Susan Ballard is an art historian and writer based at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, Aotearoa New Zealand. She established the MECO network in 2014.

Hannah Brasier is a Naarm (Melbourne-based) research practitioner interested in the relationship between interactive media and ecocritical thinking.

Sholto Buck is an artist and writer based in Naarm Melbourne. He is currently a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

David Carlin is a writer and interdisciplinary artist, who currently co-directs the non/fictionLab at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Sophie Langley is a writer and sound media maker based at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Joshua Lobb is a writer based at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the author of The Flight of Birds (2019).

Brigid Magner is a literary studies researcher based in the School of Media & Communication, RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Catherine McKinnon is a writer and teacher at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is a co-convenor of UOW’s C3P Research Centre and author of Storyland (2017).

Rose Michael is a writer and critic of speculative fiction.

Peta Murray is a writer-performer and Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at RMIT University whose research focuses on the use of arts-based practices as modes of inquiry. 

Francesca Rendle-Short is Associate Dean Writing and Publishing in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT, co-founder of non/fictionLab, and co-director of WrICE.

Lucinda Strahan is a writer and researcher of expanded nonfiction at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. She is Writer in Residence at Linden New Art.

Stayci Taylor is a media lecturer and creative practice researcher based at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

We thought we knew what summer was

Overwhelming catastrophic events have become part of the ‘new normal’ of climate change. This essayistic, collaborative lived experience report by a group of writers, each of whom lived through Australia’s 2019—2020 Black Summer of catastrophic bushfires, demonstrates how the effects of shared but different proximate relations can produce an affective, care-ful account of the lived experience of climate change. Our project asks: how might a practical entanglement with others allow for a meaningful response to climate change? How might collaboration allow for a mode that places care at the centre of writing practice?

Keywords: climate change; collaboration; care; lived experience; writing practice