Tidalpunk: Genre for a Time of Rising Seas

Short Lecture with Q&A      

Keywords: tidalpunk, cyberpunk, solarpunk, climate fiction, speculative fiction

The Intertidal Zone is that watery margin between land and sea. It’s the beach, the waterfront, the coastal area where smugglers, surfers, and scavengers form anarchic societies.

As the climate changes and seas rise, the Zone will expand and possibly flood into urban areas. Fiction and nonfiction from the Intertidal Zone will be dynamic and important.

Tidalpunk is a recent term for speculative fiction associated with the ocean and closely aligned with the solarpunk genre, but Tidalpunk has precursors in cyberpunk novels, manga, and movies.

This presentation will show early examples of Tidalpunk, propose a redefinition of the term, and explore current artworks and literature from the Intertidal Zone.

Brennan Conaway constructed the Newspeak language from the concepts in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and then used that language to write his novel year84. He is currently working on an art project that explores interstitial spaces along the urban coastline.

Memoir and Its Greater Range: Discovering Your Story’s Place in History, Culture, and Other Disciplines Beyond the Literary

Short Lecture with Q&A

Keywords: creative nonfiction, memoir, missing persons, hybrid forms, research

How can memoirists connect their stories to larger cultural themes or to topics in history, medicine, geography, psychology, criminology, architecture, military strategy, comic books?

In writing a memoir about my stepfather’s disappearance, I did research into disciplines considering missing persons from different perspectives. I applied my own background as a scholar and poet to the discussions I found in law enforcement, psychology, geography, popular culture, genre fiction and true crime, podcasts, cinema, as well as standard literary forms. Within that array, I worked back toward my own family’s particular story of disappearance – realizing that any individual story can be seen as one layer within a complex series of perspectives, sensibilities, or paradigms.

I will outline my strategies of research, invention, and composition as related to the overall production of the book itself; then, I will discuss how those strategies can be and have been used by other writers.      

Robert Lunday was a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center (1986-87, 1988-89; 1991-92 as Writing Committee Coordinator), a Writer in Residence at St. Albans School (1987-88), and a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1989-91). After retiring from teaching in Houston, Texas, he moved in 2024 to Kyoto Prefecture.