Local author's 'Highwire Act' looks at climate chnage - Gloucester Daily Times

Local author's 'Highwire Act' looks at climate chnage | Lifestyle | gloucestertimes.com

In her new collection of short fiction, “Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival,” Gloucester award-winning environmental author JoeAnn Hart takes the temperature of planet Earth and, in a voice all her own, declares it on fire.

No surprise to readers who spent the hottest summer on record watching wild fires burning wilder and wider than ever.

But the stories — which won the 2022 Hudson Prize for prose collection — were written well before climate change became climate crisis.

“Writing is observation,” says Hart, who since 1979 has lived with her family on five rustic acres on Niles Pond observing firsthand the year-to-year effects of climate change on their nature “sanctuary.”

Observation is one thing. Writing is another. and when it comes to climate change and it’s consequences, Hart reveals a singular talent for subtly and not so subtly scaring her readers straight, taking them on a journey toward a whole new kind of dystopia.

Hart, who’ll launch “Highwire Act” with a 20-minute reading at an authors’ evening this Thursday, Sept. 14, at 7 p.m. at the Cultural Center of Rocky Neck, 6 Wonson St., has secured a place in environmental literature that’s been validated by awards and international recognition.

“Highwire Act,” a journey toward dystopia, is peopled with Americans who, are “oblivious to the obvious,” as in her one story about well-heeled tourists who are outraged to find dying coral reefs “ruining” their expensive vacation.

But as the wake-up calls start coming in the form of fires and floods and soaring temperatures, her characters start realizing they’re on a high wire with no net in sight.

There are no Mad Max characters here. Hart’s stories are not inhabited by blockbuster villains, but ordinary humans, struggling to survive.

And just to remind us that humans are and always have been capable of surviving, Hart includes stories that stretch back as far as Americans’ pilgrimage through the Wild West. If they could do it, Hart seems to say, we can do whatever it takes to change climate change.

There’s no lecturing or judgment to be found in these stories, but a straightforward telling of cause and effect told in Hart’s singular voice, which is by turns witty, wicked, tongue placed firmly in cheek and always clever. Hers is an absurdist, yet compassionate take on an absurd state of the world.

You will laugh out loud, you will cringe, you will linger on sentences and observations that will stay with you long after you’ve read them. Life itself is a high wire act, Hart tells us. It’s not the first time we’ve had to come up with a net. What choice do we have?

JoeAnn Hart’s novels include “Float” (Ashland Creek Press), a dark comedy about plastics in the ocean, and “Addled,” which won the 2004 PEN New England Discovery Award in Fiction.

“Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival” officially releases this Friday, Sept. 15, following its Sept. 14 launch at the Cultural Center of Rocky Neck, where Hart will be reading with Sarah Johnson Allen.

Allen is a fellow Black Lawrence Press author, raised in North Carolina. Her first novel, “Down Here We Come Up,” won the 2022 Big Moose Prize.

The event is free to the public, and The Bookstore of Gloucester will be selling books.