Climate: Mechanics Institute Review issue 16

“From innovative poetry to engaging non-fiction and stories sparking with life and imagination, there is enormous freshness and dynamism in all the work of the latest issue of The Mechanics’ Institute Review. It’s a real pleasure to read new work clearly crafted with such zeal, skill, and joy.” Sophie Mackintosh

The 37 stories, essays and poems in The Mechanics’ Institute Review: The Climate Issue, seek to make climate visible. The book features new writing from Richard Hamblyn (The Invention of Clouds), Jean McNeil (Ice Diaries: An Antarctic Memoir) and Fran Lock (Dogtooth), a foreword by Julia Bell, photography by Diego Ferrari and the exceptional voices of both debut and established authors from across the UK. Each piece offers a compelling view of what it means to be living in our time, in our particular climate, right now.

The Climate Issue aims to make the reader see: through tales that mirror the present – austerity, knife culture, mental stress, weather extremes – and imagine the future – flesh- melting heat, mind-blanking winds, living as a tree; through essays spelling out scientific facts and their omni-impacting consequences, recounting personal experience or questioning the role of literature; and through poetry confronting drought, birth, grief, pollution, policy, portents – and dodos.

Never has the subject of climate been more urgent or inescapable. This collection is a call to arms: to debate, to engage, to empathise, to reconsider what we think we know and to acknowledge that the “climate issue” can no longer be ignored.

anthology, published Autumn 2019