Fungus Is the Future: Kristen Gallagher & Ed Steck in Conversation at Social Text
An interview with Kristen Gallagher and Ed Steck is up at Social Text, conducted by Aaron Winslow, whose Skeleton Man Press recently published books by the writers, 85% True/Minor Ecologies and The Necro-Luminescence of Pink Mist, respectively. "They are very different books by very different writers," says Winslow. "Kristen’s 85% True/Minor Ecologies is travel memoir meets weird fiction—it’s set in Florida, so the weird gets very weird. Even worse: some, or all, of the horror described is true. Ed’s book, The Necro-Luminescence of Pink Mist, tells the story of an irradiated vapor monster through meditative images of loss, trauma, and brutal physicality. Both of these writers hit the sweet spot where genre fiction meets experimentalism—where genre form (horror, science fiction, travelogue) pushes against its own limits. In other words, where the weird gets weirder."
From their conversation:
AW: Kristen, it’s interesting that you connect the formal and generic concerns of your work with the environment that you’re writing in and about—i.e., Florida. Ed, you’re currently living in Florida, so I’m wondering if both of you could talk a bit more about how nature and the environment operate in these projects.
KG: I spend about three months of the year in Florida doing research. What first took me there was a visit to a sick friend. What brought me back was the bizarre cultural dynamics, the little-known history of Florida as a destination for itinerants—escaped slaves; people running from the Civil War; survivors of Andrew Jackson’s slaughter of native peoples; John Muir and Thoreau types; anarchists; cultists; circus “freaks”; escaped convicts; misfits of all kinds. While capital was driving west, most of Florida was still impenetrable jungle and swamp. It was a great place to hide, start over, build a new community. But when you begin looking closely, everything here ultimately leads back to the ecosystem. It’s what first brought people here, and now it’s poisoned and drowning, providing several of the most visible signs of ecological devastation in the US.
I’ve been really interested in Zora Neale Hurston and her ethnographic work in Florida. It’s clear that even back in the 1920s and 30s, she kept ending up in ecology. All the Jim Crow laborers she interviewed to collect story and song were carrying out ecological devastation at the behest of their bosses. These days the work is being performed by migrant laborers, but the dynamic is the same, and the signs of trouble are everywhere: rising tides; poisoned rivers and oceans erupting in seasonal algae blooms, causing enormous fish kills; encroaching real estate pushing endemic species to near extinction; wealthy owners of million-dollar beachfront property in Miami looking to move inland, gentrifying historic communities like Little Havana and Little Haiti.
ES: Like I mentioned earlier, for The Necro-Luminescence, I was looking at model landscapes, or abstractions of landscape, as a stage for collective (or projected) trauma. I am interested in how fantastic worlds, uncanny spaces, floating worlds, or supra-natural worlds, whatever you want to call them, act as mirrors to the anxieties and fantasies of our terrestrial world. It’s also a playful thing, oddly enough. There’s quite a bit of action-figure-ism in my writing. That’s something I used to be embarrassed about.
I love nature. Maybe that’s corny to some. I use nature as allegory because it’s a way to conceptualize external spaces into platforms for mutations, reconfigurations, transformations, or states of being between. Nature is a space for decoding the between state. There’s a fragility that one expects from nature, as if its finality is dependent on humans. But, the dynamics of nature are so slowly orchestrated that the speed of capitalism obscures them. I think that’s what I’m interested in—nature’s ability to operate incognito amidst human folly. I think about some of the trees that survived the atomic bomb. Speaking of eco-writing or nature writing, the book The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing discusses the collaboration between mushroom clusters, forests, and the collapse of capitalism. It’s about much more than that, actually. Mushrooms as vessels for collaborative growth after world downfall. I’m currently writing about slime molds co-opting virtual terrains for a project that will be published next year. Fungus is the future. I’m totally inspired by mushrooms. I am a complete mushroom advocate.
Give nature a chance at Social Text.