Time’s Up, Dystopia! A Call for Climate Change Novels and Memoirs
By Joey Garcia
We’ve been warned about doomscrolling, the practice of spending excessive time on social media absorbing negative news. Doomscrolling is considered responsible for some harmful psychophysiological issues, especially in young adults.
In Doombingeing: Why Dark TV Helps Us Cope with a World of Real Terrors, the TV correspondent for Vanity Fair, Joy Press, suggests we’re doombingeing dystopian entertainment to process unresolved grief and fears. In a nutshell: We know things are bad but—after immersing ourselves in an apocalyptic story—we realize things could be worse.
Screenwriter, director, and LGBTQIA activist, Dustin Lance Black, has a hot take on this topic. He told Vanity Fair: “Subconsciously, (audiences are) like, I want to watch something that’s reflecting back to me what I’m feeling, and maybe it has an answer, maybe there’s hope. Or at the very least, I’m not alone in my anxieties.”
Back in the 20th century, what we now call bingeing was labeled a marathon. As in: I spent the weekend watching a Law & Order marathon. So here we are in the 21st century, evoking a marathon to face the climate crisis sprinting toward us.
Enter Thrutopia
On July 4, I was the only American among 50 women writers from the U.K. who had gathered on Zoom to learn about thrutopia, an empowering, new literary genre. A thrutopian novel or memoir is one that shows us a way through the climate crisis and other major crises facing our planet. In a 2016 Huffpost blog, philosopher Robert Read first proposed thrutopia as an alternative to the overused genres of utopia and dystopia. Manda Scott, a Scottish novelist, and healer picked up the banner and has been gathering creatives across the U.K. and Europe who are ready to apply their art to heal the planet. Scott, the New York Times bestselling author of Boudica, has launched a master class and think tank to help writers explore thrutopian ideas, characters, and story arcs.
Thrutopia on this side of the pond
At the 2022 San Francisco Writers Conference, author Aya de Leon announced that she’s heading a new fiction imprint at SheWritesPress. The imprint, FightingChanceBooks.com, is seeking proposals for novels about people taking positive action to fight climate change.
After Aya made her announcement, I told her about the thrutopia movement underway overseas. Aya hadn’t heard about what was happening in Europe, nor had she heard about the thrutopia genre. Aya told SheWrites publisher Brooke Warner and —chills all around! We realized that our paths were unofficially uniting to boost thrutopia’s profile in the U.S. SheWritesPress is ready.
SheWritesPress is a hybrid publisher, meaning that authors invest their own funds to help cover the cost of printing and distributing their books. FightingChanceBooks is not hybrid. It operates like a traditional small press for authors whose manuscripts are selected. Submit your climate change novel proposal to: [email protected]
Intrigued, but need more information to help demystify the genre? Here’s mine: Utopias are a kind of heaven; dystopias are hell. A thrutopia reveals a path between the extremes. In Buddhism, the middle way is a path of serenity and contentment that exists between the extremes of indulgence and asceticism. The middle way is a thrutopia.
An earlier version of this article appeared in More Joy!—Joey’s museletter for writers, activists, and other creatives. Submit your email here to get it delivered free, along with a gift.
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Joey Garcia is an editor and author platform coach. Her clients have been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian magazine, Ms. magazine, CNN, and The Tamron Hall Show, among others. Joey has been featured in HuffPost, USA Today, Deutsche Welle, KVIE public television, Global Woman TV Sweden, Australia’s Ticker News and on Slate’s Dear Prudence podcast. In 2017, she established the first-ever literary fellowship in Belize, her birthplace. Alongside literary agents, she leads retreats in Belize for writers from around the world.
I am so glad that you are introducing this idea of a thrutopia to this community. I think we can find evidence all around us of positive actions that people are taking. We need to look around and see the urban farms that are being planted, the farmers markets that are thriving, the parks that are being developed and the many many people who can limit their commute by working at home. Kudos to SheWrites Press for creating FightingChanceBooks.