These Survivals

These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction

by Lynne Huffer

A collage-style work in fragments, Lynne Huffer’s These Survivals: Autobiograhy of an Extinction brings together philosophy, memoir, poetry, and original multimedia artworks to articulate an ethics of living on a devastated planet. Focusing on climate change and mass species extinction, Huffer approaches ruination through assemblages rendered in sharp-edged prose, vibrant color images, and experimental features that include black-out poems, weather reports, and abecedarian essays. She considers her struggles with everyday life and confronts the immensity of extinction across the expanse of geological time, recognizing the self’s insignificance in the context of the planet’s 4.5 billion-year existence.

page 50 from These Survivals by Lynne Huffer
14″x11″; handcut and torn paper collage; 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

As she moves across autobiographical, political, and literary registers, her abiding theme is the repeated phrase: the fragment remains while the whole crumbles. At every turn, Huffer insists on the fragmentary, provisional nature of anything taken to be whole as well as the impartial conditions under which we write, at times experienced as constraint and at others, freedom. Reveling in interruption, obliquity, and layering, Huffer opens space for thought to emerge in unexpected and innovative ways—ways that are grounded in the material practices of writing and living.

ABOUT THE BOOK
These Survivals: Autobiography of an Extinction
by Lynne Huffer
7″x10″; 224 pages
ISBN
Paper 9781478031574
Hardcover 9781478028369
$30 USD paperback; $16.50 USD e-book; $122 USD hardcover
Published by Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2025

Purchase the book from Amazon HERE.