The Impossible Resurrection of Grief

the Square Edge flat for weeks. The building was deserted. The entire city center was deserted. The university was closed. Everyone stayed home. I went to the supermarket once a week, masked and socially distanced. Everything else was rigid isolation. I read articles about how people in lockdown were missing animals; how nature cams like the one focused on albatross down in Taiaroa Head, Dunedin, were suddenly experiencing a massive upswing in views. We were ecologically deprived and desperate to connect. Not so surprising, then, that a story of reaction to ecosystem loss came out of a residency defined by absence.

Thanks are due to the staff of the School of English and Media Studies at Massey, who did their best to make me feel part of the academic community even though I never met most of them in person, and was never able to visit the office they had arranged for me on campus. Thanks are also due to the staff of Square Edge, who were enormously kind and supportive. Particular thanks should go to Laura Jean McKay and Thom Conroy from Massey, and Karen Seccombe from Square Edge, who took with good grace my daily emails full of increasingly revolting animal facts, proof that I was still there, still working, and at least relatively sane under very trying circumstances. I am enormously grateful for their support.

About the Author

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. She has a Masters in biology and a PhD in science communication, and she likes using speculative fiction to talk about science in new and interesting ways. She’s primarily concerned with climate fiction — her climate novel, The Stone Wētā, was published in 2020 by Paper Road Press — and how humans might cope with the challenging world that climate change will bring. She’s sold over 50 stories to markets such as Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Strange Horizons. Two poetry collections, a short story collection, an essay collection on food and horror, and several novellas have been published by various small presses. She has won three Sir Julius Vogel awards for speculative writing, and is an HWA and SFWA member and Bram Stoker nominee. Octavia attended Clarion West 2016, and was a 2020 visiting artist at Massey University/Square Edge in NZ.

She would totally bring back the moa if she could.

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This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portayed in this novella are either products of the author’s

imagination or are reproduced as fiction.

The Impossible Resurrection of Grief

Copyright © 2021 by Octavia Cade

All rights reserved

Cover art & design by Rachel Lobbenberg

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-lobbenberg-1952a7a0/

Edited by Selena Middleton

Published by Stelliform Press

Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

www.stelliform.press

Printed on 100% recycled paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The impossible resurrection of grief / Octavia Cade.

Names: Cade, Octavia, 1977- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210096489 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210096519 | ISBN 9781777091767 (softcover) | ISBN 9781777091774 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PR9639.4 C33 2021 | DDC 823/.92—dc23