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Jenny Offill is the author of the cli-fi novel ''Weather'' (forthcoming in February 2020), She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low residency program at Queens University.
Jenny Offill is the author of the cli-fi novel ''Weather'' (forthcoming in February 2020), She lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low residency program at Queens University.
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Jenny Offill writes a cli-fi novel and it's going to make some literary waves upon publication
Amazon：Weather: A novel (9780385351102) Jenny Offill
Notes and Quotes from literary blogger
Danny Bloom at
Offill’s biography: her rents were school teachers, and throughout her childhood she moved around the country, living in Massachusetts, California, Indiana, and, eventually, North Carolina, where she attended high school and college, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After graduating, she worked a number of odd jobs like many beginning writers do to pay the rent.
She published her first novel when she was 30. She is now 50.
Weather centers on a librarian named Lizzie who is raising a son with her husband and caring for a brother with a history of drug addiction. Over the course of the novel, Lizzie, who begins working for a former mentor who operates a podcast about futurism, becomes increasingly fixated on the climate crisis and the doomsday preparation movement. Her anxieties only accelerate when Donald Trump is elected president.
Jordan Pavlin, Offill’s editor at Knopf, told PW that Weather is “ambitious in its themes” and that “one of its most thrilling seductions is the way it uses the anxiety we are all experiencing in relation to the current climate—both literally and figuratively—as a plot engine.”
Offill says she was inspired to address climate change in part by her conversations with her best friend, novelist Lydia Millet, who she met in college and who has written about environmental issues for the New York Times and who addresses those themes in her own fiction.
“For years Lydia and I have been talking about climate change and cli-fi, and at a certain point I thought, ‘I need to know more about this,’ ” Offill told PW.
Weather is told through frenetic fragments, with the fragments meant to mimic weather. “People always say, ‘It’s an atmospheric book,’ ” Offill told PW. “I wanted to see what it would be like to try to write atmospherically.”
The book, she says, is “meant to swirl” as if its paragraphs were clouds.
Its atomized form is intended to congeal into an uneasy whole, mirroring the challenge of political movements, in which individuals must find a way to act in concert.
If Offill arrived at any wisdom by the end of writing Weather, it’s the wisdom captured in a quote the protagonist’s husband posts above his desk: “You are not some disinterested bystander / Exert yourself.”
With Weather, Offill hopes to do just that, according to PW's reviewer Daniel Lefferts.
PS:
Jenny Offill explains herself here:
Why I Write About Climate Change
For a long time, I let my best friend Lydia Millet worry it for the both of us. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in it or wasn’t worried about it, I just had no idea what I should do. And besides I was a hypocrite. I liked to eat meat and drive my car and fly in planes. Who was I to hold forth on any of this?
I also suspected it was dull as dishwater to write about these things. Weren’t most political novels tedious and didactic? I’d written about extinction in my first novel, but that was animals and birds, not some slow-moving, weirdly boring carbon emissions apocalypse.
But my friend, Lydia Millet, who has written 12 novels to my 3 always wrote about these things and somehow managed to make questions about the fate of the earth and the creatures it contained incredibly interesting. Years ago, she had moved to the Sonoran desert to work at a non-profit devoted to endangered species protection. Because of this she always knew the worst news before anyone else did.
Ok, doom and gloom me, I would say and she’d tell me a little about how the new climate was driving grizzly bears north to mate with polar bears or how thawing permafrost might release long forgotten plagues. It was fascinating but also abstract to me.
Then in I read an article by the well-known Australian environmentalist Paul Gilding who frequently lectures on sustainability. It contained this section describing what it was like to be at an environmental conference with climatologists.
Wait, I thought. People have always talked about the end of the world, but you know who hasn’t been in that end-timer bunch before?
Scientists.
Why are the scientists so scared?
I wanted to know and so I went down the climate change rabbit hole. Seven years later, I’m still trying to get out.
—
As we begin this critical new year in the fight against climate change, Greenpeace is giving over space on our channels to authors and artists working within the climate crisis. Acclaimed author Lauren Groff prompted artists and thinkers to write essays and art about climate change for us, and so every day this month we’ll have a new piece from that project that addresses, in some form, what it means to create in the midst of this crisis. The forces fueling climate change have the most powerful networks in history pumping out their devastating propaganda at unimaginable scale. It’s going to take everything we have from all of us – imagination equal to the task – to create the climate we’ll need to stop the crisis.
We need these voices and these visions, but they won’t be enough. We need you, too. We encourage you to check back on the Climate Visionaries Artists’ Project every day to see what’s new, and to join the conversation by sharing your work on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and tagging it #ClimateVisionaries.
EXTRA NOTES:
Born in 1968, she grew up the only child of two private-school English teachers, moving around the US from Massachusetts to California to Indiana to North Carolina, going to school with children from much wealthier backgrounds. “For so much of my life money was always the thing, I might have had time but I didn’t have money.” When she moved to New York as an adult, the wealth and privilege was “of another order. I couldn’t figure out how all these people were surviving on the salary of, say, a fact-checker. And then eventually one of them would have a party and you’d go to their house and think, ‘Oh … everybody has secret money.’”
PS:
Jenny Offill explains herself here:
Why I Write About Climate Change
For a long time, I let my best friend Lydia Millet worry it for the both of us. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in it or wasn’t worried about it, I just had no idea what I should do. And besides I was a hypocrite. I liked to eat meat and drive my car and fly in planes. Who was I to hold forth on any of this?
I also suspected it was dull as dishwater to write about these things. Weren’t most political novels tedious and didactic? I’d written about extinction in my first novel, but that was animals and birds, not some slow-moving, weirdly boring carbon emissions apocalypse.
But my friend, Lydia Millet, who has written 12 novels to my 3 always wrote about these things and somehow managed to make questions about the fate of the earth and the creatures it contained incredibly interesting. Years ago, she had moved to the Sonoran desert to work at a non-profit devoted to endangered species protection. Because of this she always knew the worst news before anyone else did.
Ok, doom and gloom me, I would say and she’d tell me a little about how the new climate was driving grizzly bears north to mate with polar bears or how thawing permafrost might release long forgotten plagues. It was fascinating but also abstract to me.
Then in I read an article by the well-known Australian environmentalist Paul Gilding who frequently lectures on sustainability. It contained this section describing what it was like to be at an environmental conference with climatologists.
It’s like belonging to a secret society. Conversations held in quiet places, in cafes, bars and academic halls. Conversations held with furrowed brows and worried eyes. Conversations that sometimes give you goose bumps and shivers, and a sense of the surreal — is this conversation really happening? This is what it’s felt like over the past few years, to spend time with some of the world’s leading thinkers and scientists on issues around climate change and sustainability. In public this group generally puts a positive, while still urgent interpretation of their views… But in private, often late at night, when we reflect on what we really think and wonder if the battle is lost, it’s a different conversation. The talk goes to the potential for self-reinforcing runaway loops and for civilization’s collapse. We discuss geopolitical breakdown, mass starvation and what earth would be like with just a few hundred million people.
Scientists.
Why are the scientists so scared?
I wanted to know and so I went down the climate change rabbit hole. Seven years later, I’m still trying to get out.
—
As we begin this critical new year in the fight against climate change, Greenpeace is giving over space on our channels to authors and artists working within the climate crisis. Acclaimed author Lauren Groff prompted artists and thinkers to write essays and art about climate change for us, and so every day this month we’ll have a new piece from that project that addresses, in some form, what it means to create in the midst of this crisis. The forces fueling climate change have the most powerful networks in history pumping out their devastating propaganda at unimaginable scale. It’s going to take everything we have from all of us – imagination equal to the task – to create the climate we’ll need to stop the crisis.
We need these voices and these visions, but they won’t be enough. We need you, too. We encourage you to check back on the Climate Visionaries Artists’ Project every day to see what’s new, and to join the conversation by sharing your work on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and tagging it #ClimateVisionaries.
EXTRA NOTES:
Born in 1968, she grew up the only child of two private-school English teachers, moving around the US from Massachusetts to California to Indiana to North Carolina, going to school with children from much wealthier backgrounds. “For so much of my life money was always the thing, I might have had time but I didn’t have money.” When she moved to New York as an adult, the wealth and privilege was “of another order. I couldn’t figure out how all these people were surviving on the salary of, say, a fact-checker. And then eventually one of them would have a party and you’d go to their house and think, ‘Oh … everybody has secret money.’”
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