A hybrid of short works exploring the 1859 Carrington solar flare
A flood of illumination, a cosmic cataclysm frozen in time—the Carrington Event of 1859 was the most disruptive solar flare in recorded history, an electromagnetic storm that wiped out telegraph systems across the world and which, if it were to occur today, might well destroy anything on the planet with an electrical circuit.
Candace Nunag’s A Solar Flare is a hybrid of short essays, research notes, poems, graphite rubbings, and instant photographs, as well as bits of flash fiction, all simultaneously contemplating technology and memory, while preoccupied with the 1859 solar flare. The ghost of the Carrington Event haunts A Solar Flare with the promise of definitive answers about the narrator’s many severed connections: her digital, supernatural, eastern, western, and analog past. It is an attempt to illuminate the path of thought, wending its way through the tangles of rumination and irreconcilable spaces of wonder.
A Solar Flare is a kind of commonplace book, a well of collected knowledge, that unlike internet search engines and social media algorithms curbs rather than fuels ‘prosumerism.’ Its white space and sparsity is an invitation to pause and observe, memory receding like a wave, or the petals of a lotus opening one at a time.' —Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, author of Names for Light
In this completely original, deeply moving, and sharply intelligent book, Candance Nunag asks us to consider the afterlife of media, the technology of memorialization, and the impossibility of resolving grief in a voice both raw and wry, both vulnerable and whip smart.' —Julie Carr, author of Underscore
