Carleton University Presents: A Half-Built Garden

Carleton University’s Climate Commons presents an author reading and discussion on A Half-Built Garden.

A literary descendent of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys has crafted a novel of extraterrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth. A Half-Built Garden depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth cautiously entering into dialogue with. It's not the easiest future to build, but it's one that just might be in reach.

In this conversation, we will engage Emrys’s work in A Half-Built Garden as a starting point to think through writing and reading climate fiction, asking how literature helps us imagine collective approaches to building non-dystopian futures.

Please note: This event will not be livestreamed.

Emma D'Amico is a Ph.D. student in the English Department at Carleton University. Her current research focuses on climate emotions, climate-changed futures, and pre-figurative politics in literature. Her approach in research and pedagogy is informed by decolonial, climate affect, and climate justice theories that work to produce new insights into how to address climate-changed futures. Emma is  also the co-coordinator of Carleton Climate Commons, co-presenter of this event, which brings together scholars, students, and community members to discuss issues surrounding the climate crisis in relation to the humanities and social sciences, to share academic work, ideas, and resources. 

Books are available from our friends at Perfect Books.

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