Hi listeners, welcome to episode 5 of this sixth season, where I talk to Dr. Tannis MacDonald about Hope Punk.This is Ariel, by the way.
Tannis will be teaching a course on Hope Punk, and we get into why this topic now, what is Hope Punk anyway, and a really great reading list of texts that Tannis has the unenviable job of whittling down so her students aren't completely overwhelmed.
There's a lot of feelings going on in Hope Punk, and while a lot of it's angry, some of it is pretty bleak.At least, at first.Then comes the good stuff.
So sit tight, relax, grab a drink if you're not driving, and get ready for some insight on hope and why it's so relevant to us right now with Dr. Tennis McDonald.
Before we get started, I just wanted to say that we're so grateful for you, our amazing listeners, and all of the support that you've shown us over the past while.
Whether it's through reviews on iTunes or your other podcatchers, or financial support on Patreon or PayPal, or even just dropping a comment on our YouTube or Macedon, it's really lovely to feel seen and part of a larger conversation about Solarpunk.
At the end of the day, We're a little independent podcast producing ad-free content and we'd like to keep it that way as long as possible, and we believe we can with your support.Okay, on to the episode.
Heya listeners, welcome back to another episode of Solar Punk Presence podcast.Today, I'm joined by Dr. Tannis McDonald to talk about Hope Punk, specifically in the context of teaching it to university students.
Tannis is currently assembling a course to teach in winter 2025 at Wilfrid Laurier University about Hope Punk, and I wanted to know all the details, especially since Hope Punk and Solar Punk
often are lumped together, or one is explained as a subgenre of the other.Are they two different genres?Let's talk about it.First though, Tennis, I want to give you a chance to introduce yourself to our listeners.
So could you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure.I'm Dr. Tanos MacDonald.I'm a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.I'm also a writer.I'm a poet and a creative nonfiction writer and a big fan of genre fiction.
So I used to teach a fourth-year seminar in dystopian fictions. and I say used to because that's very pre-pandemic and I think actually of course in just pure dystopian fictions uh right now would wouldn't be popular and I think it also wouldn't be
it wouldn't be topical, right?I think everyone had, you know, before the pandemic, my students were telling me that dystopian fiction was their genre, right?With things like the Hunger Games, you know, et cetera, right?
They're just saying, yes, that's our generation's genre.We, that's where we, that's the narrative we live inside.
And I think that is probably not quite true anymore because that was the, I think, one of the results of the pandemic and pandemic lockdown and, you know, all kinds of things we're seeing in the classroom with people who had to take several years of high school or university during the pandemic.
Right, right, yeah.There's a real dystopia fatigue, I think, that's happening.
And I think people want more hopeful narratives, but also I think people are in some ways nervous about hope, right?I think they don't want to be caught out being too hopeful and looking naive. Yes, yeah.
Or Pollyanna-ish, you know, like not very smart for being hopeful, right?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.Why do you think there needs to be a course in hope punk narratives at this moment?I guess we're kind of sort of talking about that a bit.
Yeah, I'm hopeful when I see kinds of resistances and pushing back against the status quo. And I think we went through a very, you know, hopeless period when the man with the orange hair was president of the United States.
And then the pandemic, right?And now that we see that the Harris-Waltz ticket is beginning to gain momentum down South.And I've been reading a lot more about hope in the last couple of months because of that. Yeah.
So I think we need it because people, I think people are starting to get the idea of resistance.
We've got lots of resistance to the occupation of Gaza, right, and people mounting a protest, lots of pushing back against police brutality with the Black Lives Matter movement, and lots of assertion of trans and other LGBTQ identities and inclusion.
So these are sort of pieces of resistance that I'm starting to see.And that's the punk part of Hope Punk, is revolution, resistance.The term itself was coined, I think, in 2017 by the American author, Alexander Roland.
And she proposed it in a Twitter, in between, where she said, the opposite of grimdark is Hope Punk. Pass it on, right?And like many things that go viral, she had been writing this kind of literature for a while.
And she'd be the first to say that though she coined the term, she didn't invent the genre.The genre is as old as time itself, right?But there is a kind of need for it right now because it would be very easy to get caught up in the grim dark.
Yeah, and she and other people have pointed out that it's not like, you know, Grimdark is always awful.And I think there's some things we like about it.
You know, the drama Succession was just, was very popular because of how grim it was, because of how nasty it was.Same thing with Breaking Bad, right?Same thing with the Dark Knight series, right?It's about how awful it is. right?
And of course, I don't mean to equate all three of those series, but The Walking Dead, right?Also popular because of its grimness.And, you know, who knows?
I mean, when we watch narratives like that, and I'm thinking about popular culture right now, but when we watch narratives like that, sometimes I think we watch the grimness so we can back away into our lives that are not as grim and go,
My family is crazy, but not as much as the Roy's on succession.
Yeah, it's a way to sort of.
put things in perspective, shall we say.Right.But I think Hope Punk has an actual, you know, an actual kind of cultural momentum to inspire people, to make them feel more hopeful.
No, the only, only thing I was going to say, and I think what we see over and over again in Hope Punk is not always, but often the protagonists are young, in which they have every reason to feel grimdark, but they make a choice.
Okay, instead to fight to push back to practice radical empathy or radical hope, because radical empathy, I think, is a huge piece of this as well, that people are going to fight and get dirty, but they're also going to take care of each other.
Yeah, I mean, I was going to ask you if you could say a bit about your own definition of hope punk, because we've been sort of talking about the particulars of it, but in a nutshell, I guess, how would you sort of define the genre?
I know that the standard definition of hope punk relies on a narrative that has at least one foot in the science fiction camp, right?
But I'm interested in how we might spread it out a little bit and think about something that is not necessarily futuristic, but how to have hope punk about a situation that's happening right now to someone and it's terrible.
Where do we find the hope in that?Where do we find the room for radical kindness, right?And I think hope punk has been defined really as a fictional genre, but I'm interested in what poetry does in terms of hope punk.
You know, I think of writers like Ilya Kaminsky, the Ukrainian-American writer who talks about the hope that the poetry gives people who are finding an armed conflict. Oh, right.Because he's talking about the Russian-Ukrainian war.
And he said, no, it gives people strength.It gives people hope that their stories are being heard, that they matter, that they're not in an isolated place where there will never be hope or life again.
Yeah.And so I think of him and I think of the Palestinian poet Marwood Darwish, and even people like Rainer Marie Rilke who wrote in his letters to a young poet. that you must live the questions now, right?Don't worry if you don't know everything.
You'll never know everything, right?Don't wait.Live the questions now.And I think that's very hope punk.And he's writing that, you know, in the in the 30s, right?
Yeah, yeah, which was very, you think about the 30s, and you're like, oh, the depression, you know, like, it's a very aggression.
And the rise of fascism in Germany, right?Yeah, right.Yeah.So I'm always interested in, yeah, in how I might fit in various poems.Now, you know, me, I've been your professor.
So you know, that even when I teach a fiction course, I'm always slipping in a little poetry to say, Here's the novel and look how succinct this poem asks the questions that the novel pursues for 300 pages, right?Right.
So yeah, so I'm interested in that as well.So I'm interested in stretching that out.I'm thinking of teaching Aaron Bowe's YA book, Simon Sort of Says, because I think that's a very Hope Punk book. It takes place in the present day.
We've got a young man who has a huge problem.I don't want to give too much away.A huge problem that he can't solve on his own.It's a big societal problem.So much so that his family has to move in order to help him solve it.
So he has the hope of starting out in a new place. The worry that the thing is going to catch up with him. Right.
And how does he, how does he get up every day and deal with the anxiety and deal with the panic attacks and deal with the loneliness and all of those things.Now I've made it sound like a really weighty book.
And in some ways it's not, there's lots of comedy.He makes these hilarious friends, but it's not an easy solution because the thing, the thing front that was in the other town, indeed, finds him where he is, right?
And so it is really, that is a book that is really about radical kindness and radical empathy.And I know that it's not going to make any Hope Punk list, right?It's not, right?
But what happens in terms of the friendships that he makes and how he deals with the problem, it is revolutionary, very revolutionary. So that's, so I'm interested in that as well, right?
In yes, the science fiction aspects, but also how else can this idea of a revolution, particularly if it has to do with kindness and radical empathy, how is that not in the future, but right now?
Fascinating.I have several thoughts.
But the first one that just keeps coming to me is that it sounds like in your definition of Hope Punk, affect and emotions are very, very integral to how Hope Punk, you can't just describe a story as Hope Punk if a character is a hopeful person.
Right, in fact, I would say it's probably not.There has to be adversity that someone is pushing against, right?
Yeah, I think every... Yeah, like even in Grimdark, like The Walking Dead, like, you know, the reason that the protagonists are doing what they're doing and trying to survive is because they have hope, right?
And so what distinguishes Hope Punk from that journey is that emphasis on radical kindness and empathy that you were talking about.And it also sounds like Hope Punk kind of Isn't a genre in itself, but it also pops up in other genres?
I mean, is it more of a nuance to a certain genre?Or how would you describe it?
I mean, I think it's still developing, right?
Because again, I mean, think, you know, it was, you know, Roland only, you know, said this, and again, said it kind of off the cuff, describing what she saw, you know, rather than, you know, pulling it up from its roots, right?
She's looking out and she sees the Star Wars universe, and that's Hope Punk, and she sees Lord of the Rings, and that's very Hope Punk, as well as Noble Bright, which is another term that gets used, right?
And so I am not absolutely sure that it's a genre, but a kind of patina or a layer, something that goes into the mix. and informs some of the movements of the story or of the poem.
Interesting.Okay.Yeah.I'm thinking, again, I'm thinking of it in terms of like aspect theory.I'm like, oh, it's sort of like a scene, like an effective layer that sort of, and a context that kind of informs how the story goes forward.
But as you say, it is still developing.And so it's really interesting to see
But I like what you're saying about affect, because I think it's really necessary, right?
There has to be a very large antagonistic societal problem that should, maybe should, but could drain people of hope, that people could be left in despair because that's how bad it is.
And there has to be a reason for someone to push back and say, I'm not going to do it.I'm not going to be, I'm not going to despair.
I am going to, via my own relationships, via my radical empathy, via building a kind of crew to help me push against this.
And that, and relationships with other people are, are huge in, you know, in this kind of, if we're calling it like a hope punk aesthetic, as opposed to a hope punk genre.Right. Relationships with other people are really, really important.
I mean, and think of, you know, again, I talk about Star Wars and think about, you know, the force of the resistance there.
All young people, all young people coming together, some older people as well, but it's a younger person's kind of push, a younger person's movement.And the younger people end up giving the older people the hope that they have forgotten, right?
Right.Yeah.Yeah.No, I was going to say that since I, I mean, I did my, my dissertation studying a whole bunch of post-apocalyptic narratives.And I would say that maybe one out of like, I think I studied 40 plus narratives.
One of them was Hope Punk or one or two actually that I can think of.Cause they, they did, you know, like actually take the time to think about relationships and it wasn't just about a single person or
even a couple of people, but weirdly they were all sort of self-contained, you know, like without the narrative spending time thinking about how they relate to each other.
And that did not inform really the impetus of the arc of the narrative in the same way that I think Hope Punk might.
I mean, if you think of something like Emily St.John Mandel's Station Eleven, right, It is very grim to start with, right?But one of the things that Mandel keeps coming back to is survival is not sufficient.There has to be more.
And one of the ways she does that is through binding people together as an acting troupe, as a performance troupe, performing Shakespeare.
And I think that's interesting because to perform with people and to perform a number of plays in repertory, as they do, and they live together and they cook together and they take care of each other.
And part of the impetus of the story happens when somebody starts to invade that and to say, it's not about you people over here sharing your art and your love.It's about you should be worshiping me. right?
There's that guy with the Messiah complex, right?Yeah.You know, and that's interesting, because that appears to be or he says it's about love.But of course, it's not about love.
Right?Yeah, it's this anti-community thing that is masquerading as this will create more community.Yeah, absolutely.So what other texts are you sort of thinking about for this course?
I am still thinking, oh, I just want to say one more thing about this.Before I get into the text, I want to say one more thing about relationships in Hope Punk.So I just gave you that example from Station 11.
And I also think about Winston Smith in 1984, which of course, you can say that you can see tiny elements of Hope Punk in there through his resistance.Yeah.But part of the difficulty is he's not allowed to have a relationship with anybody. Right?
Yeah.And so his relationship, his relationship with the woman he has the relationship with is secret, right?And they're in peril the entire time that they meet.But it is the thing that makes him think he can keep going.Right?
Relationships and hope are just integrally connected.
Yeah, I think so.Because otherwise, for most of the narrative, he's absolutely alone.And it's very grim darn.Okay, so I'm still thinking through my text choices, but I'm definitely.
I think Nilo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring is going to be on there.Now, interestingly enough, I've taught this before, but I've taught it as a dystopian narrative.But I think it's very much hope punk.
And when I was thinking about this course, I thought that could easily move into a hope punk, because it is about a young woman who comes into her power
She's a kind of seer and she has to undergo a kind of quest to save her city from this overpowering.It's in an economic crash, right?But also it's about to get a lot worse if she doesn't push back.
And again, it's about the relationship between her and her grandmother and her and her boyfriend. and her and a bunch of other people as a real sort of community effort.
That is the combined, so she reaches back through her ancestry to find her power and also she's supported by a sort of a ragtag bunch of street kids who end up having all kinds of powers because they've lived on the streets and they know a whole bunch of stuff.
So Brown Girl in the Ring, I think definitely that and that's an older text, not super old, but it was written in the 80s, which is why I think, you know, that's another thing.
I don't want to teach only texts that were written in the last five years, right?
Because that's fine, but I don't want an entire course in that.So Brown Girl in the Ring for sure. I've already said I'm interested in Simon sort of says, right.And so we have a very young protagonist there, he's, I think he's 14.
And also, the young woman, T. John, in Brown Door of the Ring is, I believe she's 17.
And then just because I don't want everyone to think it's all about being young, I want to teach Laura Jean McKay, who's an Australian author and wrote this very fascinating book called The Animals in That Country.I've heard of that book
I'm interrupting you.Go ahead.
No, it's okay.I'm glad you've heard of it because again, I was reading widely and I came across this and I can tell people the premise of it because it doesn't, this won't blow the plot because it happens in the first 20 pages.
It is a pandemic story, but the pandemic such as it is, gives people the ability to hear the thoughts of animals and to communicate back and forth with animals.
Wow, I can sort of imagine what conflicts would be part of that.
So naturally, or the way she, I shouldn't say naturally, but the way she does it is that mammal to mammal communication is pretty clear, but it starts to be more problematic with birds and with people who are very affected, insects. Right.
And the thing is this, this doesn't actually kill you, but it drives people crazy.Yeah.
So the mortality rate itself from the actual condition from the illness doesn't kill you, but, but one could kill oneself through neglect, through not eating through, et cetera, because you're just so distracted by the, by the constant noise around you.
Right.Yeah.Being driven mad by all of that input that, yeah. Sounds horrible, honestly.
And of course, as this is happening, she has a reason to go out and find people and create relationships, et cetera.And she's an older protagonist.She's a grandmother.She's a young grandmother, but she's in a movie.I think she's about 58.
So yes, we have her.And of course, there's a great character who's her coyote, her dingo, pardon me, companion.I want to say coyote, but of course, it's a dingo because we're in Australia.
And so it's about the relationship between her and the dingo is, to me, the hope relationship, right?
Yeah, because listening to the, I mean, being able to hear the thoughts of non-human others, that just opens a whole new vista of relationships that you could have.Yeah, absolutely.Absolutely.
That one, I mean, I think it's fascinating, and I would love to use some of Donna Haraway's theories of companion animals. Right?
Because that too, I mean, and we haven't really talked about critical aspects of Hope Punk, but I mean, I think there's, I talked a little bit about Rilke, and I keep coming back to Martin Luther King saying that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
So thinking about that, and I'm thinking about things like Haraway's interest in companion animals, as part of animal studies and also, you know, as part of philosophy, like what do we do to make relationship with the animals in our lives, right?
And so McKay's novel is a long answer to that.But Haraway, you know, is a significant thinker and she's the one who said, you know, we have to stay with the trouble. Right?
And is part of our trouble the fact that we think of ourselves as an apex species, right?That we are the ones with the sentience and we are the ones with the thought.So we can destroy what we want.But she says, but what if?
What about the sentience between and for companion animals?She talks about dogs mostly, but she brings in bears and other people who have expertise in other human-animal relationships.
And she suggests that this is sort of cornerstone of why, you know, how we're destroying the planet is that we just you know, we center ourselves too much and then we think we're invincible.Yeah.Back to the radical empathy and radical kindness.
What if, you know, we center our relationships with the more than human, right?
Yeah.Yeah.And we conceive of them as actually we are able to have a relationship with non-human others.
Ariella here, just dropping in to say that for more about relationships with non-human others and the field of critical animal studies, you can check out our Season 3, Episode 2 with Dr. Chloe Taylor.
Okay, now you mentioned time and then you said, and you know, attachment to a particular time.And so that brings me to my next possible text is Amir El-Motar and Max Gladstone's jointly written novel, This Is How You Lose the Time War.
Oh, I listened to that on audiobook and it was just two different narrators for each of the characters.Amazing.It was so good.So I'm so glad to hear that you're watching that.
I haven't heard it on audio and maybe that's how I'll reread it.Because, yeah, I think it's very important to hear those two different voices, right?
Yeah.I mean, there are audiobooks and there are audiobooks, but this is a very good audiobook. I would highly recommend it.I just got it through a library too.So it's out there.
Okay, excellent.Yeah, I was fascinated by that book.I thought it was a real tour de force and storytelling.And I love the fact that there are two people on two different sides of the time war, and they are conducting this strange romance.
you know, via these letters, right?And there's always kind of a puzzle about how they can leave letters for each other in these different times and places.And I think it's fascinating.
We were talking about, you know, we're talking about relationships.
So here are two people that are rarely in the same place at the same time, and yet they're conducting a relationship and how they tell each other their stories and why they tell each other their stories. I think is fascinating, right?
So not even a shared place or time and yet.And I also thought it would be, it's good to have a little time travel in there just as a kind of science fiction staple, right?
And I mean, I don't know if this is sort of like, like, if everyone feels this, but when it comes to sort of these time travel narratives of, you know, missing people in time and stuff like that, like, I always get an overwhelming sense of melancholy.
And that's a really interesting way to sort of also think about it in relationship to Hope Punk.And what are those two affects doing in terms of interaction with each other?And
I have spent a lot of time thinking about it, particularly in this context, but I think that there is something there.
Yeah, and I'm interested in the contradictions that it proposes as well, right?And I'd like to think more about that.Contradictions in time travel and contradictions in sort of the impossibility of these two being a couple.
I'm also thinking of teaching The Marrow Thieves, Sherry Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves, as an interesting look at indigeneity and futurity, right, and I've taught that before.
I'm trying to think where, yeah, I think I did teach that in the dystopia one, but more and more And thinking, no, it's very much a hope punk kind of novel, right?With, you know, a whole group of Indigenous youth rediscovering their culture, right?
And thinking of that as a way of escaping from the racist, cruel, awful city and then heading out into the wilderness and relying on a lot of traditional knowledge.
There's a real great knowledge keeper, older woman, elder, who passes on this knowledge to the kids and yeah.
Yeah, it's a book about adventure, but also a book about discovering, I guess, relationships and creating new relationships as well.So yeah.
And talk about a book where people have to take care of each other, right?Yeah.So we have our young protagonist who isn't that old himself, but he also knows that he has to take care of the younger children as well, right?
So I thought definitely of The Marrow Thieves.And you were talking about sort of the melancholy of time travel and just missing people throughout time.So the writer Taya Lim has a great book called An Ocean of Minutes,
It's about, I don't know, five or six years old and begins with a pandemic and the discovery of time travel.So if you could go back and live before the pandemic, would you?
Of course, knowing that you would have to give up all your family and friends in order to do so.So then there's a whole sort of wormhole in time idea of could we go back and cure the disease before it begins, before it spreads? Right?
And long story short, there's time travel and there's lovers missing each other by a year, by a month.
And it is a deeply melancholy story, for sure, because one of our protagonists goes through violence and poverty and all kinds of things looking for her lover in the past.
Yeah, and it's a dark story, and part of me, you know, I'm wondering about it, not because I don't think it's a good book, it's a great book, but it leans into that grim dark, I think, for a long time, because, you know, they're separated, and it's very hard to, and she finds it very hard to create relationships in a place of such suffering.
When we first started talking about this, you said you were thinking about teaching some books that might stretch the definitions of Hope Punk, and it really sounds like this is one that sort of stretches that definition of Hope Punk.
And yeah, that just reminded me of that.Maybe not a book that someone would automatically classify as Hope Punk.Being able to take that Hope Punk lens and turn it on
on stories that are like that and sort of highlight those relationships and hopefulness is going to be part of what you're teaching.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.And it's been a long time since I read this, so I'm going to have to reread it.But Marge Piercey's Woman on the Edge of Time.Right.
Yeah, I read that.Oh, yeah.It was very long ago.So I can remember.
But, you know, it was definitely offered, and I think that would be an opportunity to talk a little bit about feminism in the late 70s, early 80s, because, you know, that was Peercy's context and thinking about an all-female society.
You know, and it's one of those things I would have to reread it to teach it, because one of my questions is, how has that aged?
Yeah, yeah.How is that aged?How is that now something that we think about in this context that we're in right now?
Yeah, yeah, indeed.So those are some of my thoughts of what I'm going to include.Clearly, I've named far too many books.They're all good books.
You know, and for people who don't design courses, remember that this is a, this is something, you know, I don't want to burn people out on here's another protagonist who is pushing against something horrible.
Yeah, because, because that is part of the out of the genre or the sub genre or the aesthetic, as we were talking about, there has to be a moment of resistance.There has to be something that someone rises up to push back against.
But I think that's one of the values of teaching something that takes place right now, as opposed to in the future.
Because if we're always deferring it and saying, yes, people are going to be revolutionary in the future, I think, well, what about now?Can't we be revolutionary now?
Plenty of things we ought to be revolutionary about right now.
That's part of my problem with those stories about revolution in the future.And it's like, well, I mean, it's nice, but like, are you just sort of telling us to wait around until something magical happens and somehow the revolution will happen?
And, but what about right now?
And I've got a quote from Alexandra Rowland who says, pop-punk isn't about moral perfection.So you're not waiting until you're good enough, right?It's not about being as pure and innocent as the new fall and snow.I'm still quoting from her.
You get grubby when you fight.You make mistakes.Sometimes you're a little bit of an asshole. Maybe you're as much as 50% an asshole, but the glass is half full, not half empty.You get up and you keep fighting and caring.
Look how she folds those together, fighting and caring.And try to make a world a little better for the people around you.You make mistakes.You get to make mistakes.You get to ask for and earn forgiveness.And you love and love and love.
That sounds wonderful, but also extremely difficult to, you know, keep doing without having, you know, what is it like empathy fatigue or burnout?
That's a very good question, right?And I think that's part of what happens in many of these books is that people, that's why you have to have the relationships because you have to
You know, that's why why Frodo needs Sam right yeah because, because he's, he's not naturally heroic.Right.I'm going to get mail about that I'm sure but anyway, he's the first to admit it. you know, again, he has people who support him.
And in the end, he has Sam, who just will never, will never leave him.
And I think people forget, I mean, the Fellowship of the Ring, like that fellowship, there are many churches that have fellowship in the title, it's about a bunch of people coming together over shared, you know, like values and having these relationships with each other.
yeah yeah and solving problems yeah yeah exactly so you know putting an emphasis on that i like what you said about yeah hope punk being sort of an aesthetic that you can see like a text as yeah sure you can see it as dystopian but when you start to focus on the hope punk aesthetic then you can start seeing it as a hope punk sort of like moment within that sort of like interrupts that narrative
Yeah, and you know, another piece of theory that I wanted to fold in is, along with Haraway and companion species and building relationships with the more-than-human, I want to come back to Ursula K. Le Guin and her carrier bag theory of fiction.
Do you know this one?Yeah.
I'll explain it for the readers.
I'll explain it for the listeners and you can add anything that I forget.Le Guin, who is so brilliant, I mean, and I definitely want to get at least a short story of hers on the syllabus.You can see the syllabus is huge so far.
I have to start making choices soon, but you know, this is my, if the course were infinite and I could teach everything I wanted, this is it.
So, Le Guin has what she calls the carrier bag theory of fiction, which is the fact that the very first tool that was invented was not a spear or an arrow or a weapon.It was a container.
a bowl, a basket, even a curled leaf, something in which people who were gathering food could place the berries or the seeds or the apples, whatever they were gathering, and carry it back.
And it would carry more than your two hands could carry because the container was larger.
And she also said, you know, and later on you figured out that, you know, that bowl or basket was also good to carry other things, tools that you would need to dig up the roots that you were getting, or to cut the berries from the vine, etc.
a child who you couldn't leave alone.Back at the settlement, you had to strap that child to your hip or to your back in a kind of carrier and take the child with you.
This is her, so it's, you know, a kind of anthropological metaphor for what story is.And she says story is what goes into the carrier bag.
But many of us have been taught that story is a spear, it's conflict, one thing against another, and people are stabbing each other literally or metaphorically with the story.It's about power and triumph.
and the person who dies with the most toys wins.And this even comes down to how some people read a quest narrative, right?That there has to be a battle.
And then we come back to Lord of the Rings, which in some ways is Hope Punk, is Noble Brite because of the relationships, but also follows this idea of that there is a story that is carried forward,
that the Hobbits carry the story and that the other people do the fight.My question is, does it get to be Hope Punk and Noble Bright because there's the grimdark action sequences?
Right, yeah.It's, you know, like, is there, like, light because of the darkness, right?
Yeah, yeah.And, you know, and that's also why I think, you know, why I think these are very sort of mutable kinds of categories, right?I think, you know, when we were talking about
You're talking about empathy burnout and also I'm one of my concerns in this course is, am I going to be presenting economic breakdown and brown girl in the ring, you know, a very difficult contemporary problem in Simon sort of says.
a pandemic and people being driven crazy and animals in that country.There are the hard things.And again, they're fictional, but I think sometimes they're very easy to find parallels for in everyday life.
And so part of my concern is I don't want to despair people so much about the situations at the fronts of these books.And I need them for them to hang on to get into the whole punk part of it, right?Just wait, it gets better. I know.
And also, you know, I don't want that to become a convention that is so, so easily found out that it's like, yeah, yeah, first 40 pages, you'll be sad, then it'll get good.Because I think that's sort of quite psychologically manipulative, right?
And while it's, well, we can look at that and say, yeah, that's a literary convention.When you teach a whole course in that, then that becomes a kind of it becomes a little bit more difficult.
And you'll know this from reading post-apocalyptic narratives for your dissertation, right?Because I'm sure you had a moment when you went, okay, more people starving and scavenging.
I had so many moments like that. And I was doing this while the man with the orange hair was in power down in the United States.I was sort of like, well, I'm not even finding escapism in my fiction. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
It was great.And that, of course, is a little different, because it's you doing that alone.And it's not a course that is supposed to have a kind of ebb and flow, right?Right, yeah.
And part of doing a PhD, I'm sure you know, is that you get sunk into your subject, sunk very deeply into your subject.
Yes, yes.And everything becomes about your subject.Yes. Yeah, there isn't quite that community there in the same way that in a course there is community just among the different students in the course.
I mean, like, it's an experience that you're all having sort of together, right?And so they can talk to each other about it and, you know, ideally sort of have conversations about how they're experiencing it.
and find solid, like group solidarity there.Whereas, you know, doing a dissertation, it's very much, you know, like the sole academic in the ivory tower, you know, just very cloistered, sequestered from everybody else.
So yeah.Well, you know, and, and I think you make a very good point.And, and one of the things that I do hope for is that, you know, speaking of community and radical empathy, that it can be practiced within, within the group as well.And I,
Yeah, so I'm thinking about exercises that might, that might work that particular way, right, or might encourage people to do a kind of group work and a group support around about reading difficult texts.
So, yeah, so I think that's, that's an interesting idea.And, you know, I have a question too, about who is going to enroll in this course.
And you know yourself that, you know, when you take an undergrad degree at Laurier in English, you need to have a certain amount of fourth year seminars.
So I know that some students are just going to take it because it's one of the fourth year seminars on offer and they need to fill that slot.Right.Fair enough.
But some people are going to choose it because they like something about the course description. Yeah.And I wonder what people think Hope Punk is before they sign up for it.
Right, and what they're going to think about Hope Punk at sort of the end of the semester.
But I think that even if someone has signed up for it just because it checks off a box or whatever, and they don't really have too much interest in Hope Punk, you're talking about the political hope in this moment that we are feeling right now with Down South, and then the contrast between that political hope and maybe some political not-so-nice feelings about the Canadian politics.
and things like that.I mean, these students are people who also live in the same world that we do, right?
And so talking about those sort of like contemporary goings-on is going to necessarily sort of draw them into the course material, or so is the hope, I guess.
Well, you know, and that I think would probably be a very interesting exercise, is to ask them to sort of map out what a Hope Punk novel would be that took in the present moment, that took in the contemporary moment, right?
And I could use Aaron Bow's book, Simon Sort of Says, because it does take place in the present, and say it looks at this particular societal problem.What particular societal problem do you want to take on?
Is it, you know, is it, you know, the rise of the, of right-wing politics here and in Europe?Well, and in South America.Or is it something else?You know, is it the rollback of Roe versus Wade?Is it?
Unfortunately, there's a lot to choose from.
Well, see, and that's, you know, and that's the other concern, right?That so many of these beginning events seem so dire.I'm interested in people's reading experience when they read more than one of them.
Exactly how do we see this kind of accrual or erosion of hope? after you read a number of them.
For sure.I know that we're coming close to the end of the interview, but we've talked about radical hope and radical empathy multiple times, but I don't think we ever sort of stopped to define that.
So in your eyes, could you define radical hope for us first and then maybe radical empathy, just because I think that people are familiar with hope as a concept and empathy as a concept, but what does the sort of radical modifier do for those?
I think the radical modifier in both instances suggests that this is something that people invest in when there's no logical reason to do so.And possibly when everything seems to say, don't hope, despair.
Don't have empathy, just get rid of this person.And so that's why I thought it was interesting that Roland mentioned forgiveness. You have a chance.You get to have a second chance.You get to forgive.You get to be given forgiveness.
And I think that's radical empathy, to have no reason, no logical reason to forgive someone and to do it anyway.
I would agree with that.That sounds right on. Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of just thinking about Solarpunk and its relationship to Hope Punk, because Solarpunk really does put a lot of emphasis on community.
It's a value, but I think that Hope Punk aspect sort of informs how that community happens and sort of what that community is for, I guess, gives it a sort of a direction, perhaps.
Yeah.And a methodology too, right?Yeah.And I think in some ways, we're still trying to work towards a kind of methodology, if we think of hope punk as a subgenre, or maybe that's the thing that is preventing it from being a true subgenre.
Yeah, I'm starting to think of it as kind of almost a critical lens, like eco-criticism, you know, like eco-criticism, what you do is you focus on a text and it might not be like, you know, like what you might think of as an environmental text, but you look at, you know, like the elements of environment.
And then with Hope Punk, it's like, you might look at a text that everybody would say is dystopian, but you look for the relationships and the way that hope sort of bubbles up and drives the character.
So maybe it's just like a pair of glasses that you put on and you can sort of see the world in a different light or a text in a different light through it.I don't know if that's correct.
I don't know if that is sort of the be all end all of what Hope Punk is.We shall see.It's still evolving as a thing, but that's where I'm sort of landing right now.
And I actually have a book out from the library that is the Oxford Handbook of Hope.Oh, wow.And it's Philosophies of Hope and Theories of Hope.
Yeah, I think it's far too theoretical to assign to the students, but I'll be reading a lot of it and drawing from it for them as well.
Because again, I think hope can be nebulous if we don't try and take a really close look at it, at its moral complexities, at its moral urgencies.
Yeah, if we're if we just sort of like lump all these different kinds of hope together in the same category as like, that's very stupidly optimistic.And you know, like, it's just hope is not something that serves us.Actually, it does.
Yeah, but yeah, but but that's, that's a good point.Where do we where's where's the dividing line?Yeah, you know, radical hope and and foolish optimism.Yeah, find out.Yeah, let's find out.Okay,
Okay, so all right listeners, so Tanis will be teaching her course on Hope Punk in Winter 2025 and I'm really hoping that we can catch up with you afterwards just to kind of see how it went.But thanks so much for sitting down with me to chat today.
I feel like I have sort of a better grasp on Hope Punk from like an academic perspective and we really sort of got into it and really sort of critically examined sort of where is it coming from and how is it playing out as a literary phenomenon.
It was a pleasure to be here.
Yeah, of course.And thank you listeners for tuning in.
Thank you for listening to Solar Punk Presents, a podcast hosted and produced by Ariel Kroon and Cristina de la Rocha. The audio for this episode was recorded in part on the traditional territory of the neutral Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.
And in Germany.The opening and closing music for this podcast is Water Cooler Gang by Monkey Warhol, available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international license.
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