Katharine Haake on What Happened Was

Tuesday, May 21, at 2 PM on KPFK: Katharine Haake joins me to read from and talk about her new eco-fabulist fable, What Happened Was, a short novel which inaugurates the new 11:11 climate change fiction series, Nothing Exists Alone. She’s also the author of a forthcoming memoir-in-essays, which won the inaugural Wolfson Prose Prize. Haake has written novels and short story collections over a long career, and been published widely but today we’re going to celebrate the arrival of What Happened Was, a novel which represents a stylistic and thematic culmination of so many of her interests: ecology, community, parenthood, hybrid narrative, speculative and imaginative fiction, experimentation and, always, a playful and meaningful engagement with language.  In What Happened Was, we find omission combined with elaboration, often quite poetic, funny and necessarily disturbing fictional documentation, in a set of fables which purposefully lack the details of the end of our world but which employ atmospherics and logic and richness that assumes and grieves and finds a way to speak to us now.

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