CANCELED: Pup Fiction: Dogs, Dreams, Women, and the Sources of our Ecological Crisis

Lynda Sexson

Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Montana State University

Sexson will discuss her current project, Griffin’s Dreams, that engages contested questions around the relationships that complicate our understanding of the Anthropocene. She begins with the observation that dogs, dreams, and women are all category errors or anomalies in our contending and collapsing views of nature. In a hybrid essay, Sexson and her dog, Griffin, meditate through ten chapters on ten of his dreams. Griffin and Sexson claim that the ecological crisis is a crisis of story. Although it is crucial that we attend practical and urgent needs, we must also ask how inherited views and theories of nature are at the basis of our action (or inaction).

Lynda Sexson is author of Ordinarily Sacred, two volumes of short stories (Margaret of the Imperfections and Hamlet’s Planets), and a film on early children’s literature. Her essays and fiction have appeared in distinguished journals such as The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Image, Epoch, Massachusetts Review, and Kenyon Review.