fiction/non/fiction S9 Ep. 7: Kathryn Nuernberger on Mutualism, Climate, and Finding Family at the End of the World
Poet and essayist Kathryn Nuernberger joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about her new collection of lyric essays, Held: Essays in Belonging, which is about symbiotic mutualisms, and grief and joy in an era of worsening climate change. She discusses COP30, the United Nations climate gathering currently underway in Brazil, and considers the global failure to keep warming below 1.5 °C. She reflects on the nature of symbiotic relationships and offers several examples, noting that over several cycles even parasitic relationships might achieve the balance of mutualism. Nuernberger places her work in the larger tradition of climate and nature writing, which previously tended to celebration and in recent years has turned more elegiac, and also talks about writing personal grief in relation to societal grief. She explains new vocabulary developed to address emerging climate concerns and emotions and identifies several concepts that need new words. She reads an excerpt from Held.
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This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, Graham Ballard, Courtenay Kantanka, Katelyn Koenig, and Bayleigh Williams.
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