It Could Happen Here

CZM Book Club: The Clover Still Grows Wild in Wawanosh, by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back

27 min
Feb 22, 2026about 2 months ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

This episode of Cool Zone Media's Book Club features a reading and discussion of "The Clover Still Grows Wild in Wawanosh" by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, a speculative fiction story set in post-collapse Canada exploring themes of environmental devastation, utopian community living, and survival under state oppression. The hosts analyze the story's subtle prose, emotional depth, and exploration of freedom and autonomy within a doomed revolutionary context.

Insights
  • Literary subtlety and emotional resonance can drive narrative impact more effectively than traditional plot structure in speculative fiction
  • Utopian communities in dystopian settings benefit from realistic portrayal of interpersonal conflict and hardship rather than idealized harmony
  • Environmental collapse narratives gain power through intimate, personal perspectives rather than large-scale catastrophic descriptions
  • The tension between collective survival and individual autonomy represents a core challenge for revolutionary communities
  • Climate fiction can explore philosophical questions about freedom and meaning in the context of inevitable systemic collapse
Trends
Growing literary interest in climate fiction that prioritizes character and emotional depth over plot mechanicsSpeculative fiction exploring post-collapse community structures and alternative social organizationIncreased focus on environmental devastation narratives set in North America, particularly CanadaLiterary exploration of queer relationships and non-traditional family structures within dystopian settingsEmergence of accessible, community-focused creative spaces (queer gyms, inclusive workshops) as cultural institutions
Topics
Climate Fiction and Environmental Collapse NarrativesUtopian and Anarchist Community LivingPost-Apocalyptic Social OrganizationChemical Contamination and Health EffectsState Oppression and Revolutionary ResistanceQueer Relationships in Dystopian SettingsProse Craft and Literary SubtletyIntergenerational Trauma and MemoryFreedom and Autonomy in Collective StructuresSurvival Ethics and Community Care
Companies
iHeartRadio
Podcast distribution platform where Cool Zone Media and affiliated shows are available
Cool Zone Media
Production company that produces It Could Happen Here and the Book Club series
Black Effect Podcast Network
Network hosting Selective Ignorance with Mandy B, mentioned in promotional segment
Spectrum Collective
Accessible queer gym space founded by author Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, mentioned in author bio
People
Kelly Rose Pflug-Back
Author of "The Clover Still Grows Wild in Wawanosh"; writer, editor, and weightlifting coach based in Toronto
Margaret Kiljoy
Host of Cool Zone Media Book Club; reads and discusses the featured story
Hazel
Research and story selection contributor for Cool Zone Media Book Club; provides critical analysis of the story
Quotes
"subtlety that Kelly brings as true craft. And she writes with this prose that you can really chew on and keep finding depth, turning over a new layer."
Hazel
"What does freedom mean to a doomed revolutionary?"
Hazel
"The clover still grows wild in Wawanosh."
Story narrator (Mina)
"There is softness in everything. There is softness in the sunless world inside the old prison, in the smell of old, old ashes that comes back up out of the ground after it rains."
Story narrator (Mina)
"It works as this vignette with a lot of things that it leaves us to think about. It asks more questions than it answers."
Margaret Kiljoy
Full Transcript
This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. is the true story of protest and rebellion in black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bob. Hi, Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt. Hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to Two Guys, Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. It's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legally Brunette podcast. Each week, we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens. Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, or you still need to wrap your head around the ditty verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step. And we're not just lawyers, we're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Book club, book club. Hello, and welcome to Cool Zone Media Book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do the reading, because I do it for you. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and today I have a story for you. I suppose I have a story for you every week, but this week I have a story for you. It is luscious. It is delicate. It is complicated. And it doesn't quite have a plot, But Hazel and I both agree that it's honestly better for it in this particular story. Do you trust us? Do you trust us for a story like that? Please trust us on this one. This story is from a longtime collaborator of mine, someone who I've worked with on projects here and there throughout the years because she's such an incredible writer. Kelly Rose Flugback, who is a writer and editor living in so-called Canada. This story is also set in Canada, in and around a community near Wawinosh, which I looked up trying to find out how to pronounce and listened to approximately eight different pronunciations, and all of them were produced by a machine, and I don't trust that pronunciation. So Wawinosh it is. It's about three hours west of Toronto, on Lake Huron. It appeared originally in Strange Horizons magazine in 2013. It's a real quote-unquote classic book club story in that it is a story about climate and governance and sadness, but it's so much more subtle and haunting than just saying it like that. It's a really good story. Do you trust us? Please trust us on this one. It is a great story for the false spring. Probably about half of you are experiencing what I'm experiencing, which is the false spring after the coldest winter in 5 to 20 years, depending on where you are. if you spend all your time looking at charts of weather like I do. Anyway, I can't really explain the story any better because you should just listen to it. Maybe you'll listen to it while you take a pleasant but unseasonably warm walk. Or you live out west and it's been unseasonably warm for a long time. Or you live somewhere else in the world where I don't look at the maps of weather, including the country where this is set because I tend to only look at the maps of weather in the United States. I don't feel proud of that. But now you all know about my weather-watching habits, and I feel like that's important. Please join me in reading. Well, you all are going to listen. I'm going to do the reading. The Clover Still Grows Wild in Wawanosh by Kelly Rose Flugback. Dr. Hansen presses the cold bell of her stethoscope against my chest, and I watch the lines in her face deepen. It's dark in the room and the watermarks in the ceiling's cracked plaster look like continents, like places I've never been marked on a map I've seen once and forgotten. It's daytime outside and the cold light of early spring filters in pale and weak through the newsprint she keeps taped over the windows. Most people don't know this, but Dr. Hansen is the kind of doctor that helps people, too. She used to work in a hospital like other doctors and wear a white coat and frown over her patients like she frowns over me now in a broken-down old house outside the city's walls. When I talk to her out loud, I call her Josepha, but in my head I still think of her as Dr. Hansen, the way I first heard it on the radio five years ago. Her face is different now than it was in the photographs. Her nose is different, and so is the line of her jaw. She says the pains in my chest might be from little growths called polyps. She says that it isn't uncommon for kids born in the year of the worst chemical spills like me when the poison gases left the forests outside of Wawinosh dead and leafless. Since it happened, she says, some of the biodegradable components of those chemicals have broken down and become harmless. Others circulate through the water cycle, coursing through rivers and clouds of condensation in the stratosphere, gradually making their way to the North and South Pole, concentrated by the cold there. She tells me it's the same as what happens when you leave a bottle of beer outside in the snow in the winter and forget it's there, and when you go out to get it, all the pure alcohol has separated and risen to the top. She gives me analgesic pills, an inhaler full of generic bronchodilator. Dr. Hansen has people inside the hospitals who give her things, even though they aren't supposed to. She sits beside me on the edge of the narrow cot and lays her dry, cracked hand against my cheek. The pads of her fingers are hard and smooth, silvery white with scar tissue. I touch my own fingers sometimes and wonder how much it must have hurt. Dr. Hansen's eyes are blue, their edges creased with fine lines. She tries to smile when she looks at me, but instead her lips just press together. I'm going to try to get you some better drugs, she says, and she wraps her hand around mine and squeezes. Jean-Marc accosts me before I'm even back to the compound, walking up behind me on Paul's silent feet so that I startle when he puts his hand on my shoulder. I was in the city today, he tells me, and his smile is wolfish. The day is bright and cold and his breath makes clouds of steam in the air, his chest heaving like he's been running. His hair has come loose from where he keeps it tied at the nape of his neck, the short pieces hanging down in his face and greasy hanks. I always tell him that next time one of the kids gets lice, he's going to have to shave his head like everybody else, teasing him with the wooling shears, saying I'll chop it off while he's sleeping, like that story I read in one of the Bibles we found in a crate at the dump site. We'll see, he tells me, like he has any choice in it. I robbed a man, he grins, and I notice how he's hiding his hands behind his back. I try to lean around him to see what he's got, but he darts and turns away from me, taking another step backward. What is it? Something you'll want, he laughs, and he shows me a little package wrapped in brown paper. Coffee? I try to grab it out of his hand, but he jumps out of my reach again, and his hands go behind his back. Share, I tell him, taking another step forward, and he laughs and tells me that sharing is conditional. On what? I ask, still advancing as he retreats, and he raises one of his eyebrows, and his face becomes smug. Does this condition apply to everybody who wants some I ask and he shakes his head and says no just me I try to tackle him around the waist but he seems somehow heavier more solid than last time we fought Until it occurs to me that it's just me who's gotten weaker. He tries to pin my arms behind my back, but I get myself free and run down the potholed road until he catches up. Once, he would have pulled me to the ground, and we would have rolled around slinging dirt into each other's faces, laughing and choking on the dust, until one of us admitted reluctant defeat. But this time, he lets his hands fall from my shoulders, and then puts them back, a gesture of consolation this time rather than a challenge. Mina, he says, and he puts the package in my hand and closes my fingers around it. We're still standing close to each other, and he smells like stale sweat and stale tobacco and unwashed hair, laced with some other smell I don't recognize, some alien city smell, chemical and sharp. We walk down the road together. It's packed dirt flanked with ratty shrubs and Queen Anne's lace. New green buds. You were with the doctor? Yes, I say. And I show him the painkillers in their little plastic bottle. He nods and doesn't say anything else. And do you know what else, besides painkillers in a little plastic bottle, numbs the pain of the collapse of late capitalism? The sweet, sweet deals that our advertisers are offering on these products and services. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America was at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bowen. Hi, Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt. Hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. When Jean-Marc first showed up in Illithiria, he was all lean muscle and bruised colored eyes, a feral city thing. He had a kind of violent sadness coming off of him, Toxicity of constant fear. His face looks softer now, even though he's older. From certain angles, you can almost see what he would have looked like as a child, if a place like the city would even allow a childhood for someone like him. We walk all the way to the place where Illithuria's compound used to be, the wrecked carcass of the old prison, with its big ragged hole opening into what used to be the north wing, all jagged with twisted pieces of rebar and steel I-beams sticking out everywhere like teeth in a mean, hungry mouth. I came to the prison alone last week, the day it rained all morning, and the ruins smelled like wet concrete and wet ashes. I'm not sure what I was doing there. I found a dead sparrow right in the bomb-blast steel-toothed mouth, lying with its wings spread on the ground. Its neck lulled, limp in my cupped hands, and I thought to myself, there is softness in everything. There is softness in the sunless world inside the old prison, in the smell of old, old ashes that comes back up out of the ground after it rains. Some of those ashes are the burnt up bones of the men and women and little kids who are trapped inside after the bombs. And back when the compound was still at the ruins, sometimes I would find little pieces of bone in the buckets of ash I brought out for the gardens. Whenever that happened, I would keep them in my pocket and bring them up to the third hill after I was done, the highest one where you can see into the junkyard and what used to be the highway. I would dig little pits deep enough that the rain wouldn't wash them up and say a few words to the bone pieces as I scraped the dirt back over them and packed it down. Sometimes I would pull out some of my hair or make little cuts on my fingers and squeeze drops of blood out so they would know I hadn't forgotten why they died, why the prison and all the places around it were empty for us to build our home in the first place. For days, I would feel the little pinpricks on my hands where I'd cut myself whenever I was washing the dishes or cutting potatoes or chopping wood. The pain would remind me of the bone pieces and the fire I was too young to remember. And there was softness in that as well. Jean-Marc and I stand beside each other in the prison's jagged mouth, our hands not quite touching, looking into the dark. My eyes scan the ground for the sparrow's little body, but it's gone now, carried off by some animal. The flat field behind us is still surrounded by a high, high fence, although there have been torn up bits for as long as I remember. Some of the older people, like Sarah and James and Yehuda, tell me that it was a yard where they would let the prisoners exercise way, way back when, when the place was a normal prison. After everything changed, they never let anybody outside. There are people in the city who want to help us, Jean-Marc says, still looking into the dark. My face tenses up when he says it, and he notices. They're not rats, not this time. I don't say anything. My hand leaves my side and traverses the space between us, meaning to touch him, although it stops short of contact and falls again, numb and heavy. At the compound, there's an old mirror nailed to the door of the building that used to be a barn, and I catch my own eyes reflected in it as I'm closing the door behind us. I look worse. I look the same. Everyone can tell. No one can tell. I'm imagining it. I'm imagining everything. Jean-Marc wrote a sign that says, you're ugly, and nailed it above the mirror because he was sick of people looking at themselves. I see it and smile as I latch the doors back shut again. The children assail us before we've taken our boots off, and my smile widens at the small hand searching my pockets, the laughing voices I close my hand around my bottle of painkillers And Flora tiny hot fingers try to pry it open again wanting to know what I have After the sun goes down everyone goes outside where scrap wood from the dump site is already piled for the fire. It will be summer soon, and there will be music and fire and laughing voices every night. I leave without speaking and go up to the top floor of the third building where I sleep, in a room which is really just one of the hall closets from back when the compound was a farm with a house made for three or four people, not 30. In the dark, I think about Dr. Hansen, her soft, crackly voice telling me I should be more careful, her scarred-up fingertips brushing the hair out of my face, pinning it behind my ears. I dream she lets me lay my head on her stomach while she combs my hair. My mind drifts, pacified by the fantasy. When I open my eyes, she is not her anymore. She is dead, like the people on the propaganda leaflets that Jean-Marc showed me, lurid photos showing the atrocities of the regime. Bloated faces, a woman's pregnant belly slid open like it's been unzipped. Her intestines are laid in a slick membrane knot on her chest, and you can see the baby inside, no longer protected by the cradle of her pelvic bones. Layers of dissected tissue pinned and ruched like paper roses, flesh petals, curved bone. I startle awake when Jean-Marc kicks open the door. He shuts it again, as quietly as his panic will allow, and darts into the corner beside where I'm lying. Psh, he says, and I can hear things banging downstairs, angry words being exchanged. There's an edge of laughter in his voice, and I know he's done something really stupid, but part of him is proud of it. The stairs creak with heavy footsteps, but I can tell from the sound of the hard-soled shoes that it's Mason he's infuriated this time. He's got a knife, says Jean-Marc close to my ear. I can tell by the way he's walking. He's walking with confidence. The footsteps thud past us. Mason has been drinking. He yells Jean-Marc's name twice, and then there's just silence. Then a noise of frustration, and he hurls something solid and heavy against the wall, near where we're hiding. Jean-Marc's hand wraps around mine in the darkness, but once Mason goes back downstairs again, he breaks out into laughter he's been holding back the whole time. His wine-smelling lips press against my cheek, and then he disappears again, probably leaving through one of the upstairs windows that leads onto the roof. In the morning, Yehuda looks exhausted, awake before everyone else, peeling a mound of potatoes into one of the big plastic wash tubs. A pile of broken tinder that used to be one of the chairs lies gathered into a neat pile by the wood stove. He smiles when he sees me, and I sit down beside him and take the knife off my belt and start peeling, thinking that's the best way I can tell him I'm sorry. Not for anything I've done wrong, just for the way things are in general. He doesn't say anything, but I know he understands. Sometimes I think Yehuda is my father. Everyone takes care of the kids together at Illithuria, feeds them and sews their clothes and teaches them how to mix bread dough and plant tomato seedlings and feed the chickens. But sometimes Yehuda looks at me in a special way, kind of sad and searching. And I think he's trying to find pieces of my mother in my face. Did you see the helicopter yesterday? He asks eventually, and fear jabs its sharp beak into my chest. No, I say, and I know what he's thinking, that we have to leave soon, that we have to go north to where there's still places to hide, jagged mountains where helicopters can't land. Brooms of dried nettles and mother warts sway from the ceiling rafters, newly risen sun spilling in through the crack in the door that's been opened to let the spring air in. Home. The illusion of permanence. James comes down the stairs with two of the kids, sad, dark-eyed Matthias asleep in his arms, while Aretha straggles behind them, thin and rangy, her small face serious. He eases himself onto the bench besides Yehuda, and they sit with their knees touching. Yehuda puts his arms around James and Matthias, and they stay like that for a while with their eyes closed. Makes me sad for some reason, and I try not to look. Mina, what do you think we can do for Jean-Marc? James asks me. I look at the potato I'm peeling and shrug my shoulders at him. For? Don't you mean about? They both laugh, although they try not to. He's not here, and nobody knows where he's gone. Please, Mina, you seem to know him better than anyone else does. I do know Jean-Marc better than anyone else, I want to tell him, and that's the reason I really don't care what happens to him. He'll be back, I tell them instead. He doesn't know how to take care of himself out here where there aren't any rich people to rob. Aretha pulls at my sleeve and frowns. She wants us to stop talking about it. I'm sorry, Reetha. We won't fight, I say. And I wrap my arm around her narrow shoulders and pull her onto the bench beside me. And do you know what else is always beside you on the bench? Just right there, ready to put a supportive arm around your shoulders like an old friend. That's right. It's the ads. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America was at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. to be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Two Guys, Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. It's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legally Brunette podcast. Each week, we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens. Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie or you still need to wrap your head around the ditty verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step. And we're not just lawyers. We're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. I know I shouldn't do it, but I go to Dr. Hansen anyway, after the sun's gone down and my work for the day is done. The way there is mostly through the forest so I tell myself the helicopters wouldn be able to see me anyhow If they knew how to see into the forest they wouldn have to drop the bombs filled with poison gas that strips every tree to its bare white skeleton If they knew how to see into the forest, they wouldn't have to chop it all down and burn the stumps. The way there is long, but I push my aching body. When I get to her house, there isn't any light, but she's lying awake inside with her eyes open, just looking out into the dark. You have to leave soon, she says when I crawl into bed beside her. I have to leave too. She puts her arm around my shoulders and I tell her the same thing I've told her so many times. That I love her, that I'm in love with her, that I want to kiss her on her mouth and on the scarred over tips of each of her fingers, that I wish more than anything I could take the pain out of her memories and out of her tired, broken body. I love you as well, Mina, she says, and kisses the side of my head. I know she doesn't mean it the way that I mean it, and I tell myself that's almost better. That's the way it should be between us. We don't say anything for a while, and I wonder for a moment if she's gone to sleep. I curl myself around her thin body and lay my head on her shoulder. In my pocket, I can feel the packet of coffee that Jean-Marc gave me. A heavy wind shakes the house, making its wooden rafters sigh, and it's then that I know I will never see Jean-Marc again. He has been killed, or else crossed some other boundary just as unbroachable as death, lost again in the bowels of the city where he came from. Do you think any of the forests have grown back, I ask her? The forests all around Wawanoche? It won't ever be like it was before, she says after a minute, her voice ruffling my hair as it drifts into sleep. But some things are hardy and don't die like the rest. Clover, I think. I think the clover still grows wild in Wawanosh. The clover still grows wild, I repeat to myself, and I close my eyes listening to the sound of our breath and the rattling in my chest and the noises of the first birds waking up outside as the gray morning light weeps in through the windows, through all the small spaces where the tape has peeled away. The end. And yeah, I don't know, welcome back. What a lush, delectable story. Thank you, Kelly. And I can just feel the fog through the prose. Kelly just has a real serious way with words. Hazel, who helps us pick the stories, has this to say about this story. Quote, subtlety that Kelly brings as true craft. And she writes with this prose that you can really chew on and keep finding depth, turning over a new layer. At the beginning, we called out that this piece wasn't going to have too much plot. And it doesn't, but it frankly doesn't need one. Plot is often the engine driving a story, but for Clover, the images dripping in emotional resonance are so strong that they power the story all on their own. The final image of looking at the sunlight coming in through the holes in the window where the tape is peeling away, sums up so perfectly the tensions of this story. Illithuria, the utopian community, which is also the Greek word for freedom, is the sunlight coming in through the holes, carving out autonomy outside where the state can project its power. And Illithuria is also the tape, trying to keep everyone together to survive collectively. This is the endless tension of finding autonomy. But beyond that, what does it even mean to be free if you know that your world will be ending, slash ended by force by the empire? What does freedom mean to a doomed revolutionary? And that's what Hazel has to say about it, and I agree with that. And one of the things that really struck me about this story, usually if you have your little community called freedom at the edge of an empire and it's dystopian and you can't quite tell the age of the characters, but you get the impression that they're like older teens maybe, you know, you're expecting a certain kind of YA niceness to that community. If people disagree with each other, it's like goofy or bullying, you know? But in this story, you have a drunken bad kid who's made someone so mad that he's stalking around the house with a knife. You know, there's like a realness, a rawness to this utopian community that I'm really impressed with. and it really shows that Kelly has experienced the less gentle sides of life and society at various points in her life. And it really comes across, and I really like that paired with this, like, you know, cool, anarchy-ish community outside of society, having it be like, nah, shit's like rough and real, but they're also like care about the kids and take care of each other and all that shit. So I would read a whole novel set in this, but I agree that it works like this. It works as this vignette with a lot of things that it leaves us to think about. It asks more questions than it answers. And while I both appreciate that, I'm also like, I could read more. Anyway, Kelly's bio. Kelly Rose Flugback is a writer, editor, and weightlifting coach living in Toronto. They recently edited the anthology Uprising, which is U-P colon rising, and have otherwise been busy opening an accessible queer gym space, which you can find at spectrumcollective.ca. You can also follow her at kellyrosecreates and at lesspain underscore moregains. yeah and I'm Margaret Kiljoy and you can find me on Instagram and Blue Sky and Hazel helps with research in the scripts and Eva does the audio editing and I hope you too get to chop a mountain of potatoes this week and that it's cathartic for you as well until next week see you soon fuck ice bye everyone It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media for more podcasts from Cool Zone Media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by Black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks Black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bowen. Hi, Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt. Hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. It's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legally Brunette podcast. Each week, we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens. Whether you want all the facts on the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, or you still need to wrap your head around the ditty verdict, we're breaking it all down step by step. And we're not just lawyers. We're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.