Helios

Helios 3: Rebecca Sharp's Rough Currency

Tagged:

Literature

Climate Crisis

Fossil Fuels

12 Min Read

August 23, 2021

By

Rebecca Sharp
Imre Szeman
Caleb Wellum

Helios is an EH interview series about new research in the energy humanities and the creative processes that bring it to life.

Our third installment features Scottish poet and playwright Rebecca Sharp, whose interdisciplinary work explores ideas of landscape and place across artforms. In her new poetry pamphlet, Rough Currency, Sharp plumbs our personal and collective entanglements with fossil fuels with an eye for the mythic and the magical. A selection of her work is featured in The Art of Energy exhibition at the Centre for Energy Ethics, where it won second prize in the inaugural Art of Energy Award.

EH editors Imre Szeman and Caleb Wellum sat down with Rebecca over Zoom on June 25 to talk about her poetic process during a pandemic, why she wanted to write about oil, and how poetry can help us to see the world differently so that we might change it.

Click the download link below to read the full interview.

Download the interview
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Read More

The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy: Multispecies Encounters in Extraction
Travelling out of sight? Mapping the flight networks of Canada's gold mining industry
Why Read Fiction while the Planet is in Crisis? Reflections on Cli-Fi Book Clubs

Read More

February 16, 2022

Canadian Oil and Soil: Romantic Nationalism and Eco-Fascism

Adam Carlson

Adam Carlson teases out how the framing of resource development in Canada often supports authoritarian resource rhetoric and policies. The way we talk about "Canadian oil", it turns out, is deeply political and cannot be separated from ongoing histories of resource extraction and dispossession.

Read
December 23, 2025

The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy: Multispecies Encounters in Extraction

Josephine Taylor

In this Author’s Note, Josephine Taylor outlines the intellectual and ethical foundations of her recent book, The Nonhuman Narratives of Energy, tracing how animal life has been rendered absent within dominant energy narratives. Drawing on animal studies, energy humanities, and science fiction, she argues for an ethics of witnessing multispecies vulnerability as a way to rethink extraction, petroculture, and the possibilities of a world after oil.

Read
all articles

~

Researchers work with high school students from 18 countries to address energy futures

~

Denaturalizing Gas and War: On Energy Humanities and the Cyprus Gas Conflict

~

Education and Extraction

~

Making and Meeting Online

~

When It Comes to Energy Transition, India Must Embrace Complexity

~

The Carbon Convoy: The Climate Emergency Fueling the Far Right’s Big Rigs

~

Rare Seeds: How Venezuelan Artists are Breaking the Spell of Oil

~

Making climate information accessible to rural farmers in Kenya

~

Forum on Carbon Democracy Part 3: Maintaining the Rule of Experts? Interrogating the Contradictions of Energy

~

Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion

~

COVID-19, Electric Cars, and the Life-Sized City

~

Helios 2: Anne Pasek on Changing Methods in a Changing Climate

~

The Black Gold Tapestry

~

EH in Practice Part 3: The World of Energy and The Myth of Containerization

~

Fieldwork in the Energy Humanities

~

Quiet the Oil and Gas Industry with This One Weird Trick

~

EH in Practice Part 2: Museums and the Challenge of Cultural Decarbonization

~

Energy Decolonization and Indigenous Resistance: Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms

~

The Promise of Electrification

~

"There is no other life”: Gary Snyder’s Double View of Petromodernity

~

Gothic Energies in Transition

~

EH in Practice Part 1: Libraries and Laboratories: Teaching Energy Humanities in Literary Studies

~

Reassessing Nuclear Energy in the Shadow of Toxicity Discourses

~

Forum on Fossil Capital Part 2: The Ideology of Fossil Capital

~

Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations

~

Canadian Oil and Soil: Romantic Nationalism and Eco-Fascism

~

EH in Practice Part 6: Preserving Oil: A Conversation with Educators at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum and Oil Museum of Canada

~

Forum on Carbon Democracy Part 1: Why I Love Teaching Carbon Democracy

~

We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition

~

Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-First Century