I also underwent counseling during which I was told about this lunacy specific to the Iqaluit run, which manifested itself as hallucinations — even mass hysteria — featuring one common theme: the bears speak. Not in husky-like complaints but in English, with clear diction and a slight but very strange accent. I was shown film of exit interviews given by the crew of the infamous Marigold immediately after they landed at Ushuaia, conducted in a secure facility. The crew maintained that not only did the bears communicate in English, several bears had acted as Able Seamen, capable of performing routine duties, such as taking on lookout shifts and anchor watch. –– from “Honeymoons in Temporary Locations”
“Experts See Eco-Disaster for These Polar Bears” shouted a headline in the New York Times recently. The story says polar bears in the Southern Hudson Bay, an “indicator species,” could go extinct as early as the 2030s because the sea ice that helps them hunt for food is thinning.
This doesn’t surprise Minnesotan Ashley Shelby. Her new book, “Honeymoons in Temporary Locations,” begins with polar bears in the story “Muri.” It’s narrated by the captain of an icebreaker bringing the last pod of Baffin Bay polar bears to the coast of Antarctica in an attempt to keep them alive. The bears, who can talk, take over the ship under the leadership of the bear Muri, and turn it back north. They know they will die of starvation but they want to do so in their ancestral home.
“That’s one of the challenges of writing something speculative,” Shelby said of this intersection of fiction and reality. “It takes years to write a book and the speculative becomes documentary. These are strange times, strange and uncanny and hard to make sense of.”
“Honeymoons in Temporary Locations,” a story collection Shelby will launch this week in Minneapolis, is one in the growing category of climate change fiction dubbed Cli-fi. There’s debate in the literary world about whether Cli-fi is a genre or a spin-off of science fiction. Shelby, who worked in New York publishing, feels it’s a “problematic term” that creates barriers for readers to find the work.
“My argument at this point is that Cli-fi is realistic fiction,” she said. “It’s not a term of art; it’s a term of convenience used in publishing, like ‘chick lit.’ I would say to the reader that I acknowledge climate change is not part of your regular thinking and these stories might be weird to you. These are not your traditional stories for the most part, taking you to places you might not have expected or even wanted to go. I want the reader to walk away thinking ‘Wow, that really resonated with me,’ or ‘I hated this book.’ I ask them to think about it.”
Shelby acknowledges she never thought she’d write anything like “Muri,” inspired by Herman Melville’s 1855 novella “Benito Cereno,” about an 18th-century slave revolt on a Spanish slave ship.
Besides talking bears, her book is made up of humorous, horrific, satirical stories told not in the usual narrative style but in imaginative ways — a travel brochure for “impact cruises” of endangered cities, menus (including Saddle of Squirrel in Merlot Sauce), medical patient impact studies, a Support Group for Recently Displaced Millionaires, a podcast titled Climate Crime Files. The only thing that hasn’t changed is bureaucracy, as shown by the story “Federal Eligibility Questionnaire from the Temporary Aid to Climate-Impacted Deserving Poor Benefits Program.”
One unsettling thread is emails from staff of a marketing campaign for Climafeel, a drug in development that treats the disease Solastalgia, a term you will be hearing with increasing frequency as our world literally heats up. Environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term in 2005 to describe the specific kind of grief human beings experience as the natural world changes around them, a grief that anticipates a separation while you are still in the place you know you will leave. Or lose.
“Albrecht’s brilliant neologism haunts and disturbs me,” Shelby writes in her acknowledgments. “In these pages I’ve processed his concept by imagining solastalgia into an illness the world tries to cure, a disease to be eliminated, a mental illness to be treated. But grief is not pathological. It’s the inevitable endpoint of love.”
Shelby isn’t surprised therapists are reporting increased anxiety in their clients.
“When I got finished copies of my book I saw this was about solastalgia, written by someone who has it,” she said. “Biophilia (the urge to affiliate with other forms of life) is also a real thing. We have something bone-deep in us that reaches out to the natural world and creatures in it. As we see the connection starting to fray because of what’s happening in the world it impacts our mental health and experience of living in the world. That’s what I am feeling. I am not alone. This is not free-floating depression. Something is happening.”
The last generation
Shelby, 46, lives in an old farmhouse in Shorewood near Lake Minnetonka with her husband, Emmanuel (Manny) Benites, son Hudson, 17, and Josephine, 14, who prefers to be called Joey
On their acre of property Shelby has a garden “with so many little winged things.” Her favorite books growing up were “Watership Down” and “The Incredible Journey,” which gave her access to thoughts and emotions of animals. Now one of the things that bothers her most is “how the blameless fellow creatures are trying to make sense of what climate change is doing to them.”
Ashley’s family lives not far from the Excelsior home of her parents, Don and Barbara Shelby.
“I was born in Texas but I am a Minnesotan through and through,” she says. “My sisters (Lacy and Delta) and I were raised in Minneapolis’ Linden Hills area when it was mixed-income, before it became a wealthy enclave. It’s the place I go to in my mind sometimes and think of the good times. My generation is the last to have free rein, turned out of the house on our bikes, back at dinnertime.”
After graduating from Hopkins High School, Shelby earned a degree in journalism from Indiana University-Bloomington, and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. Her first book, “Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City” (Minnesota Historical Society Press/Borealis Books, 2003), was nonfiction about the historic 1997 flood in Grand Forks, N.D. It is dedicated to Don Shelby, Emmy Award-winning retired WCCO reporter/anchor, who taught Ashley the importance of research and accuracy.
“My dad was a big figure in my life growing up,” she recalls.
Don Shelby, 77, is also an author. His book “The Season Never Ends: Wins, Losses and the Wisdom of the Game” was inspired by his life-long love of basketball. He admitted in a phone chat that he is still feeling “a little grief” after culling about a third of his formerly 10,000-book library. One he definitely kept is “Honeymoons in Temporary Locations.”
“It’s an incredible book. Important stuff, literature that changes minds.” he said. “It’s not dystopian in the sci-fi sense. What would be considered talk of the future ends up being true. Ashley has this Nostradamus piece of her that interests me.”
Shelby takes no credit for Ashley’s writing (“she got her mother’s brains”) but he does credit her growing up in a household watching news and being around her dad’s colleagues including Dave Nimmer, godfather to Ashley and her sisters. The Shelby daughters also saw their dad, who loves the outdoors, introduce environmental/climate change reporting years before anyone took it seriously, with some 800 stories aired on WCCO.
Don Shelby has worked hard at his commitment to the Earth as a volunteer helping mitigate the damage already done by rising temperatures. He participated in a project to reforest the 52-mile Mississippi River National Park that replaced dying or dead ash trees with species more accustomed to the climate farther south because trees are moving north. He has attended a climate change meeting in Oslo presented by the Nobel Peace Prize Committee as well as belonging to Climate Science Rapid Response Team, a match-making service to connect scientists with lawmakers and the media. He also serves on the board of Minnesota-based Climate Generation, which believes in the power of youth to have an impact on the systems perpetuating the climate crisis.
Writing for Beno
After Ashley wrote “Red River Rising,” she turned to fiction with her 2017 comic novel “South Pole Station” (University of Minnesota Press paperback), about a person who joins the National Science Foundation’s Artist & Writers program in Antarctica that becomes the center of global controversy when a fringe scientist claims climate change is a hoax.
“I am not a scientist,” Shelby says. “I wanted to be one but my mind didn’t trend that way. It takes me a lot more reads of scientific material to suck out meaning. Sometimes I wish I were better at science, but I’m glad I am not. I can utilize abstraction and imagination and creativity in a way that scientists cannot do day-to-day.”
After “South Pole Station” was published, Shelby started another book set in the climate-affected world, but it didn’t go well:
“I had difficulty using the tools I’d used for ‘South Pole Station.’ They weren’t up to the task of narrative, framework, characters and dialogue. Now I know it was (because of) my grief at what had happened and what will happen. I started having strange thoughts after reading ‘Benito Cereno,’ Melville’s masterpiece. For some reason, I thought, ‘What if it was bears?’ They are the most salient image used about climate change, a trope we look away from because it’s so upsetting. But I dismissed the idea as too big an ask of the reader, too ridiculous. No one would accept this premise.”
That changed when she started telling a story about talking bears to Beno, her son’s friend.
“He was only 11 years old, but he looked at me seriously, nodding, and said, ‘This is going to be bestseller,’ ” Shelby recalled. “That conversation made me go back to my desk and write ‘Muri.’ I didn’t think I would ever show it to anyone, but I would write it for Beno who saw something in it.”
To Shelby’s surprise, when “Muri” was published as a limited-run chapbook in Radix Media’s Futures: A Science Fiction Series, people not only read it, but it was adopted in university courses teaching climate fiction.
“I am so grateful for the generous readers of speculative fiction who wanted to know more about these bears,” she said. “This filled me with happiness and joy. It allowed me to have the courage to process grief about climate change in a way my brain was telling me I could do it, not with traditional forms but telling the story in your head as you are experiencing it without worrying about narrative form.”
The kids will understand
“This book is written in a way that will appeal to younger people,” Shelby says. “A story about a podcast resonates with them. Marketing documents for a drug resonates with a generation that has come to be suspicious of the pharma industry.”
Shelby’s concern for the confusion in some young people also runs through her stories. She’s writing about the in-between generation, youngsters who never knew the world in which their parents lived. As one character says, “How do you explain to a child who has never experienced the normal contours of spring why many adults preferred death than a world without it?”
“This generation knows things are changing,” Shelby says. She sees the toll climate change takes in her own family.
“My daughter has asthma and has difficulty breathing,” she says. “During soccer season in the summer she has to bring an inhaler and separate medication. Asthma rates are skyrocketing. For my daughter it’s always been like this. My and my dad’s generations don’t see it, but my kids see it clearly and they will understand how to address it in maybe uncomfortable ways. These climate change activists who deface artwork and block traffic are telling us in all different ways ‘this is the future.’ They are relying on us, but the people in power, the ruling class, are foisting this on us, making us feel guilty for using fuel or plastic straws. We are beholden to CEOs who create rocket ships and pay no attention to what they caused. It gets to me. That’s the emotion distilled in these stories..”
In the end, Shelby returns to our longings: “Solastalgia exists because we love Nature, and as long as we still love Nature, there is hope.”
Honeymoons in Temporary Locations
What: Ashley Shelby launches “Honeymoons in Temporary Locations” in conversation with Eric Holthaus, a St. Paul-based leading journalist on all things weather and climate change who has written for the Wall Street Journal, Slate, Grist and The Correspondent, where he currently covers our interconnected relationship with the climate.
When: 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 25
Where: Moon Palace Books, 3032 Minnehaha Ave., Mpls.
Admission: Free (masks required in the store)
Publisher/price: University of Minnesota Press ($22.95)
Information: Moonpalacebooks.com/events
For readers who want to dive into more climate fiction, here are titles that most often appear on reading lists.
- “American War,” Omar El Akkad
- “Barkskins,” Annie Proulx
- “Blackfish City,” Sam J. Miller
- “The Drowned World,” J.G. Ballard
- “Flight Behavior,” Barbara Kingsolver
- “How Beautiful We Were,” Imbolo Mbue
- “The Ministry for the Future,” Kim Stanley Robinson
- “Parable of the Sower,” Octavia E. Butler
- “The Overstory,” Richard Powers
- “The Water Knife,” Paolo Bacigalupi
- “War Girls,” Tochi Onyebuchi
- “The Swan Book,” Alexis Wright
- “Tentacle,” Rita Indiana
- “Oryx and Crake,” “The Year of the Flood,” “MaddAddam” trilogy, Margaret Atwood
