Issue No. 16
Published in 2019 with a foreword by Julia Bell, the sixteenth issue features the following contributors:
Richard Hamblyn
Emma Hutton
Rachel Bower
Katie Willis
Arhondia
Hannah Austin
Rushika Wick
Tarquin Landseer
Carol Caffrey
Louisa Armitage
Season Butler
Dave Wakely
Kate Noakes
Alexandra Petropoulos
Shauna Mackay
Elizabeth Baines
Diego Ferrari
Sarah Barr
Laura Lewis-Waters
M. W. Bewick
Reena Dennhardt
Joshua Southern
Valentine Carter
Andrew Leach
Carmel Shortall
Fran Lock
Judy Darley
Jean McNeil
Emily Hinshelwood
Lawrence Illsley
Ronan Fitzgerald
Lorraine Wilson
K. M. Elkes
“The trouble with climate change is that it’s too big to see.”
The 37 stories, essays and poems in this, the sixteenth issue of The Mechanics’ Institute Review, seek to make climate visible. 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 – this anthology makes us see.
Featuring 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.
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.
