folio : energy stories
This term, I have been teaching a
course on energy and energy transition in contemporary popular culture at the
University of Winnipeg. Instead of accepting the idea that energy means fossil
fuels, or that it is best characterized as a debate with two sides, we have
been engaging with bigger ideas about energy as everything, as relationship
with the land, and as deeply connected with cultures and ways of life.
Following Derek Gladwin’s suggestion
that “We could power a new green
movement by talking about energy change,” we have studied a variety of cultural texts as intersecting
and overlapping energy stories. Focusing on energy stories suggests that rather
than dividing us, energy can bind human and non-human communities through
relationality, responsibility, and care.
This folio casts poetry about the oil
and gas industry, energy, and the land as energy stories and as contributions
to a much-needed, broad conversation about energy and energy transition.
The energy stories folio is a
supplement to issue #17 of g u e s t: a journal of guest editors, which
includes more poetry on this theme.
Melanie Dennis Unrau respectfully acknowledges the original caretakers of the
land known as Treaty 1/Winnipeg, where she lives as a settler of mixed European
ancestry on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree,
Dakota, and Dene peoples and the homeland of the Métis Nation, with water from
Shoal Lake in Treaty 3 territory and with electricity from Treaty 1,3, and 5
territory, where the Northern Flood Agreement has never been implemented.
Melanie is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Comparative Literature at
Columbia University and a Research Affiliate at the University of Manitoba
Institute for the Humanities. She is the author of Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (Muses’ Company, 2013), a co-editor of Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat (Palgrave, 2014), a former editor and
poetry editor at Geez magazine, and a former co-editor of The
Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada.
