downthefallfullpassagain

My friend and colleague remarks to me over dinner that islands make visible what it means, or might mean, to live with limitations. On an island it is not always expected that what you desire is at hand. Here on Terschelling, an island in the Waddenzee, Netherlands, it’s normal to make do with what you have. Island-ness, I say, is the embodiment of salvage culture. When you use a broken ship’s mast as the topline for your humble roof, you are solarpunking it with the sea. We go to speak with an islander who leads school groups to pick up trash on the northern beach. Under his knit cap and mustache he has a character deeply attuned to plastics and pollutants, and he is adamant that these represent the largest threats to humans and nonhumans alike. We are standing 150 km down along the coastal current from Rotterdam and just a few kilometers from a major shipping lane where cargo routinely gets tipped overboard. Terschelling, he says, is a place where ‘international rubbish’ washes up: ‘...

Huge thanks to the journal SHIMA for picking up and publishing my first article, adapted from my masters’ thesis work on labor issues and climate adaptation in Venice, Italy.  I went into this research expecting to work on a small conflict between workers and citizen-activists. What ended up in the article was instead something much bigger: workers telling me, in recorded interviews but also in off-the-record hints and implications, that the Italian state is robbing them of their future. The one thing that I wish everyone in Venice takes away from this article is how strongly the lagoon features in the future imaginary of those who work with or on the water. MOSE workers mix their own fates with the fate of the lagoon, often telling me that a non-responsive government will make the lagoon, and their jobs too, disappear. Sea-level rise is not just a technical issue for these technicians. They are among the first, in Venice, to feel the enclosure effects that a rigid project like MOS...

I’m very excited. My friend Brianna Cunliffe and I are beginning to lay the groundwork for a soft open on a micro publishing house based in Durham, New Hampshire. We will be publishing essays and anthologies on transformative futures, starting from the local and regional levels. Taking inspiration from Elizabeth Rush’s Rising , we are calling our venture Flooded Pine Press . This idea was born the day after the 2024 election. I was reeling in my apartment in Venice, having cast my absentee ballot weeks before. That day I had plans to meet my dear friend Matilda, who was in town from Helsinki, and she invited me to walk the Ponte della Libertà (Freedom Bridge, an apt name for the day of mourning) that connects the mainland to Venice. The sunny distance, with cars and trains swooping past us for all three miles of our walk over open lagoon, was ritualistic for me. Helped to focus on what’s important, what was to come, in great company. We were later lounging in the sun on Campo San Lore...

If I were the Earth asleep Laying down my mountain ridge Wanting hard to bury deep In the folds of ground-old age What do I do when stirring At the people who poke me Climb all over conferring Dig their pincers in slowly I turn over and grumble Grouse and groan I get angry Slapping out in my slumber At specks on these seabed sheets Only then do I really shout Oh my god have you no shame My rage clouds my blood gets hot Stop it — I am trying to dream Durham, New Hampshire — October 12 2024

This short story is the second in a collection of three inspired by my master's thesis research on sea level rise narrative futures in the Venice Lagoon: talk, trust, time. Nadia: 2028 The Assemblea started last year, in 2027, as a body that runs parallel to the Autorità per la Laguna. The Autorità was meant to be the public governing body that was taking over from the monopoly that the state had given to a consortium of private firms. When the transition happened a few years back, MOSE was active. At the top of the agenda were other diffuse projects of caring for, managing, healing (whatever word works for you) the lagoon. The trouble is that the collective trauma of the MOSE project on the Venice community had left a fragmented and uncoordinated response from the public. There was absolutely no clarity, and so not even a shred of trust, around what would happen next. The national government chose a public entity to consolidate the responsibilities of maintenance and management, b...

This short story is the first in a collection of three inspired by my master's thesis research on sea level rise narrative futures in the Venice Lagoon: talk, trust, time. Toporagno went out one day to collect grasses from the high mound of the tidal flat. He plodded up the shallow mucky slope and skirted a pack of friar birds to reach the top where the grasses had remained dry even in the recent stormy days. From this point he could see all the places he had ever known. Across the small channel there was the neighboring salt-flat where his den-brothers lived, and beyond that lay one where the Piovanelli ducks make their nests hidden from the terrifying raptors, and in the far distance he couldn't quite discern some shoreline that he knew was there because of the gulls who come to give news from across the northern lagoon. To his other side was the humble human city, a busy thing that barely concerned the shrews and their neighbors. Only once in a while would a small rowboat pu...