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Finding the Swamp with David Huebert

The news was wildfires. The news was “The Amazon is burning.” The news was Greta, Greta, Greta. Newsfeeds were shredding. The world was imploding, maybe it always had been. 

“Swamp Things” started as an attempt to reckon with a gasping world. Conceived and begun shortly after my second child was born and in the midst of the global rise of Extinction Rebellion, #fridaysforfuture, and the Trump administration’s celebration of “freedom gas,” I wanted to ask my two infant daughters questions they weren’t capable of answering. I wanted to explain to them, apologize to them, warn them, protect them, level with them. I wanted to say I’m sorry, we’re sorry. 

“You’re sorry?” my hypothetical older children scoffed. “Who cares? Fix it.” 

A question I’ve been struggling with for a few years is how to write fiction about oil. Like most environmental issues, petroculture is too polarizing to make for good stories. Oil is good, or it’s evil. Oil is inexcusable—Amitav Ghosh says that it is “an embarrassment verging on the unspeakable”—or economically necessary. But for some reason I’m drawn to it, sensing that it’s not that simple after all.  

Eventually, I found the swamp: the vegetal theory of oil origin. Oil, after all, is life, is animals, plants, characters. This realization helped me find Sapphire, a girl profoundly influenced by Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing comics. More oil-adjacent than about oil, “Swamp Things” is the story of a swamp that has been brewing for hundreds of millions of years. It’s the story of a teenage girl trying to navigate the climate crisis while also trying to wade through the sewage of what it means to be a teenage girl today. People exploit her, manipulate her, intoxicate her. She watches flares rise from the stacks, SUVs burning on the 401, a brown fountain spuming out of a gas station—and she’s as implicated in it as the rest of us. There is only one, very simple, story about oil. Yet every story told today is tangential to that tale. Towards the end of “Swamp Things,” there is a moment of hopefully not-too-transparent ars poetica: “we can’t purge or clean up all this filth but maybe we can bend it into beauty.” If you’ve never done so, I recommend doing an online search of “Bitumen.” You will be astonished by how beautiful it is.

“”“You’re sorry?” my hypothetical older children scoffed. “Who cares? Fix it.””“

David Huebert’s work has won the CBC Short Story Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize. David’s fiction debut, Peninsula Sinking, won a Dartmouth Book Award, was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize, and was runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His second book of poems, Humanimus, will be published in fall 2020.

Photos courtesy of David Huebert; Malcolm Lightbody; and Katie Rodriguez.

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What is Margaret Nowaczyk Reading?

The pandemic has done a number on my writing—I have not been able to concentrate at all, my motivation out the window. Thankfully, I have been able to read and read voraciously: classics I never had time for (Middlemarch dragged on like molasses, Moby Dick shocked me with its final image), classic I am rereading (The Magic Mountain, The Odyssey, The Plague), a really, really bad thriller (recommended—what a shock!—by The New York Times), two beach reads (didn’t finish either), and many others. But there have also been several amazing new authors that I have discovered and would love to share.

The first is Natalie Bakopoulos, a young Greek-American writer. Her sophomore novel, Scorpionfish, is set in Athens circa 2015 and the city itself becomes a character in the novel. We gawk at the street art of the anarchist Exarchia district, we revel in tavernas thrumming with bouzuki, we visit a museum with a visual art exhibit stunning in its scope. It is not the Athens of tourists, but the living and breathing (or rather heaving) Athens of a populace struggling with the financial crisis, the influx of refugees, casual and thus that much more malevolent Greek nationalism/neo-Nazism, and tight living quarters. This kaleidoscopic, bracing background showcases a profound exploration of loss (of love, of one’s parents, of a life-long career, of health). From Tin House Publishers just this year.

The other, whose second novel I am still in the midst of reading yet already besotted with, is Chigozie Obioma. An Orchestra of Minorities, like his first—The Fishermen— was a finalist for the International Man Booker Prize. Even though I haven’t finished it, I can already recommend this multilayered tour de force written in the most prodigious language where high lyricism mingles with the Nigerian dialect. Based on traditional Igbo beliefs, it is narrated by the main character’s chi, a guardian spirit, who is pleading his host’s—an Igbo poultry farmer’s—case to Chukwu, the highest god of the Igbo cosmology. I don’t know what the main character has done to require this intercession, but whatever it might be, I will find out. This 500-plus page book reads like a dream and keeps the reader captivated with its voice, its mythology, and the heartbreak at the centre of the story.

Margaret Nowaczyk is a pediatrician-geneticist and a short story writer living in Hamilton, ON. Her memoir about working in the medical profession is due out in 2021 with Wolsak&Wynn.

Photos courtesy of Timon Klauser; Annie Spratt; and Aaron Burden.

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What is Scott Armstrong Reading?

American crime noir is a fascinating genre that has lost much of his reputation and popularity. The number of novels that some of these forgotten novelists have published is staggering. As was their mostly lasting poverty. The grit and uncertainty of this specific time period, and in many cases, the naivety of its young culture create a unique brand of flabbergasting murder mysteries. 

     I recently came across a Library of America collection of noir novels of the 1930’s and 40’s, including names such as: James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” Edward Anderson’s “Thieves Like Us,” and William Lindsay Gresham’s, “Nightmare Alley.” Fun reads all, as they were went to be, wedged away on the high shelf with the other gaudy covers. 

Scott Armstrong lives in Ottawa with his beautiful family of five. He has published over a dozen short stories in various Canadian literary journals over the last decade.

Photos courtesy of Andriyko Podilnyk and Daria Gudoshnikova.

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Marilyn Gear Pilling’s Writing Space

Intense colour has been a primary pleasure of my life. When the children left home, I turned the dining room, which has doors, into a space for myself. One wall a pure darkish-blue, the opposite wall, tomato red. Above the plate rack, Mayan gold. A large vase of flowers that picks up those colours. An elderly maple desk from my cousin’s used furniture store. My favourite books, taken from other shelves in the house, so that I have the feeling of significant old friends around me.

On the walls and plate racks—art, artifacts, photos of people who mean a lot to me. A photo of the writer Gordon Sheppard, who, over the last two years of his tragically truncated life did an enormous amount to encourage my writing and myself. A picture of Mr. Bones poring over a book; this reminds me to squeeze the juice from every day. A Wes Bates wood engraving of Dionysus, so that I don’t forget, as Jeanette Winterson puts it, that “art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother….” The room looks out on my wild, blousy, colourful garden, another primary pleasure; I spend three months of the year tending it.

My friend swims her poems, others wear out their shoes walking their writing into being. My brain is in my fingers, and thank God for the computer; its speed catches what my fingers want to say.

Reading others’ poems sets me off to write poetry. At the moment I’m reading Anne Carson’s inimitable oeuvre and Matthew Zapruder’s brilliant Why Poetry, as well as his poems. Reading others’ CNF, including what is published by TNQ, is pure pleasure, but I’m sure that my busy unconscious is also absorbing the techniques. I did laugh out loud at how often TNQ writers described their writing spaces and then said they didn’t write there. Laughed because—ça c’est moi aussi! Often I write in the mornings at a coffee shop five minutes from my home. I like to be among people but not relating to them. I can also be found writing in the garden, at the kitchen table, in the living room, in bed or in the attic. Sometimes even here, in my writing space.

The essentials are my laptop, my fingers, and coffee, which I may or may not drink. It’s almost as if this writing room space is my writing persona, whereas the real person-as-writer is not so easily pinned down.

Marilyn Gear Pilling grew up in Waterloo. She is the author of ten books, three short fiction and seven poetry, the latest The Gods of East Wawanosh from Cormorant Books, 2019. She is thrilled to have her essay  “The Hen-house” published in her home town.

Photos courtesy of Marilyn Gear Pilling and fotografierende.

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What is Meg Todd Reading?

Just before book stores and the like closed due to Covid19, I paid $6.00 for The Sound and the Fury in the second-hand bookshop up the road. “Have fun with that,” the shopkeeper said. One is never sure which way to take her words. I once brought in four boxes of used books and she glanced through them, perfunctory and taciturn, until she spotted two small, boxed dictionaries. They’d been printed in Japan. One was Sanskrit-English, the other Tibetan-English. These were the only books she bought and I’ve regretted the sale ever since, even though I have no use for them anymore. Still. The way she honed in. 

I leafed through the paperback as I walked home, looking, I think, for a name, scribbled annotations, a forgotten grocery list or photograph, something to connect me to the previous reader, something to tell me what I was in for. Because, yes, I was uninformed.

The book lay on my bedside table in the stack of half-read or about-to-be read books, and then it lay on the dining room table in another stack. Like the rest of the world, I was consumed by the pandemic and as time passed and we were all enlisted to help stop the spread, my husband and I longed for our children. Our son in China where life had resumed a pre-Covid19 pace, asking, are you guys still in the middle of that? The twins and their partners on the farm, focused on food production and unwilling to risk visits. Our daughter in the Yukon, self-isolating in her isolated little house in the middle of nowhere because her partner might be sick.

A mass shooting in Nova Scotia. And then a CAF Cyclone helicopter went down in the Ionian Sea. I was stretching on the living room floor, as I’d taken to doing every morning while I listened to the Prime Minister’s address, when the story broke. The words “went down” were what made me cry.

And wouldn’t you know it, I was reading The Sound and the Fury. Doing my best to follow the miserable decline of a family. It took me months to finish. From more or less the beginning of the lockdown to the beginning of the summer, with lots of books and journals and Netflix series inhaled when I’d come up from segments of Faulkner for air. The characters circled my mind, their angst and anger and disappointments blending with my general sense of malaise. Benjy running along the fence, his mind travelling from what he sees to what he remembers, from the golf caddie to his sister, Caddie; Quentin’s fractured thoughts as he contemplates suicide; Jason obsessing about money and the morals of Miss Quentin; Dilsey striving to keep peace.

“”Had I known just how long and serious the situation we were heading into was going to be, I might have chosen a light read, “”

Faulkner expects a lot from his reader. Launching into dialogue or time-leaping streams of consciousness, eschewing punctuation conventions and expository preamble. Any dropped hint must be spotted and picked up or you’ll be left behind. He marches through dialogue spit-ball fast and never explains who is speaking, why or when. It’s in there, he’s saying. Read on, it’s in there. So I read on, unsure, sometimes, of where I was, unsure of who the character was in relation to other characters. I carried on because these people were real. I’d joined their lives mid-upheaval for better or worse. Damn the punctuation or capital letters because the story had to move, had to keep up with Benjy or Quentin or Jason.

Had I known just how long and serious the situation we were heading into was going to be, I might have chosen a light read, but maybe The Sound and the Fury at the onset of Covid19 was the perfect fit: decline for decline. A book that travels through a handful of days while at the same time spanning close to thirty years — isn’t this what lockdown feels like?

In the doorway of the used bookstore, which is still closed, someone has made a home. A sleeping bag, coffee cups, piles of magazines and pages torn from books that were left in boxes, discarded in the hope that the proprietor might take an interest. Maybe even be grateful. This despite the signs on the windows indicating that books are, under no circumstances, to be abandoned here.

Meg Todd’s fiction has appeared in TNQ, Prairie Fire, Grain, PRISM, EVENT, The Humber Literary Review, CBC, and others. She lives in Vancouver.

Photos courtesy of  Meg Todd and Fallon Michael.

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Nicholas Bradley’s Writing Space

My desk is uncharacteristically tidy these days because my writing space has become my Zoom “studio.” Normally the stacks of books would be taller, the pile of papers overgrown, but this corner of the basement is now, in the time of the pandemic, my virtual teaching space. I’m fortunate to have it, and grateful.

The attempt at neatness is not just vanity (or embarrassment)—I’m trying not to distract students—but I do enjoy working without clutter. That’s the theory, anyway, if not always the practice. The dictionary stays on my desk, though, since I seem to need it every few minutes, along with whatever books I’m teaching at the moment. There’s a card from a trusted friend with wise words about keeping spirits up. My laptop, on which I do almost all my work, first draft to last. A notebook, filled with to-do lists and the odd idea. A cup of coffee, of course, and the old envelopes on which I made notes for this little essay. The desk itself is pine, so soft that it’s scratched by the sight of a pen. But I like the knots. The chair is a hand-me-down from my parents. It’s older than I am, and still going strong. I wasn’t allowed to sit in it when I was a kid, so I take satisfaction in using it now. I don’t even ask permission.

The photo doesn’t show that the floor slopes downhill toward the garden, a quirk of the house that suggests metaphors for writing: fighting gravity, maybe, or, more happily, falling into the green space outside the door. When I get stuck, I look out the window at the incredible Garry oaks, those enormous stalks of broccoli, and remember a favourite line from Theodore Roethke: “Leaves, leaves, lean forth and tell me what I am.” The trees are, more or less, why I write.

Nicholas Bradley lives in Victoria, BC. His most recent books are Rain Shadow (2018) and An Echo in the Mountains: Al Purdy after a Century (2020). He teaches at the University of Victoria.

Photos courtesy of Nicholas Bradley. Cover image by David Vig on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Eva-Lynn Jagoe

When Vinh Nguyen asked me to write something for “Scatterings,” I felt so honoured because the writing in that series has been so amazing. In trying to find the form of a piece, I find that I tend to write with a particular reader in mind. For “The Finca,” I was thinking of Vinh, who I know to be a beautiful subtle writer and a perceptive reader. I wanted to evoke, for Vinh and readers like him, the nostalgia of place and time that I feel so strongly. I knew that, to do this, I needed to linger on sensory imagery and really try to express the longing I feel when I can’t sleep and lie in bed tracing, with minute detail, the rooms of the house, the touch of the cool marble tiles on my bare feet. Or when I think about the saffron taste of my grandmother’s paella, jostled by cousins at the patio table in the heat of the midday shade.

It was a pleasure to write the essay, and I wrote it quickly. The first person, which is me and not me, is a voice that I am familiar with, since my previous book is a memoir. Recently, I’ve been trying to write a gothic climate novel about the finca and my family’s legacy. My grandfather was a British electrical industrialist in Barcelona, so I want to write a novel that looks at hydroelectricity in Cataluña and the repercussions of modernization in the intimate space of a family and a place. I have been pushing myself to write characters who are very different from myself, and to use the third person. I am having a pretty bumpy time. Sometimes, it’s totally fun to make up situations and character traits, other times I feel that really I have no imagination and that I’m just fictionalizing reality.  

The other day, a writer friend told me that I should just write in the voice that comes naturally. I whined, “But I don’t want to write another memoir!” This is something that I really need to figure out, since the novel draws so much from my own family and the finca. How am I going to write this? Why am I so averse to writing it as memoir? In part, I think, this has to do with fear of hurting people. My first memoir was already so intimate and painful that I still cringe to think about my parents reading it.

My uncle, who appears in “The Finca” as Uncle Tony, read it and wrote me an email headed “Slightly Petulant,” with a link to a Leon Redbone song, “Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.” My heart sank when I read it. I regretted that I had written about him and my aunt, and felt a paralysis about the writing that I was currently doing for the novel, which was about them.

After some thought, I wrote this reply: “You know what they say, dear uncle… ‘For the wolf of a writer, the family is a crowd of sitting ducks.’ No, but seriously, I wrote this piece because it felt true to me, but you know how it is with writing, even real people become characters who demand to be written a certain way. Any autobiography or biography is both a truth and a fiction, so how much more so in full fiction?”

We’ve been writing back and forth since then, him telling me about how the finca is more bohemian than ever, now that he and my aunt live in it full time, me asking him questions about family history. He sent me these two pictures the other day, which haunt me. I stare and stare at my aunt’s young 1972 beauty and her aged 2020 face, seeing my mother, seeing my aunt Chichi, and seeing myself. It’s all so deep and tangled in me that I wonder how I’m going to write my way into and out of it.

Eva-Lynn Jagoe’s Take Her, She’s Yours (punctum books, 2020) is a memoir about psychoanalysis, sexuality, and self-possession. She is a professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at University of Toronto.

Photos courtesy of Eva-Lynn Jagoe. Cover image by Pascal Habermann on Unsplash

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The 2020 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award Winners

The New Quarterly is proud to announce the winners of the 2020 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award!

Winner

“Moon Sign”
by Joshua Wales

Runners-up

“Count Your Blessings”
by Heather Debling

“The Place of Broken Glass”
by Sarah Wishloff

Honourable Mentions

“Hyacinth Girl”
by Lisa Alward

“Till I’m Me Again”
by Joshua Wales

The 2020 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest Winners

The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the winners of the  2020 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest!

Winner

“The Medium of the Archive”
by Elizabeth Dauphinee

Runner-up

“Terrorist Mythologies”
by Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt

Honourable Mention

“The Wounded Man”
by Lisa Martin

Notable Essays
To appear in a later issue

“Generation Congee”
by Donna Seto

“Human Touch”
by Doley Henderson

“2020: A Family Odyssey”
by Yohani Mendis

“Ways of Singing”
by Rosie Long Decter

“Selfies @ Auschwitz”
by Claire Montgomery

“How to Make a Gay Icon”
by Kevin Shaw

“Inheritances”
by Linda Light

Blaze Island by Catherine Bush: Q&A with Mahak Jain

Catherine Bush (www.catherinebush.com) is an award-winning, bestselling and New York Times Notable Book author of five novels. Her most recent novel, Blaze Island, is Shakespeare-inspired and tackles issues of climate change. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph and the coordinator of the Toronto-based creative writing MFA program. Below, she is in conversation with past student and writer Mahak Jain (www.mahakjain.com), whose work appeared in Issues 152 and 134.

You’ve mentioned that the idea for this novel came from a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest set in the Arctic. Still, it’s possible to read and enjoy the novel without any knowledge of this influence. How did you make the novel its own experience, distinct from The Tempest?

It was absolutely crucial to me that a reader be able to enter and be immersed in the novel without any knowledge of The Tempest. That said, Blaze Island repurposes many elements of the play and I hope there will be readers who pick up and feel these resonances both in a playful way and as a deeper undercurrent. I wish I could remember the moment when I decided to make Prospero, Shakespeare’s magician and deposed Duke of Milan, a climate scientist desperate to find a way to stop runaway global heating. It was clear to me early on that I wanted to narrate the novel from the point of view of the young characters, Miranda, the scientist’s daughter, and Caleb, my reimagined Caliban, who’s mixed race and an outsider on tiny Blaze Island in the North Atlantic. They have the most to lose from the climate crisis and I wanted to shift the focus of the play to tell their intertwined story. I’m trying to imagine, across generations, what it’s like to encounter the climate crisis now as someone who’s just entering adulthood, to reverse the lens, so to speak, and have them examine the so-called adults who are supposed to be in charge and are making such a terrifying mess of things.

At the end of the book, you explain the research you’ve done, not only reading but also travel to places like Fogo Island and Germany. How did you come to decide the type of research you would do and, more practically, how did you organize and store your research?

I am an extremely haphazard researcher. I play link hopscotch online and bookmark articles of interest. I take notes by hand in a schoolbook size, spiral-bound notebook. At any moment when I’m stuck in the writing I search for what I might need to move forward. All you really have to do to research the climate crisis is read a good newspaper, like The Guardian, which has had excellent coverage for years. One of the challenges, certainly, of writing right up against the present is that the present, along with some of the scientific knowledge, keeps shifting.

Then there was all the lived research, some of which also ends up in my spiral-bound notebook. The novel takes place on a fictional version of Fogo Island off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. I spent part of each summer there for the last eight years and would have gone this summer if not for the pandemic. I lived for weeks at a time in the house that’s the model for the house that Miranda and her father live in by the sea. I talked to people about wind and weather and language and climate changes and foraging. I went berry picking. I listened to the changeable and ferocious wind. I walked trails by the sea and listened to the voices of the novel come up through the rocks into my body.

“We need to stop entertaining a dream of flying off to live on Mars once we’ve wrecked this planet.”

Blaze Island is a remote and isolated island that has been further isolated as a result of a hurricane. How did you come to decide the story should take place on an island? Was there any point in which you considered setting the story elsewhere?

As a reimagining of The Tempest, the novel always needed to take place on an island. It was a matter of finding the right island. I’m drawn to northern places, maybe because my people come from a northern island across the Atlantic Ocean. I have a tremendous sense of being metabolically at home when in Newfoundland or on Fogo Island. I love cold and wind. I discovered Fogo Island online, before the deluxe and beautifully minimalist Fogo Island Inn made it famous (I wrote my own travel feature about the inn, which was the only way I could afford to stay in it). I heard about the Shorefast arts residencies, which weren’t for novelists like me, and Shorefast folk pointed me in the direction of Tilting, the village at the easternmost edge of the island facing the wild Atlantic, which has its own wonderful artists’ residency program; its organizers invited me to come and then, as wondrously, to return. Beyond that, there’s an essential metaphoric resonance to the island setting. Island thinking requires tremendous self-sufficiency. You need to know how to live in isolation and sustain yourself long-term. We’ve learned something of this during the pandemic. We also live on a planetary island and need to apply island thinking to our biospheric life, which is something that Miranda says towards the end of the novel. We need to stop entertaining a dream of flying off to live on Mars once we’ve wrecked this planet.

Though the effects of warming are featured throughout the novel, the novel’s subject is the cold of the north and terrific winds. Heat, though mentioned, never takes center stage. What made you want to take this approach?

One of the more compelling features of global heating is the phenomenon of Arctic amplification, which means, for instance, that dramatic temperature rises are even more pronounced in the polar regions. Here in the mid-latitudes we can ignore how dependent we are on the presence of ice and snow on a global scale but our lives are indelibly tied to the presence of the huge Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets: if they go, we go. This is the knowledge that my scientist, Milan Wells, grapples with. One of the features of life on Fogo Island, and Blaze Island in the novel, is the presence of ice: sea ice drifting south from the Arctic in the early spring, icebergs in the later spring and summer, most of which have broken off the Greenland ice sheet. Icebergs are awesome in the truest sense: they’re huge, stunning mountains and sheets of ice. They’re also small, broken ice islands. They inspire awe. And grief. It’s an incredible thing to watch icebergs float past your back door. This is ancient ice, ice from the early days of the human story. To encounter this ice is to confront our own past from ten thousand years ago and then watch the past, which may hold the key to our future, dissolve.

You mentioned early resistance to the idea you are exploring in this novel: a technological solution to climate change, or climate engineering. Can you explain the resistance and what compelled you to move forward anyway?

Beyond the risks of climate-engineering implementation or even experiments, there’s the risk that focusing on it takes attention away from reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, which is the most crucial task to ensure our survival. This may be a real-world risk, but moral dilemmas wrestled with in extremity haunt me as a novelist. I’m certainly not advocating for climate engineering; I’m using it as a lens to examine human emotion and behaviour. For instance, many who began as adamant climate-change deniers switched their tune to become advocates of climate engineering as a way to continue a business-as-usual approach to planetary plunder. I took it as a challenge to depict characters who are credible deniers and climate sceptics, people terrified of losing their lives as they’ve lived them up to this point, still avid to be cancerous capitalists. These guys also get to be the novel’s comic relief.

Climate change narratives often explore apocalyptic and dystopic elements, but Blaze Island maintains a deliberate realism. Why was it important to you to take this approach?

I’d say it’s hard to write realism these days without being either apocalyptic or dystopic. But I’ve always been interested in shifting what realism is or can be. These days I’m preoccupied with nudging human beings from centre stage to make room for other elements: wind, water, more-than-human life forms. I want the narrative balance to feel altered and possibly deranging. Historically the novel, at least in the West, has been preoccupied with individual human stories. But in order to go on living on this planet, our perception of realism as a narrative strategy has to change. We need to remake the world and let in more sentience, more biosphere, more sense of our web of connection to the rest of the living world. We can’t go on pretending, even in our stories, that humans are all that is; it’s the most dangerous fiction possible. I want to write into this new and necessary realism and discover what it might look like in a novel.  

Historically, weather has been viewed through the lens of myth (“an act of God”) or as a symbol (as John Ruskin would deem it, pathetic fallacy). In a piece in the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz argues that in recent years, weather has lost its prominence in literature in tandem with our understanding of weather as meteorological. What is it about weather that interests you–as a mythical, symbolic, or metereological phenomenon?

Like The Tempest, Blaze Island opens in the midst of a huge storm. In the novel it’s a massive hurricane that rolls up the eastern seaboard of North America smashing all human infrastructure in its wake. It’s reasonable to believe that Shakespeare had a hurricane in mind as well, because hurricanes were a New World phenomenon that Europeans were just beginning to learn about from seafaring and colonizing expeditions. So although the storm in The Tempest is magic, it’s also referencing real weather, only weather that feels fantastical. My contemporary storm is the inverse; its hugeness is realistic, shaped by humans in so far as the greenhouse gases we keep pouring into the atmosphere are having an increasing impact on weather phenomena, making contemporary hurricanes larger and more destructive than they used to be. Even if the novel’s hurricane is fictional, I want the weather throughout the novel to feel real, not symbolic, not metaphoric, to have deep presence; for the air itself to have agency in the story the way humans do, for weather and humans to be as entangled as they really are.

In the same article, Schulz discusses how the study of meteorology resulted in a shared language around weather, which didn’t previously exist. One of the characters in the novel, Agnes, says “there are people out there who don’t believe ice and snow are weather,” suggesting the language isn’t as shared as we might think. How do you perceive weather as a language?

The character of Agnes Watson is an Inuk climate scientist who works for the federal government. The incident you mention is taken from an actual incident that occurred under Canada’s former government which was much more resistant to the science of climate change than our current government. The language of climate change and therefore weather can be highly politicized. I wanted to gesture to the fact that climate-change denialism is still a force in the world. If you don’t want something to be spoken of, you can make it linguistically disappear. If you want to make melting ice vanish from public discourse, make it a thing not an occurrence. You’re basically saying the melt isn’t happening. But in response specifically to weather as language, weather has multiple languages: there’s scientific languages of weather and weather as we experience it, what it feels like on our skin. Caleb grows up with a descriptive language of weather phenomena different than the scientific names for clouds that Miranda is taught by her father. She and Caleb learn each other’s weather languages as they grow up together. Above all they come of age paying intimate attention to the weather in ways that go beyond language. I want readers to feel the wind sensuously as well.

The novel reaches into the past, the present, and the future at the same time. The characters are looking back at where they’ve been, individually but also over eons. They are also looking at where they will be, in their lifetime and the lifetimes of future generations. What is it about the tension between the past, present, and future that interests you?

Miranda remarks in the novel that we can only imagine the future through the past; what we know shapes what we can imagine. Caleb is desperate to create a future that is an extension of the past, especially the past he’s shared with Miranda. Meanwhile Miranda finds herself thrown into a series of rapid, soul-shocking changes that make her reconceive her world entirely. It’s a bit like what’s happened to all of us these last months: suddenly the past doesn’t provide a route map for the future, even though it never really did. The words change, alter, shift pulse like a bass beat through the novel. The present is an entirely fluxy place. The novel is constantly asking, How do we respond to change? But I also want to bring the reader into an encounter with deep time, time on a geological scale, which is a scale on which we also exist even though it makes human lives minuscule. We are a tiny, potentially self-destructive part of this much, much larger, longer planetary story. How can a novel incorporate this perspectival shift?

Milan Wells says to his daughter, Miranda, “I will look after you whatever the weather.” But in the view of climate change, children are both a burden (increasing the carbon footprint) and the motivation (we need to save the planet for future generations). How do you perceive climate change as a conflict across generations?

We have only to look to Greta Thunberg, the School Climate Strike movement, and Thunberg’s speeches to the UN Climate conference and world leaders at Davos and elsewhere to see how badly older generations have failed younger generations. How dare you, Thunberg shouted at politicians and economic leaders and begged them to behave like adults, though the implication that they’re behaving like children does children a disservice. Now Milan Wells, my scientist in the novel, is absolutely not ignoring the climate crisis, he’s consumed by it. And terrified as to what the future may bring. But how does one live as a parent, or any adult, and hold this terror in the presence of one’s child or, collectively, children? Milan’s overwhelming impulse is to figure out a way to protect his daughter, even if that leads him in some extreme and morally dubious directions. The collective parents in the room may not be able to save us; they may even destroy us. The children need to rise up as they have been doing and assert their agency, as Miranda does in the novel. The pandemic may temporarily have derailed a new and heartening focus on the climate crisis but the climate crisis and the crisis of ecological loss haven’t vanished. The hard but thrilling work of how to reimagine our world and how to change everything must go on. The pandemic simply makes this more acute.

I couldn’t help but think of Milan Wells as an artist, single-minded in his vocation and pursuit, living in a world apart from others. As an artist yourself, what is it about scientists that interests you?

Scientists are usually seen as these rational beings and in contemporary, industrialized societies science is understood as a pursuit shaped by objectivity in which the subjective is entirely leached away as suspect. The data must speak. What draws me to write about climate scientists is that they are pursuing research with such profound existential implications, knowledge that we seem collectively intent on ignoring. This leads to an intense crisis between the objective and the subjective. How can knowledge about ice melt or carbon build-up or global temperature rise that may lead to the collapse of the world as we know it not provoke terror? What does a scientist do then?

Like Milan Wells, you are an academic. How do you balance the expectations of you as an academic with your aims as a writer?

As a writer my relationship to academia is very different than a scientist’s. A scientist depends on academic structures to build a lab, a team, do their research. I’m looking to create a space not penetrated by my academic life. That said, my academic position supports me and allows me to write. I was the Writer in Residence at the University of Guelph when the position as Coordinator of Guelph’s amazing and then very new MFA opened up and I was asked to apply. It’s a small and innovative program in which I’m the only full faculty member — as you know since you’re a grad! What I relish about the MFA is the diverse and vital community it has created and how much I learn from my students, who are such amazing writers and then are going out and changing our literary landscape, engaging in profound acts of cultural reimagining.

I am curious how writers choose what projects to pursue. Have you decided yet what your next project will be, and if so, how did you come to that decision? If you haven’t, what is going to be your process for finding the next project?

At some point in the process of writing every novel, another idea has slowly come swimming up from the deep, so yes I have something new that I’m moving towards. All I can say is that it’s still deeply engaged with our relationship to the natural world, and to de-centring the human story. It looks like it will be historical, as in going back to the mid-twentieth century as a way to consider how we got where we are now. I don’t know how to write any more not in relation to the ecological crisis going on around us. How do we write now – this feels like the essential question.

Photo by Mike Lewinski on Unsplash

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