Elvia Wilk - Death by Landscape

Contents

Praise for Death by Landscape

Elvia Wilk is one of the most exciting essayists working today. I love this book.

Catherine Lacey, author of Pew

Its rare to come across an essay collection that veers so far into the wilds of weirdness, only to return from these distant outposts with something so deeply honest, vulnerable, and close. Wilk is a writer of exceptional talent, but it is the sheer scale and scope of her curiosity that makes these essays not only unforgettable but intellectually rearranging. Death by Landscape pulls off a wondrous bit of alchemyit takes what might otherwise be terminus ideas, sites of conclusion, and transforms them into conduits of passage, a way of reassessing what it means to be human in this age of endless unmooring.

Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and American War

Wilks brilliant interlinked essays show why fiction matters in a time of climate catastrophe, species devastation, and radical inequality. From the old weird to the new, sci-fi to cli-fi, medieval womens mysticism to larps, Wilk gives us a roadmap through unfamiliar pasts and unsettling presents, pointing toward unpredictable futures that fictionin its multiple, shifting, compostable formsenables us to imagine. Treading the fine, impossible line between dystopia and utopia, between trauma, its repetition, and its working through, Wilk doesnt pretend fiction can fix everything, but she does insistand she showsthat the effects of fiction are myriad small explosions with far-reaching fragments, fragments that help us grapple with what life means and how best to live it while we can.

Amy Hollywood, author of Acute Melancholia and Other Essays

I love these weird essays. They do best what weirdness always wants to do: defamiliarize the world around us so that we may better see where weve ended up, where we might be going, and whoor whathas been chasing after us all this time. Weirdness, Wilk writes, provides a sort of methodology for reading stories that lead toward the black hole. The places, people, things that resist description, challenge our fictions and nonfictions. A black hole is impossible to enter without warping your reality, death beyond death: Wilk scrapes the event horizon and gazes at last into the spooky abyss.

Andrew Durbin, author of Skyland and MacArthur Park

Wilk has written a guidebook and a philosophy for living in a precarious world, in essays that are searching and funny, self-assured and unguarded all at once. With each chapter Wilk directs her telescopic focus on plants and rot, mysticism and black holes, female embodiment and trauma, weaving together seemingly disparate topics with an intelligence that recalls the best of Mark Fisher and Wayne Koestenbaum. Reading Death by Landscape, I feel terrified and exalted, expanded, in awe.

Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea

Wilk is that cool person I want to hang out with at the end of the world. Too smart to despair and too curious to not reexamine even the most studied phenomena (nature, trauma, ambition) until theyre no longer familiar and are catching new light. Death by Landscape is beautifully written, expansive, athletic, weird, and funny.

Britt Wray, author of Generation Dread and Rise of the Necrofauna

Wilks learned and bracing essays distribute the mind out beyond the stubborn habits and enclosures of our humanitiesout past hack plots or boundaries assigned to gender or specieswhere it can expand into subsoil or outer space or corpuscle in narratives weird enough to reflect another human/nonhuman social life.

Keller Easterling, author of Medium Design and Extrastatecraft

Wilk reads the world like an insect reads a garden; her approach is sensory and kaleidoscopic, buzzing beyond manicured surfaces to get at the fertile, loamy rot beneath everything from black holes and science fiction dystopias to martyred saints and larpers. Beautifully brainy, bug-eyed, and weird.

Claire L. Evans, author of Broad Band

Wilk reports on psychic borders, the lines drawn between earth and earthling, plant and steward, healthy and sick. She finds false binaries we hadnt even thought to count and asks the human to find its humanity, gently but without wavering. Brilliant and swift, as she always is.

Sasha Frere-Jones, musician and writer

With evocative clarity and intuitive rigor, Wilks Death by Landscape guides us through a troubled terrain criss-crossed by that most uncanny of entities, nature. This is writing that uniquely extends the tradition of speculative nonfiction, delineating a new constellation of culture and climate that ultimately points to the nebulous horizon of human being itself.

Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of This Planet and Infinite Resignation

ALSO BY ELVIA WILK

Oval

DEATH BY LANDSCAPE

Essays

ELVIA WILK

Soft SkullNew York

Copyright 2022 by Elvia Wilk

All rights reserved

First Soft Skull edition: 2022

Please see image permissions on for individual credit. For quoted material in the epigraphs, all reasonable efforts were made to contact the copyright holders.

Excerpt on from The Arc from Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart, copyright 2017 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wilk, Elvia, author.

Title: Death by landscape : essays / Elvia Wilk.

Description: First Soft Skull edition. | New York : Soft Skull, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021051433 | ISBN 9781593767150 (paperback) | ISBN 9781593767167 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Essays.

Classification: LCC PS3623.I5452 D43 2022 | DDC 814/.6--dc23/eng/20211112

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051433

Cover design by houseofthought.io

Book design by Jordan Koluch

Published by Soft Skull Press

New York, NY

www.softskull.com

For Andreas

Each sentence is a kind of promise, an increment of hope that replaces the broken promise of the last sentence. What is that promise? That the world will continue, that one image will replace the next foreverthat is, the world will respond to your love by loving you back.

ROBERT GLCK

Miracle is a shorthand for this, for all those moments when, against all odds, people living all of their lives in one genre suddenly slip out and make their way into another.

WAI CHEE DIMOCK

CONTENTS

Reading figure and ground

TWO ADOLESCENT GIRLS GO for a hike. They are away from home, at summer camp, and they have left the main group of campers to wander up a rocky hillside thick with trees. The girls are extremely close, as young girls often are; their thoughts and feelings and bodies are all wound up with each others. As theyre walking, one of the girls steps off the main path to pee behind a tree. A minute later, her friend hears a strange shout. She runs into the brush, but no one is there. The girl is gone. Disappeared. All thats left are trees.

This is the premise of a 1990 short story by Margaret Atwood called Death by Landscape. Atwoods story is told from the perspective of the surviving woman, decades later. Her friend never reappeared, and the loss has haunted the narrator for her whole life. Meanwhile, she has developed an obsession with landscape paintings of forests. She collects them and covers the walls of her home with them. Staring at the paintings in her room one evening, she remarks that they seem to open inward on the wall, not like windows but like doors. And sometimes, after looking at a painting for several hours, she thinks she glimpses her lost friend in the imagenot as she was, in human form, or hidden among the trees, but