The Craft of Speculative Fiction: “Writing Ecosystems”

Nobody writes in a vacuum. Everybody has a body and everybody has a context. And once in the world, a body of writing travels and collides with other writing and bodies, too. In this talk, Elvia Wilk will discuss examples of “ecosystems” literature that explicitly portray the complex (often unfathomable) relationships between individuals and the planet. Wilk will describe how she approaches writing nonfiction that doesn’t foreground herself but does situate her subject position, and introduce the concept of “fan-nonfiction” as a tentative term for this approach. Lastly, Wilk will speak about the afterlives of texts as they enter and alter existing ecosystems.

Elvia Wilk is a writer living in New York. She is the author of the novel Oval (2019) and the essay collection Death by Landscape (2022). She contributes to publications like The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Atlantic, Granta, n+1, Bookforum, Artforum, Frieze, and 4Columns, and is a contributing editor at e-flux journal. She has taught at institutions like Eugene Lang College, City College of New York, the University of the Arts Berlin, and the Royal Academy Copenhagen.

This event is colloquium credit eligible.