Children's books, science fiction, and fantasy have no problem with expanding perspectives beyond the human. For too long, the view that humans are superior to nature has limited literary fiction to human-centric culture, situations, and environments. But fiction is an excellent medium to imagine an entangled, restorative relationship with nature. Stories can conjure our long-lost intimacy with brown bears and beetles, clouds, crabs, herons and honeybees, humpbacks, lemurs and larkspur, monarchs and maize, oaks and others.
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JULIE GABRIELLI’s work as a writer, architect, and professor navigates our time of climate collapse and environmental reconciliation. She teaches architecture at University of Maryland, holds a Fiction MFA, and writes the Homecoming newsletter on Substack, where she serialized her CliFi novel, FLUX. Julie has been published in the magazines Orion, Ecological Home Ideas, and Urbanite; and in literary journals: Dark Mountain Journal; Dark Matter and Immanence. Her essay, "Song of the Chesapeake," is in the 2025 anthology, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing: Dreams Before Extinction.