A Solar Flare

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.