‘Station Eleven’ author to share thoughts on apocalypse, survival, and art

In a September 2014 interview, Emily St. John Mandel shared the motivation for her fourth novel, “Station Eleven:”

“I wanted to write a love letter to the world we find ourselves in… a love letter in the form of a requiem.”

She explained that she can best show appreciation for this world—a world of taken-for-granted conveniences like subways, electricity, antibiotics, water that comes from a tap — by annihilating it. Ten years later, millions of readers have received that missive in her elegiac fictions mourning apocalyptic loss.

Mandel writes about new worlds that struggle to remember and understand the old worlds (resembling our own) ended by pandemics and environmental catastrophes. These stories of moon colonies and time travel are otherworldly yet ordinary, vast yet intimate, and crafted with an unyielding tenderness toward our present, now past, in her future settings.

The University of Kentucky Gaines Center for the Humanities will be bringing Mandel for the annual Bale Boone Symposium on Oct. 17. The event is free and open to the public.

Author of six acclaimed novels, Mandel’s most recent, “Sea of Tranquility,” has been translated into 25 languages and was listed as a favorite book of President Obama’s in 2022. “The Glass Hotel” has been translated into 26 languages and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. “Station Eleven” has been translated into 36 languages and was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, winning the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award among other accolades. Two years ago, the novel was adapted to an HBO limited series and this year it was featured in the New York Times “Best Books of the 21st Century” as both a critic and reader’s choice.

Described as “dazzling” and “ingenious” in reviews, “Sea of Tranquility” opens in 1912 with eighteen-year-old Edwin St. John St. Andrew sailing on a steamship from England to Canada and closes soon after 2401, when spaceships serve as intercontinental and interplanetary transport.

“Gliding across five hundred years, six time frames, and four interrelated storylines, the novel captures in two unsettling sentences the impetus for the lunar district, the primary setting of the novel: “There was substantial interest in immigration to the colony. Earth was so crowded by then, and such swaths of it had been rendered uninhabitable by flooding and heat.”

Although the end-times are not the focus of Mandel’s fictional energies, rather the societies navigating the aftermath, the sparseness of exposition invites readers to meditate on the causes of disaster as well as the infinite points of prevention.

Mandel’s work could not be more relevant for our time. In “Station Eleven,” a global pandemic ravages the human population and survivors search for meaning and purpose after civilization’s collapse. The story follows the remarkable journey of the Traveling Symphony, a Shakespeare troupe dedicated to making and sharing art amid the devastation. They stage down-at-the-heels performances in abandoned parking lots and roadside stops for the remnants of humanity, covering hundreds of miles each year by horse and cart while enduring the elements, hunger and thirst, and extreme discomfort. As the caravan pushes farther into unknown terrain, they risk attack from an enemy cult. Why do they persist? “Because survival is insufficient.” This phrase, plastered boldly on both sides of the caravan, issues an enduring reminder of the reason for their hardships. The group’s mantra reinforces not only the basic needs of food, shelter, clean air and water, and healthcare for our lives, but simultaneously, the necessity of the arts and humanities for our existence.

This year’s Bale Boone Symposium, “An Evening with Emily St. John Mandel,” is an opportunity to sit with one of most imaginative literary artists in the publishing world today and to contemplate the role of the arts and humanities in a world navigating global pandemics, climate change, and fracturing leadership.

We hope you’ll be able to join us at on Oct. 17 at 6 p.m. at Transylvania University’s Haggin Auditorium where Mandel will participate in a moderated Q & A, followed by a book signing. Like all Gaines Center events, tickets are free, but registration is required. Please follow the link below to reserve your seat.

https://transytickets.ticketspice.com/gainesctr-emilystjohnmandel?t=UKY

Michelle Sizemore is the director of the UK Gaines Center for the Humanities.

This story was originally published September 18, 2024 at 10:34 AM.