Katharine Haake

Metro is a unique multi-genre creative writing text that provides exercises and prompts to help students move beyond terms and concepts to active writing. By using "guided writing," the authors help students through the creative processes in fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction. A mini-anthology with relevant exercises makes this sourcebook complete.

In Katharine Haake's new eco-fable, What Happened Was, emissaries from the post-world return to us with accounts of a future that spools itself out because we're not paying attention. In it, everything looks a lot like now, only a little different. Intimate, precarious, often beguiling, sometimes hilarious, and never free of political context, these reports are haunted by loss. Whether parts of the body or children in trees, things disappear in this world without warning or sense as everything fades toward oblivion and dead parents taunt from the grave: What made you think you were so special it wouldn't happen to you?

Lyrical, provocative, and deeply haunting, The Time of Quarantine takes us into a near-distant future of post-human environmental collapse to chronicle the tale of a boy raised alone in the woods by computers at the end of the world--or is it? As the sole surviving member of an ill-fated Intentional Community designed to escape world's ending plagues and convinced he is alone on earth, the boy--now a man--is determined to carry out the final wishes of his father and fulfill his stoic duties of being merely human. But when he discovers, as if by accident, that everything he's always imagined to be true is instead a lie, he decides to leave the safety of his little spinning plot of spaceship earth and go back into the world to find out what comes next.

Fiction. These stories, powerful eco-fables of down-home Americana, take place during the relentless rollover from one millennium to the next in a world remarkably like our own--and not. In one, for example, a girl exquisitely tuned to the sorrows of history ends up in a city blasted by light where she gets the chance to try dreaming things over. In another, a boy born lacking the ability to distinguish phonetic difference grows up to be a famed musician. There's a dapper, square-headed astronomer who discovers the origin of stars, and a tiny-footed climber who scales the tallest mountains in the world at the end of time. As mothers and children, husbands and wives struggle to make sense of whatever still remains, the one thing they share in common is their determination not to miss a single beat. Or, as one narrator remarks, The next time we imagine the world, let's try to imagine it whole.