This August marked the centennial birthday of Mavis Gallant (1922–2014), who is known primarily for her short stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker and later turned into acclaimed collections, and two novels and nonfiction essays. Somehow, I’d never read Mavis Gallant when I was very young, even though we were both born in Montreal, and I am fond of writing from my home city. Of course, I’d heard her name, but that was about it. Her work was never assigned in any of my English literature classes at McGill. I even took a year-long course on Canadian women writers, but her stories were not touched upon. I do believe, though, we find writers when we need them most. I was in my mid-twenties when I heard her voice on a car radio. She was talking about how all she had ever wanted to do in life was write. She went off to Paris so she could do only that. It was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. I went to the library and checked out a pile of her collections and never looked back.
Memory is slippery. With each recall it is altered. The context you remember from colours it. The narratives you’ve told to make sense of it colour it, like a drop of food dye in a cup of water. The identity you imagine for yourself colours it. This memory is persistent. I can feel the heat on my face. I can hear the stranger describing his utopian building plans, touring us around the construction site, pointing at a wooden frame that, with drywall, would become a bedroom, and the holes where windows would be. I watch myself watching as the stranger cries. In the memory I don’t have the language or tools to understand what is happening, but now I understand that this was grief.
Ecological grief can be triggered by the loss of a species, an animal, part of a forest, a cherished place, a river, a home, future ecologies, past ecologies. The grief can be acute, anticipatory, vicarious, cumulative. It is connected to a cluster of a newly defined set of emotions: eco-anxiety, eco-panic, eco-trauma, all resulting from our personal relationship to the natural world. I think of this memory as a demarcation, a transition between a time before I understood the idea of ecological grief to a time after.
Off the California seaboard, ocean and sky create a phenomenon that has long defined life along the coast.
It rushes through the Golden Gate, shaping a city with its bracing chill and haunting charm.
Now, some scientists fear that a timeless companion is fading away as the world warms.