Beaty threads hope for a better future through collection examining impacts of global warming

Georgina Beaty is a successful playwright and actor raised in the Rockies and based in Toronto. Now her accomplished debut story collection The Party Is Here fuses relationships and climate change.

“We’re already dealing with the cascading impacts of global warming, so I wanted to write stories where climate change is a ‘natural’ part of the characters’ lives, where the extremes that are the new normal are integrated rather than left out. I’m engaged in making the large-scale policy change that’s needed to address the reality of global warming,” Beaty says.

The title story, “The Party Is Here,” is set in a national park, now owned by a private company. The new owners would be delighted if the fauna would die out so they could resume mining the area. One of the last park rangers notes how in olden days miners would “light a Joshua tree on fire every night, so that their buddies from the other camps knew where to go. What’s a tree or two to say, hey, here’s where the party’s at.” Because of climate change there is now one Joshua tree left.

Some of the stories are fantastical, as in “We Were Trees,” when in El Árbol women literally – but temporarily – become trees. “Whiff” paints an astute picture of addiction, although the substance in question is highly unusual. And Beaty slyly adds some iconic figures – the Beverley McLachlin School for Girls, a look-in by Anne Carson.

Privileged school girls in “Be It Resolved” adopt endangered animals without any idea of what these creatures – a bear, a vole, a Panamanian golden frog – truly need. And people can be naïve in their understanding of other species, as in “The Ruende” where the protagonist is told that a menacing pack of feral dogs wouldn’t hurt her if she was “right with [her]self.”

Climate change affects many areas of the characters’ lives. “Many of the stories address fertility and motherhood in some way, which I didn’t anticipate,” says Beaty. “In ‘Shelter Seekers’ I’m probing (with absurdity) the notion that one might make the decision to not have a child based on climate change. Certainly these are things I grapple with, but I think for most of us, it’s a different part of our brains/bodies – the part that absorbs and understands an unfolding climatic disaster and the part that decides to have kids.”

Beaty’s stories are funny, chilling, rueful, absurd, full of loss and the hope of transformation. In The Party Is Here, spawning salmon and permaculture work-aways in Patagonia combine with spectacles of ice shows for the rich as the world bakes, painting a sobering picture of our world.

Beaty’s view of the future isn’t all bleak. “I’m interested in ‘hope’ in the way Rebecca Solnit speaks of it,” she says. “Hope that engages with the truth of what is going on, and hope that activates people to make change and push for change to make the world more sustainable.

“I don’t have hope that we’ll go back to the world that any of us grew up in (environmentally speaking); we can’t turn back, but I hope we can contribute to a much better future.”