“How do we make sense of it and what do we do? There’s lots of bleak imagery in art, but in the work of Ursula K. We know what’s required, but we’re at an impasse - a powerful industry has been blocking progress for 40 to 50 years,” he said. He’d had the characters, plot, setting, and theme in his back pocket for a while, he said, and so he set it to paper.Ĭollins said that “we’re on a collision course toward a climate catastrophe. “I needed to make my own way.” Acknowledging his multigenerational advantage, he adds, “That’s the hand I was dealt: I chose not to go there.”Ībout his departure from nonfiction, Collins notes that as in his current work, published by Green Writers Press of Brattleboro, Vermont, “fiction can play an important role in imagining how we move forward.” Collins said that he “didn’t set out to write a novel.” But he added that he was inspired by his wife, Mary Wallace Collins, a real estate agent who is also accomplished at storytelling, an art he’s honing. Mayer: in turn, he donated it all to social justice causes and foundations - choosing, instead, “to work for a living,” he said. At 26, he came into a sizable inheritance from his great-grandfather, the German-born immigrant entrepreneur Oscar F. Growing up in the wealthy suburbs of Detroit, he says, he became increasingly aware of inequality in his youth. A board member of the Windham and Windsor Housing Trust, he was instrumental in shaping that organization.Īuthor of numerous articles and several nonfiction texts - among them, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions and Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good - Collins has been a presence on CNN and on NPR’s "Fresh Air" in print he’s been featured in publications from The Hill to T he Sun magazine, all a credit not only to his experience but also to his perspective on economic inequality in the U.S. In a life committed to economic justice and equality, and, more recently, to climate health, Collins, founder of United for a Fair Economy, is director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., where he co-edits, which, since 2011, according to the website, has tracked “inequality-related news and views” that address the question: “What can we do to narrow the staggering economic inequality that so afflicts us in almost every aspect of our lives?” In addition, Collins co-founded the website DivestInvest and is a trustee of the Post Carbon Institute, which publishes the website, Resilience. “The appeal was the rural area and the ways in which Vermont has proven itself to be a sort of lab for regenerative economy.” “I started building a cabin in Guilford,” he said. He came to northern New England first through Greenfield, Massachusetts, and from there to Southeastern Vermont. At 18, he worked in Worcester, Massachusetts, with Mustard Seed Catholic Worker Community for a few years before matriculating at Hampshire College. In the end, it’s clear that Rae Kelliher did not die in vain.įrom his native Madison, Wisconsin, Collins, 63, first came East in 1977. Seven years after her dramatic demise, Kelliher’s Vermont farm community - which she and her husband, Reggie, nurtured - gather to honor her, to try to understand her violent exit, to grapple with the work yet to be done. From wrestling with her Ohio past and a myopic brother to her meticulous research into, and near-obsessive behavior around, a cause, we see that she is a force to be remembered. Throughout the novel, we see what makes Kelliher tick.
Rae Kelliher is a life-long activist focused most on the environment, though her reach spans other causes. In Altar, a work of near-future eco-fiction, Collins welcomes us into a world where visionaries and activists wrestle with climate disruption in the recent past to our present and several years beyond. Complicating the aftermath, two of the CEO’s children are killed in the process. Kelliher sacrifices herself to a cause, taking out an oil baron for his role in delaying responses to climate change. Within a mere few pages of his debut novel, Altar to an Erupting Sun, Chuck Collins of Guilford, Vermont, sets the stage for his heroine, Rae Kelliher, to carry out a well-planned murder/suicide.
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