beth, Author at Writers Rebel

We don’t wake up at 5:14am and check the news to see if we’re at nuclear war. We don’t go back to sleep. We don’t read Putin-expert Fiona Hill’s article ‘Yes, He Would’. We don’t blame friends for dropping out of WhatsApp groups (we can’t, they’ve left). We don’t spend an hour leaving Google […]

Notes from Deep Time: A Journey Through Our Past and Future Worlds | Helen Gordon

18th February 2022

[/su_column] ‘A terrific book, especially clarifying on the Anthropocene in context. I loved the especially eye-opening last chapter on the deep future, on the disposal of nuclear waste and the human failing to […]

The Electric BlanketFernanda Eberstadt

17th February 2022

I was born in New York in 1960, an era when people—Americans, especially—still believed in the modern. My grandparents were wild about gadgets: at Sunday lunch, my father’s father—whose teasing always carried a whiff of terror—liked to chase his grandchildren with his electric carving knife; when we went to stay with my maternal grandmother, […]

Listen: Parables of Nutmegs and GenocideAmitav Ghosh

17th February 2022

Amitav Ghosh is an influential Indian writer and environmental thinker who has won many honours for his fiction. A former academic, he’s the author of several substantial works of non-fiction, including The Great Derangement, an exploration of literature’s failure to address the climate and ecological emergency. His new work, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in […]

The Month of Emergencies – poemRebecca Faulkner

10th February 2022

7.9 inches of rain fell in Central Park last night dead cicadas on the crosswalk their bodies bunched in brittle knots sticky candy sky bright with grief branches submerged by the weight of our silence a letter unread a door closed firmly & […]

Duino – poemPatrick Mackie

10th February 2022

Whether you can get there from here or wherever depends on whether you are there already, on whether you will find that you are already standing amidst the outspread hands of its stones, and their misty grey dawns, on whether indeed the arcs and folds of that sky really can make all location moot […]

Diver Overview – PoemSebastian Schloessingk

10th February 2022

The Great Barrier Reef diver/cameraman ‘cried in my mask’, to see the bleaching. Mankind is beginning to take creaky baby steps towards being able to live forever. Just when there’s no more forever to live in. There is a shock that sidles from the phrase ‘humans were rare,’ as applied to time in […]

Shadwell Three: Phil Kingston’s Defence StatementPhil Kingston

3rd February 2022

Phil Kingston, 85, was one of three Christians on trial in January 2021 after they stopped a train at Shadwell Station in London in 2019. Two people stood on top of the train while Phil superglued himself to the side of the train. All three were acquitted. Here are some extracts from the defence […]

The Vicar, The Priest and The Former Probation OfficerJessica Townsend

3rd February 2022

A vicar, a priest and an elderly former probation officer sat on a train. Not in a train, you understand: on it. It sounds like the beginning of a joke but it’s not. Far from it. These are the facts that were established at the beginning of a court case in which three people […]

Q&A with Laura Jean McKayLaura Jean McKay

3rd February 2022

Laura Jean McKay is the author of The Animals in That Country, which in her home of Australia won the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction. The novel then won the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award Science Fiction Book of the Year. Here she discusses with Alex Lockwood […]