News from Robin Kirk
The Bond is on Kindle sale this week for 99 cents. If you have friends who NEED this book, please let them know. Also, if you’ve read The Bond, please leave a review on Amazon.
What I’m Writing
After I turned in Book II of “The Bond” series, I turned my hand to non-fiction. I’ve been working on a human rights book that looks at how we can use the past to better our future. I’ve worked on this issue in Northern Ireland, Chile, South Africa, Argentina, Hungary — and in Durham, where I live. I believe we need to foster a true reckoning with the past — warts and all — and use it to better chart where we want to go.
In Chile, for example, the government has helped build a “Museum of Memory” that presents some of the stories of people detained, tortured, and executed by the government. Previously, these stories were hidden or erased. Not only do Chileans and school children go to see the exhibits. The Museum has become an important tourist destination.
In Argentina, similar attention has led to the recovery of clandestine sites used to torture suspected dissidents. Often, these sites were in everyday spots: a municipal bus garage, for instance, or a farmhouse on a city’s outskirts. Groups like Memoria Abierta have mapped sites that were destroyed or evacuated, helping preserve the memory of what happened.
In the book, I argue that this is essential work and a foundation of any effort to promote social justice. We have to be able to talk about the whole past, warts and all, to truly build justice. In the United States, that means, among other things, talking more deeply about the abuses of our past, including slavery, the Native American genocide, and violent white supremacy (plug: if you haven’t read the New York Times’s 1619 project, you have your reading set for the weekend).
But these questions aren’t just or even mostly about political or national issues. Fundamentally, they connect with everyone individually. In our lives, we all have stories that are difficult, that we might want to hide or that we’re ashamed of. I also use my own past to unpack how hard stories shape the way we live.
I was writing the concluding chapter when I found my thoughts drifting to my other writing: science fiction. Like many, I enjoy reading about stories of what people would do after some catastrophe. The genre of dystopia or post-apocalyptic fiction has been around for most of human history. We even get the word “apocalypse” from the Christian Bible.
But as I dug deeper, I found that the Biblical apocalypse doesn’t mean the end of the world. The Bible’s Greek text uses the term apokalypsis, translated as "unveiling" or "revelation,” not catastrophe (therefore the “Book of Revelations,” not apocalypse). So “apocalypse” is better understood as a dramatic new way of seeing.
It’s what happens in this last portion of the New Testament that gives the modern definition of apocalypse its meaning. The figures of the four horsemen, the seven seals, and the red dragon, among others, have been interpreted in many ways — as the literal end of the world, as allegory, or as commentary on actual 1st-century events.
Where I started getting stuck in the writing is on how to include this idea of telling the whole story of the past while we are all facing the very real crisis -- or apocalypse -- of a climate rapidly changing because of human activity. Most apocalyptic fiction gives us a hammer blow of change: the alien invasion of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the utter desolation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Starting in the 1950s, nuclear obliteration animated books like Neil Shute’s On the Beach and Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah. Now, as scholar Chanda Phelan has shown, books tend to totally avoid the cause of catastrophe. It’s taken for granted that we’ve driven ourselves straight over a very real cliff.
Will human history continue past this century? I wonder if it’s no longer about what histories we’ll tell. It’s about any histories surviving. By now, the Golden Record packed onto Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977 is beyond our solar system. Will that be what’s left? When you look at what’s on it, already, it feels like those elements — a breast-feeding mother, a tree with daffodils around it, a Navajo night chant, the Sydney Opera House — are slipping through our fingers.
Sorry for the downer -- but if there's any way out of our current predicament, it's by acknowledging that it exists and taking action. I've been so heartened by the work of the Parkland students. In the face of GOP indifference, March for our Lives just released an ambitious, smart, and totally doable #peaceplan. Help them out by donating (like I did), telling Congress to support, and spreading the word.
Upcoming events
I’ll be presenting at the September SCBWI-Carolinas conference in Charlotte. I’m really looking forward to being with my tribe: writers and readers!
Photo of the month
The great honey harvest of 2019 (in my kitchen)
That’s it for July — thank you for reading and please don’t be strangers. Feel free to contact me through my website, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. If you liked this post, please consider sharing. Happy reading!