Climate

We could try writing letters, one of us said to the other after our cross-country trip was over and we weren't done talking. Talking about hurricanes, fires, floods, droughts, freezes. About shootings, bombings, border crises, #MeToo. Jewishness, whiteness, feminism. Fear, ambition, desire. Work, marriage, friendship. Grief, anger, illness, and suicide. At once anecdotal, philosophical, political, and deeply personal, the letters quickly come to sustain a different kind of present moment: a way of finding self through other, a portal into urgent and shared contemplation, a means of saying what otherwise feels unsayable. Propelled by events both public and private, these epistolary essays comprise a catalog of living with and thinking through the climatic disturbances that determine our lives. Finding kinship in other epistolary exchanges, from Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs to Etel Adnan's Of Cities and Women to Martin Land and Jonathan Boyarin's Time and Human Language Now, they inhabit the experiment of talking and listening in the unspooling, untenable now, while exploring what it means to be an I and a you in the alternate present letters invent.

Literary Nonfiction.