Join us at Finnriver for a reading and discussion with Miranda Mellis, author of a recently published climate fiction novel, Crocosmia; a revelatory novel (or parable) of art, adventure, and radical politics, set in a world on the precipice.
A philosophical fable, Crocosmia centers on Maya as she recollects the “great turning”—a moment of radical social and ecological change effected in part by the art of her mother, Jane. As Maya recalls her upbringing—from a commune run by anarchist nuns to a time of rural isolation before her mother’s disappearance—Mellis’s prose gorgeously conjures a life defined by revolutionary thought and action and the interplay and tension between family life and political commitment.
At once a fantasy, a handbook to political thought, and a work of eco-fiction, this lush novel published by Nightboat Books, meditates on how, in a world on the precipice, dreams of communal care can bloom.
Finnriver co-founder Crystie Kisler will moderate the discussion with Miranda and invites community members to order the book from a local bookstore (like Imprint or Winter Texts) and to join us for an important inquiry into how art and the creative life can transform the future!
Miranda Mellis is also the author of a book-length lyric essay The Revolutionary (forthcoming, Nightboat Books 2027); three novellas, The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry; and a short-story collection, None of This Is Real. Poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks include Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. She is the co-author of two books of dialogue: The Instead with Emily Abendroth and Passing Through with Rick Moody (forthcoming from Solid Objects/ Wesleyan University Press, 2027). With Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, she was a founding editor at The Encyclopedia Project. She has been an artist-in-residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts and Millay Colony and has been the recipient of an NEH grant and the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest where she is a professor at The Evergreen State College.
Her website: mirandamellis.com. She has an intermittent Substack as well: https://youareinlovewiththeimpossible.substack.com/