We Were in It: Stories about Energy Transition

Bringing together academics, scientists, creative writers, visual artists, lawyers, and policy makers, We Were In It is a collaborative effort to attack the problem of climate crisis from very different backgrounds and perspectives, through fiction. The fusion of scholarship, literary writing, research, and creativity allows the strengths of many forms of writing to address the unfolding crisis of our modern petrocultures. Relying on the brevity of flash fiction to reflect the ticking clock of the climate crisis, the stories contained in this collection are slick as oil but against oil. They are a speculation about the future, taking notes from the present and the past as a portal to a better world.

Lisa Moore is the author of the short story collections Something for Everyone, Open, and Degrees of Nakedness and the novels Alligator, Caught, February, and This Is How We Love, as well as the young adult novel Flannery. She has co-edited, along with Dede Crane, 24 True Stories About Birth by Canadian Authors, co-edited The Democracy Cookbook with Alex Marland, and co-edited, with Stephen Crocker, Muskrat Falls: How A Mega Dam Became a Predatory Formation. Lisa has also edited four anthologies of short fiction and is a co-librettist for the opera February, based on her novel by the same name. She teaches creative writing in the English Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Sheena Wilson is Professor of Media, Writing, and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. She is the co-founder of the international Petrocultures Research Group, and principal investigator of Just Powers. Her research interests involve an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to studying how the extractivist worldview not only contributes to climate change but allows for the exploitation of gendered, classed, and racialized people. A commitment to feminism and decolonization as method and praxis as well as object of study informs her current research and all of her ongoing research partnerships under the banner of Just Powers. Her publications include, among many others, the edited collection Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Cultures with Adam Carlson and Imre Szeman (2017) and the short film Petro-Mama: Mothering in a Crude World (2015). Her monograph in process is entitled New Logics for the Climate Crisis: Deep Energy Literacy.

Kamei Lim is an artist practicing in Edmonton, Alberta, in Treaty 6 territory. She holds a BFA in Art and Design from the University of Alberta. With the use of vivid colour palettes and dreamscape imagery, she explores themes of memory, superstition, and culture. Kamei works primarily in painting, printmaking, and book arts.