Writing Solid, Broken, Changing

photo by smudge studio, from Conveyance 

I was inspired to write Solid, Broken, Changing by 15 years of collaborative art-making with Jamie Kruse, as smudge studio.

When I first started writing the book, I saw it as a way to give voice to smudge’s lived experiences of field-researching and responding to the Anthropocene as artists. The book was in rough outline form seven years ago, when journalists first began to explain the word “Anthropocene” to their readers. Anthropocene events ramified. And as they did, the book project felt more urgent and relevant. I was editing its print proof when Greta Thunberg crossed the Atlantic and as the 2019-20 fires raged in Australia. And now, Solid, Broken, Changing feels less like a fiction and more like an artifact of the contemporary moment.

Staging a story about living the Anthropocene on the threshold of adulthood felt appropriate. It’s a time when self and self-in-the-world undergo radical transformations. The ways we humans envision the future as we cross the threshold into adulthood trigger outcomes that are long term, and far from knowable.

Like smudge’s ongoing projects, Solid, Broken, Changing connects the intimacy of daily experience to the vast, generative forces of deep time and geological change.

As each new day turns the world and the future more strange and uncertain, Kally and her unexpected ally, Stuart, dare to confront the fact that they are enmeshed with, and in, the Anthropocene. It is a courageous, generative act—even if it doesn’t always feel that way. New realizations about the immensity of the changes taking place come fast and furious, and Kally and Stuart are buffeted by their emotional force. Growing new skills and inventively adapting old ones, they dead reckon into undreamt of futures that are suddenly theirs.

Ways of meeting and living the Anthropocene; emotional resiliency in the wake of massive change; dangers, challenges and wonders of co-existence; what it means to realize that we are of the Anthropocene and it is of us—these are several of the contemporary conditions of daily life that Solid, Broken, Changing explores through narrative fiction.

Solid, Broken, Changing is available in paperback and as an Ebook.