant and theoretical
• Writers serve as witnesses for changes that might otherwise be invisible or normalized over time
• The contrast between human rituals and environmental disruption reveals both fragility and resilience

Erica Mitner describes her hiking practice as essential to finding "micro joys" and "granular beauties" in Midwest ecosystems she initially didn't know how to love. Learning new places through curiosity rather than assumption becomes a pathway to joy and a antidote to despair. The Merlin bird app and iNaturalist become tools for deepening relationship with specific environments.

From Corporate Guilt to Systemic Understanding

One of the most important insights from Ashley Shelby concerns how individual guilt around climate change serves corporate interests. Her early work included lines like "Are we the invasive species?" reflecting a period when she, like many people, internalized responsibility for climate change as fundamentally about individual behavior.

But years of listening to scientists and processing the evidence led to a crucial realization: "It isn't us. It's a handful of large corporations, extremely wealthy individuals, and they have done the most amazing job of making us think it's our fault." The suggestion that buying an electric car will assuage guilt over driving kids to soccer practice 20 miles away represents a deliberate misdirection from those with actual power to address climate change immediately.

Glenn Albrecht, the environmental philosopher who coined the term "solastalgia" (homesickness before you've left home), corrected Shelby's medicalization of climate grief. Solastalgia isn't a medical condition requiring treatment - it's "a rational response to the imposition of an irrational social structure." This reframe shifts climate emotions from personal pathology to reasonable reactions to genuinely unreasonable circumstances.

• Corporate messaging deliberately shifts responsibility from systemic change to individual consumer choices
• Climate grief represents sanity, not pathology, in the face of irrational destruction
• Writers' processing of these insights happens in real time, creating "relics" of earlier thinking within their work
• Understanding actual power structures can redirect energy from guilt toward appropriate targets

This analysis helps explain why climate emotions feel so isolating and confusing. People experiencing reasonable responses to genuine crises are told their feelings are excessive or unwarranted, creating a form of gaslighting that serves those profiting from continued environmental destruction.

Reframing Hope: From Opioid to Action

The question of hope runs through climate literature like a fault line. Aaron Kafal notes how hope became "this really ugly word within activist communities" for a while, dismissed as an opioid that prevented necessary action. But over the ten years she spent writing "All the Water in the World," she watched conversations evolve toward more nuanced understandings of hope's role.

Her novel deliberately begins at the end, with the protagonist looking back on survival and continuing to work toward a future even after collapse. This structure argues that "we don't lose the future even though there's a collapse. There's still a future out there." The book asks whether hope is still possible and worth pursuing in the face of genuine catastrophe.

Kafal's insight that "greed and hope are twins, one each reaching for the same thing, one in fear and one in faith" reframes both emotions as fundamentally about desire and reaching toward the future. The difference lies in whether that reaching happens from fear or faith, individual grasping or collective vision.

• Hope requires distinguishing between individual desires and collective needs
• Collapse doesn't eliminate future possibilities, just familiar ones
• Historical precedent shows communities typically respond to disasters with mutual aid rather than violence
• Stories matter in shaping expectations about how people behave during crises

The novel draws on Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell," which documents how disasters typically produce mutual aid societies and community rebuilding rather than the chaos and violence portrayed in popular culture. This research suggests that apocalyptic narratives that assume human selfishness and violence may actually be counterproductive, creating expectation for behaviors that aren't historically accurate.

Joy as Engagement: The Opposite of Despair

When asked about finding joy while writing about climate change, the writers offered surprisingly practical and embodied responses. Claire Wamholm rejected despair as "a deeply narcissistic emotion" that's "isolating" and "easy to get into." Instead, she emphasized learning new things as a way to "expand the map of what is possible" and "expand my mental universe."

Reading Ed Yong's "An Immense World" about animal senses reminded Wamholm of how much she doesn't know about the world, helping her "decenter myself" and get off "the hamster wheel of ruminating and spiraling." This connects to Erica Mitner's insight that "any feeling fully felt is joy" - it's about engagement versus disengagement rather than simple happiness.

Ashley Shelby finds restoration in literally planting trees, carefully moving seedlings from overcrowded spots under mature trees to sunny locations where they have better chances of survival. The physical act of helping rather than harming provides concrete connection to healing and hope that extends beyond individual lifespan.

• Joy comes from engagement with the world rather than retreat from it
• Learning new things expands sense of possibility and counters despair's tunnel vision
• Physical practices that help rather than harm provide embodied hope
• Curiosity about the unknown serves as an antidote to the despair that comes from thinking you know everything

All the writers emphasized practices that connect them to the physical world - walking, hiking, growing things, observing wildlife. These activities counter the disengagement that characterizes much modern life and provide direct experience of the beauty and resilience that climate writing aims to protect.

Looking at these writers' approaches, what emerges is less a new literary genre than an essential evolution in how literature engages with reality. Climate fiction and poetry aren't separate from other forms of writing - they're what all writing becomes when it honestly engages with the world we're actually living in right now.