myrth killingsworth on wildfires and pterosaurs

This year, we braved wildfires, hurricanes, and floods to bring you the best environmental short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers today as part of our climate change contest (which you can access here).

I interviewed First Place winner and poet Myrth Killingsworth about her short story “Praise to the Pterosaur.” You can read Myrth’s story here below and here.

Myrth Killingsworth is a wild co-creator in an ecosystem of language. She is a MFA candidate in Fiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she is an Asst. Managing Editor for Hunger Mountain Review. Myrth lives in Northern New Mexico and is currently working on a novel about electronic dance music and mushroom mycelium.

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“Praise to the Pterosaur”

The wildfire looms in the distance. Hard not to think of it as a beautiful monster, skin of technicolor clouds, a thousand tongues of flame, pure consumption. My car summits the ridge on the way to town, and the plume climbs the sky.

Orange light. Blue shadows. Eerie like an eclipse except without the cool. I wait at an outdoor table at the tap room for my friend and gape at the cylinder of smoke. I text my dad—

Me: Ah! Forest fire erupting like a fucking volcano. You okay? Is it the apocalypse?

Dad: I was on errands and got Siri to read your message. Very funny in that voice. Everybody okay up there?

Me: Lol. Yeah. I’m fine. Just wondering if we should be thinking about evacuating.

Dad: I’ve never been this close to a fire this big. SW wind still holding.

Me: I have when I worked for the park service, but only prescribed ones.

Dad: This was a prescribed burn too!

Me: True

Dad: Somebody fucked up

Me: It might have been Edwin L. Drake

Dad: …

Dad: Is that the first dude to drill for oil?

Me: Yeah.

Dad: (face palm emoji)

Me: Hey, is your Siri butch now? I updated, and now my phone’s targeting me, and it’s working.

Dad: Nah. They are femme.

Me: You use they/them for your machines?

Dad: Mainly for the home pod.

Now I picture Dad grabbing Siri, his “home pod,” when we have to evacuate.

The cloud morphs into something more like a mushroom cloud. Then the pillar shape of the old star trek transporter beam. Original series. Pyro cumulous. I say the word over and over again to distract myself. Thick gray clouds emerge from behind the iridescent softer clouds, the shape of a giant brain.

My friend arrives. She flings her arms to the crawling body of smoke. “Holy shit. You seen the Doom?”

I nod. We agree to stay outside and suck the smoke, because we don’t want to get COVID again.

Orange light. Blue shadows. The doom approaches, burning its way through the land. We talk about our problems. Making rent. Hating work. Tourists.

“The doom will solve it all,” I say.

“To the doom!” We cheers, our pint glasses frothing over their rims.

The sun sets and spins the Doom into cotton candy.

We hug goodbye and get in our separate cars. The cloud spurts upward, rockets like struck oil in the black and white photos before they’ve capped the well. Humans are uncapped wells sprouting blackness onto a silver gelatin sky. The empty fuel tank light flashes on my dash.

How are we still burning carbon?

Gray light. Black shadows. Fossil fuels. I pump gas into my car. The gas is dead Sequoia trees. It’s dead ferns. It’s dead dinosaurs. It’s sort of a prayer for me, to think of all the species I’m resurrecting in my internal combustion engine. I try to form it into a hymn, but can only get the start before the gas clicks off: “Praise to the pterosaur, algae old!” I climb back into my car, twist my key until the engine roars to life. I wonder if my blood will someday be used as someone’s fuel.

Gunmetal sky. The shape of a pterosaur births from the smoke cloud like a phoenix.

***

Caylee Weintraub: What was the inspiration behind the piece you submitted to our climate change contest?

Myrth Killingsworth: Big fire! Huge beast of black flame-cloud erupting not too far from where I live in Northern New Mexico! True story (see Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak fire).*

Read more about the disaster that inspired “Praise to the Pterosaur” here.

CW: Who are some authors you admire? What works of theirs do you draw from in your own writing process?

MK: There are so many! When I wrote this piece, I was reading Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon, The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter, The Hounds of No by Lara Glenum, and Fantasy Kit by my friend and mentor Adam McOmber. For me, each of these, in very different ways, curate queer assemblages that disrupt the (illusory) boundaries of the natural and artificial. They play with language to expand the power of thought.

For me, each of these, in very different ways, curate queer assemblages that disrupt the (illusory) boundaries of the natural and artificial.

CW: Are you often drawn to environmental themes? If so, why? If not, what other themes are you drawn to in your writing?

MK: All themes are environmental themes. I find that if I follow any one thread, whether it’s the plant-breath I’m breathing, or the mircobiome digesting the food I’m eating, or as in this piece, the gas I’m pumping into my car, the boundaries of “self” and “environment” deteriorate. So writing about any person or thing or relationship on this planet just zooms in on a chunk of a larger body, taps a larger mind.

All themes are environmental themes.

CW: What can writing do to help prevent climate change and other environmental issues? Is there a particular piece of environmental writing that showed you the power of writing for the environment?

MK: I believe the sooner we, as a species, realize that we are all ecosystems in ecosystems, we will grasp that preventing climate catastrophe and environmental degradation means preventing human catastrophe and human degradation. Any story that breaks down those barriers and reveals the pores in the containers we call skin and “me” is doing that work. In that vein, I have a tattoo of the opening line from Walt Whitman’s “This Compost.” Like Leaves of Grass (even after 167 years!), the work I’m most drawn to in this moment is perception-shifting writing that obliterates even the concept of an “environment.” So, I’m thinking of Janette Winterson’s 12 Bytes and Patricia Lockwood’s No One’s Talking About This and Harry Dodge’s My Meteorite, works that contain multitudes then shatter the containers.