The Lost City of Atlantis (our future, rather than our past): Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and James Cairns’ In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times

Getting Lit with Linda - The Canadian Literature Podcast

In this episode, Linda begins by speaking about the Kingston Writers Fest (KWF) - if you are in reasonable distance, you MUST go! The most incredible line-up of authors will be there, including Madeleine Thien, Margaret Atwood, Canisia Lubrin, Nita Prose, and Ian Williams.

She then thinks about Atlantis - what if Atlantis were about our future and not our past? She uses Atlantis as a way of considering the dystopian novel, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (Penguin Random House). Using James Cairns’ In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Trouble Times (Wolsak & Wyne), she thinks about why we read novels that are apocalyptic in nature. Cairns, she notes, refers to Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind (HarperCollins) and shows how we get some measure of satisfaction from reading them. Dimaline’s novel may offer that kind of satisfaction, but it is very much based in Indigenous community and what Daniel Heath Justice would call “embodied sovereignty.”

Other highlights:

• The Lost City of Atlantis (2:15; 3:04; 4:22)
• Plato (2:50; 3:11)
• Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (4:12)
• Thomas More’s Utopia (4:14)
• Shakespeare’s Macbeth, hubris, and the tyranny of completion (8:14)
• Daniel Heath Justice’s essay, “Go Away Water” (15:29)

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