by Coyote Shook

“What are the limits of introspection in a moment of crisis? How do the intersections of personal crisis and environmental crisis create rich fodder for speculation?”

What are the limits of introspection in a moment of crisis? How do the intersections of personal crisis and environmental crisis create rich fodder for speculation? When I saw Minnie Callison's grave, it felt like one of the banal interactions that one might have with human remains in a cemetery. My mind hopped from the loss of an important friendship to what I imagined this woman's life had been. It was in the untidiness of two lives overlapping in a land parched from climate change droughts that speculation was most orienting.

—

Coyote Shook is a cartoonist and PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where they are working on a graphic novel work of speculative nonfiction that examines intersections between disability and the ocean in American cultural history. Their comics and visual essays have appeared or are forthcoming in a range of American and Canadian literary magazines and journals, including The Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Tupelo Quarterly Review, The Puritan, The Maine Review, The South Dakota Review, LandLocked, and Hunger Mountain Review.