Bard Faculty Jenny Offill Participates in “Writing Climate Future” Panel for the Los Angeles Review of Books

Jenny Offill, writer in residence at Bard College, took part in a “Writing Climate Future” panel discussion for LARB Radio Hour podcast, hosted by Los Angeles Review of Books and the Berggruen Institute. As the world faces a climate crisis, questions about the role and efficacy of environmental writing assume greater urgency. Offill’s most recent book, Weather, which was shortlisted for the Women's Fiction Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, reflects on the looming threat of a warming world against a backdrop of modern daily life. “At the time that I began writing Weather—which was about eight or nine years ago now—I felt like the way that fiction writers would deal with questions about climate was always pretty much going down the apocalyptic road,” Offill says. “I realized that even when I read one of those books and liked it, there was a way in which it kind of felt like, at the end of it I thought, ‘Oh good, that hasn’t happened. We’re not actually on the road dodging cannibals.’ And so I had this idea like, well, what would it be like to write a pre-apocalyptic book that took place now?”
 

Post Date: 08-13-2024