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Writing Solid, Broken, Changing was a way to process my experiences of art-based field research in the Anthropocene. Much of the inspiration for its story came from 15 years of collaborative art-making with Jamie Kruse, as smudge studio.

The book was in rough outline in the 2000-teens. Journalists had just begun to explain the word “Anthropocene” to their readers. Anthropocene events ramified. As they did, the book project felt more urgent and relevant. When Greta Thunberg crossed the Atlantic and as the 2019-20 fires raged in Australia, I was editing the book’s print proof. Now, Solid, Broken, Changing feels less like a fiction and more like an artifact of the contemporary moment.

Staging a story about living the Anthropocene while on the threshold of adulthood felt appropriate. It’s a time when self and self-in-the-world undergo radical transformations. The ways we humans envision the future as we cross the threshold into adulthood trigger outcomes that are long term, and far from knowable.

Like smudge’s ongoing projects, Solid, Broken, Changing connects the intimacy of daily experience to the vast, generative forces of deep time and geological change.

As each new day turns the world and the future more strange and uncertain, Kally and her unexpected ally, Stuart, dare to confront the fact that they are enmeshed with, and in, the Anthropocene. It is a courageous, generative act—even if it doesn’t always feel that way. New realizations about the immensity of the changes taking place come fast and furious. Kally and Stuart are buffeted by their emotional force. Growing new skills and inventively adapting old ones, they dead reckon into undreamt of futures that are suddenly theirs.

  • daring to be vulnerable in the midst of upheaval
  • emotional resiliency in the wake of massive change
  • dangers, challenges and wonders of co-existence
  • what it means to realize that we are of the Anthropocene and it is of us
  • ways of meeting and living the Anthropocene

Solid, Broken, Changing explores conditions of daily life today.

You can buy Solid, Broken, Changing on Amazon in paperback or ebook, and at Barnes and Noble and other indie bookstores.