I see younger writers “building careers,” and I have to wonder what sort of career it will be – how long the building will stand. Even for those who are very successful in terms of readership. Let’s say there’s 15-20 years left before the climatic (and climactic) SHTF moment arrives, when food and water scarcity, large-scale housing scarcity, and concomitant hyperinflation (or unemployment and deflation) ensues.* Nobody is going to buy books or magazines (or rather, even fewer people will buy them than now). “Streaming content” may still be available, so you could write for its providers. But that, too, will grow more expensive as everything else (electricity, ISPs, hardware) does, too.
One could imagine some very low-wattage kind of publication – probably text-only. Or a kind of samizdat network. Or even a Fahrenheit 451 set-up. These might be particularly attractive options, given that fascism seems to be creeping back all over the world – in response to insecurity spawned in part by climate change. But in any case, even the currently paltry numbers of readers, even in the global north, goes way, way down. (Indeed, the human population may go way, way down.) All of which brings up the question: does writing (as some theorists would have it) presuppose a reader – and language, a receiver? If so, what does it mean to write for a reader whose existence is purely hypothetical? Maybe that is what all readers are, to a writer. Those are much more fundamental questions than that of the shape the publishing world will take (if it exists) two decades from now. But I do think they’re the starting points for re-conceiving our ideas of writing, reading, author, and audience, in the era of Massive Climate Uncertainty. At the very least, I think, one has to decide whether or not one conceives of one’s audience as particularly (or even moderately) large. In that case, it may be that you’re like the band on the Titanic, and you just need to keep playing until the water covers your instrument. If you’re truly “writing-to-be-writing,” maybe you should consciously refrain from attempting to publish, in order to be the writer of tomorrow, today. Most of us, I think, fall in between. For us, esp. poets, paper and print are probably not the way to go, except to obtain institutional rewards (where available – print still carries the cachet). It’s a huge waste of money, trees, and energy (Wm. T. Vollman claims it costs more BTUs to make a pound of paper than a pound of concrete). Better to work with some combination of informal on-line (for your global subculture or virtual coterie) and read/recited or circulated by hand (for your local circle). The local and the immediate may be all we’re concerned with, 20 yrs. hence. ------------ * This may be generous. I just read about a report that claims several of the biggest cities in India will run out of clean water by 2020 (i.e., next year). Stay tuned.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |