Allegra Hyde was young when she first realized that although she was most likely too nervous to chain herself to a tree, she did want to find a way to save them.
“I’ve always been someone who cared about environmental activism,” says Hyde, an author and assistant professor of English language and literature at Smith College. “It’s not that I haven’t participated in protests, but I just felt like as someone who also loved to write fiction, that really intentionally bringing environmental ideas and messaging into my stories and novels is a small way I can contribute to a larger cultural conversation.”
Allegra Hyde
In Hyde’s new class, Writing Climate Fiction, Smithies are using their writing skills to make their own contributions.
Offered last semester and described as a course that “teaches students how to use fiction as a tool for engaging with the realities of climate change,” Writing Climate Fiction sounds straightforward enough, but with the support of a curricular enhancement grant from the Center for the Environment, Ecological Design & Sustainability (CEEDS), Hyde was able to develop it into a more multidimensional experience. For example, she arranged a trip to MacLeish Field Station where students began the semester reading and analyzing examples of climate fiction (or “cli-fi”) and writing pieces inspired by the nature around them. She also hosted several guest lectures from contemporary cli-fi authors who discussed how they engage with a subject as complex and—frankly, depressing—as climate change.
For Hyde and her students, that meant taking different—and sometimes unexpected—approaches to storytelling.
“[Climate change] is something so vast, complicated, and political, at times,” Hyde says. “For me as an author, I use a lot of humor to balance out the grimmer realities of our world, and working with students, it was definitely a tool we utilized. We also experimented with stepping out of human frameworks and writing from an animal’s perspective, as well as with using a utopian lens to try problem solving on the page rather than just imagining worst-case scenarios. It’s all about figuring out how to distill environmental concepts that can, for most people, be intimidating, overwhelming, or boring, but that are so important to make part of our everyday conversations.”