Sheltering: Deb Olin Unferth on Personal Loss vs. Collective Grief
On this episode of Sheltering, Maris Kreizman talks to Deb Olin Unferth about her novel Barn 8, released on March 3. Barn 8, an experimental novel about the US egg industry told from the point of view of a chicken, tells the story of two inspectors going rogue and releasing a farm’s worth of animals, roughly a million chickens. It takes on the (timely!) ethics of sequestering living beings and rejecting capitalism. Deb talks about having to balance the personal losses of this time with the collective grief of the nation, and relying on fresh vegetables to make it through quarantine. Deb’s bookstore of choice is Book People; please purchase Barn 8 through this link if possible!
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From the episode:
Maris Kreizman: Your book gave me hope in terms of thinking outside the box—the box being capitalism
Deb Olin Unferth: The characters in this story are definitely rejecting capitalism. They are liberation warriors. Something the characters bring up a lot is the concept of reintroducing wilderness, specifically in areas humans just don’t go, so that nature could take back those particular spots. It would be a kind of voluntary withdrawal from different areas. It’s an idea that’s grown a little more, but what happens in the book is that, one character realizes it just is not going to happen and only will if there are areas so badly contaminated that humans can’t live there. Then those will be the only areas that human’s won’t live, and it’ll be an opportunity for other species to go in and take back that area from humans.
