The weekend at the LSFRC SF + Extraction conference was an exhilarating experience for many reasons. It was my first event as a new co-director and it was also one of the first LSFRC conferences where I did not present a paper. Instead, I attended, helped out, and engaged with a lot more of the sessions.
In all honesty, today, I feel extracted… chewed, digested, and expelled by the weekend.
It is inevitable that this theme would attract many papers that would paint a bleak future for our planet earth. Nonetheless, it was necessary, and the expansion of our critical knowledge in the area can hopefully help us navigate the present, for a better future.
For those of you who missed the event, visit the LSFRC website where you can find the programme and abstracts document. If you’d like to reach out to any of the directors, or have a query for any of the delegates, you can always email us.
As it is the time of the year with term starts and the change of seasons, we had a few cancellations due to illnesses. In place of the keynote, we showed a few short films that resonated with the theme (titles and links are available from our website too), and one in particular stood out for me: Three Thousand. The breadth of emotions that it provoked sums up the conference for me… perhaps I wasn’t expelled in the end, but had been rebirthed instead?
I managed to catch Peggy Riley’s wonderful writing workshop to end the conference, which was a perfect way to release the pent-up thoughts and emotions from the two days. The result of it is the following short story...
Sea Junk
The red plastic container is as large as my palm, hollow in the middle, it is a solid colour altogether, shaped like a ladybug with four spots and a face bulging slightly for definition. It holds a handful of pebbles of different sizes that are smooth. One larger pebble, just wider than my thumb, is in different shades of grey, and two smaller ones are grey too, but with shades of brown embedded. The plastic and pebbles still have sand covered, remnants of the last beach trip. I sniff them but I’m sad to find that there is only a light saltiness that lingers. Shaking them, I hear the pebbles clanging against each other and on the plastic.
Sitting at my workstation, I wonder at these objects that were gathered at a peaceful and happy time. Though I was there with my family, my memory of the beach is of emptiness, a quiet space filled only with the roar of waves and seagulls trying to get heard over it. Is it because of the chaos we live in today? I look out of my window and see the skyscrapers that litter our skyline, above the permanent waters that cover the surface of our planet - a literal wet blanket. I wonder where that beach is now, how deep, how far down, and if the pebbles still remain.
My son Otto, had found the items in our storage floor. He was clearing up to make space for a new nursery. We should keep the ladybug scoop, perhaps my grandchild would learn what a ladybug was, or would find it cute at least. As I hold the cold stones in my hand, wondering where I can keep these things, Otto returns and takes them from me.
‘Where?’ I ask.
‘Disposal,’ he says.
I nod.
distilled into strong short tale