Novelist, English professor Dionne Irving Bremyer on empathy, creative writing and climate change’s impact on culture
Through her fiction, Dionne Irving Bremyer is exploring ways in which climate change can erase culture right along with landscape, as well as the resulting implications.
“What happens if some place like the Caribbean becomes like Atlantis?” asked Bremyer, who is an associate professor in English and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame.
Because Notre Dame is interested in developing the whole person, she said, it’s an ideal place to write fiction and think about the world.
Bremyer, an affiliated faculty member of the Initiative on Race and Resilience, is the author of the short story collection “The Islands,” which is one of 10 books longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In it, she traces the lives of Jamaican women who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism on the Caribbean island nation.
She is also the author of the novel “Quint” (7.13 Books), a fictional retelling of the true story of the Dionne quintuplets, and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. Two essays, “Treading Water” and “Do You Like to Hurt,” were notable essays in Best American Essays 2017 and 2019.
Reading stories about people who are like us, and not like us, helps develop empathy and provides appreciation of what it means to be human, Bremyer said.
“We still read Hamlet, right? And we get something out of it, not necessarily because we are Danish princes, but because we can have the experience of understanding what it means to have difficult family situations.”
Originally published by al.nd.edu on Feb. 10.
atLatest Faculty & Staff
- ND Expert: Will ‘Brat Girl Summer’ translate into an autumn of Democratic victories? ‘It’s anybody’s guess’In the past three days, people on social media have embraced British pop star Charli XCX’s online pronouncement that “Kamala IS brat.” According to to Sara Marcus, an assistant professor of English and author of “Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution,” that translates to a declaration that Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s presumptive new nominee for president, embodies the sort of messy, complicated, casual womanhood that the singer’s recent album, “Brat,” depicts and celebrates.
- Using forest resources strengthens food security, study findsForests can reduce hunger in rural households while also capturing carbon and advancing sustainability goals for low- and middle-income countries, according to new research by Daniel C. Miller, associate professor of environmental policy at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.
- In memoriam: Benjamin Radcliff, professor of political scienceBenjamin Radcliff, a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, died June 10 after a long illness. He was 60.
- Jason Rohr wins 2024 International Frontiers Prize for innovative public health and sustainability researchJason Rohr, the Galla Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, is one of three international winners of the 2024 Frontiers Planet Prize for his research that helps improve public health, agriculture, sustainability and poverty in Senegal.
- US states shape foreign policy amid national China unease, research showsState-level officials such as governors, state legislators and attorneys general are shaping U.S.-China relations as the two countries navigate a strained geopolitical relationship, according to new research by Notre Dame political scientist Kyle Jaros.
- Carter Snead testifies before US Senate Judiciary CommitteeO. Carter Snead, the Charles E. Rice Professor of Law and director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, offered expert testimony on Wednesday (June 12) before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.