E.C. Barrett | Reckoning

Swimming Whole

First Jeff Martin bought the narrow strip of land between the river and Banks Road from the town, then he spider-webbed caution tape between the trees and nailed posted signs to their bark. The swimming hole where so many of us had spent our childhood summers was no longer ours. And this with each year hotter than the last.

Martin, who also owned The Weekly Gazette, the Dollar Store on the edge of town, and a quarter of the rental properties, bought and moved into the Carter Mansion across the street from our swimming hole after the last owner died. As big as it was, it wouldn’t pass as a mansion nowadays, but the historical plaque in front of it named it the original home of the town founder. A draw, no doubt, for Martin, who fancied himself a self-made man in the way the wealthy who grew up just shy of wealthy tend to do. He didn’t live there one full summer before he convinced the town council that the strip of land—the only spot with passable access down the river-cut gorge—was nothing more than a waste of taxpayer money.

Why pay to have it mown, when he could send his landscape crew over? (And seeing as he was doing the town this favor, really, the property ought to be tax-exempt, didn’t they agree?) Like most things Jeff Martin said and did, it had the sound of a gift bestowed. Like everything he said and did, the beneficiary was definitively him.

How many generations had we kept that spot a secret from the June-to-August tourists who crowded the lake beach and left their soda cans, candy wrappers, and busted flipflops wherever they landed?

The sale went through with only the tiniest announcement buried in the back pages of the Gazette. The caution tape and posted signs were the first any of us heard of it.

Laughing, nervously, we ducked under the tape and made our way down to the hole where we’d swam all our lives. The cops arrived and bull-horned over the river that we were trespassing and had five minutes to vacate or risk arrest.

Men who had grown up there swimming with us turned their faces away when we reminded them of the summers we’d shared. They were just doing their jobs, they said.

The river still belonged to the town and some of us could make it down the opposite river bank, but it was a steep climb and likely to land you splayed and broken on the slate shelf that decked the river, worn smooth by spring and fall floods.

A group of us showed up at the next council meeting and took turns airing our grievances during the public comment portion until we were told our time was up. Two members of the council agreed that something should be done. Three members and the Mayor, who could regularly be found golfing with Jeff Martin during the week when the rest of us were at work, said this was a matter of private property now. They’d followed all required procedures in the sale and if we’d had a problem with it we should have spoken up then.

Three Sundays in a row we protested, crowded by the side of the road with our clever signs and a spirit of camaraderie. The Gazette reporter showed up. Took pictures and asked us questions, scribbling in her notebook as we answered, but we never did see a story in the paper.

Our numbers dwindled until it was just me, a handful of folks who protested everything, and the cops telling us once again it was time to move along.

No matter where I was or what I was doing, the swimming hole and Jeff Martin were there in the back of my mind throbbing like a hammer-hit thumb.

It wasn’t right.

And there was nothing I could do about it.

My husband, Andy, told me I needed to let it go. We, of all people—two men whose right to love each other out in public hadn’t been recognized even half our lives—should know there are bigger worries in the world than the local swimming hole. Racism, sexism, all the isms, and a climate crisis to boot. I shouldn’t hold it against the folks who had lost interest, preoccupied with the business of living.

I went to the river, picked my way down the steep side as the sun set and looked for the ghosts of summers past. I imagined myself teaching the child we thought we might adopt how to swim, tossing them over my shoulders, clapping at their underwater somersaults. Giving them the things my father had given me.

Sitting there, head in my hands, I worried Andy was right—this powerless feeling would consume me if I let it and there were far worse wrongs to confront. Better to change myself than give in to the growing resentment of people who didn’t care enough to take back what had been given away out from under them.

A voice startled me out of my ruminations.

“Why so down, friend?”

A three-quarters moon had risen over the placid river, lighting the snaking lines of current, wet stone bank, and the leaves of trees lining the top of the gorge on either side. I couldn’t spot a soul. A splash in the river caught my attention, and there, in the middle, a salmon the size of a two-year-old swam a lazy circle and asked the question again.

Of course I’d heard of this fish. You can’t walk a block in this town without meeting someone who knows someone who almost hooked it, or heard it speak, or watched it leap fifty feet in the air in acrobatic delight. Even my father believed it was as old as the town.

So here was my madness, finally emerging. Well, what can you do but answer when a fish asks a question twice?

I told it my troubles. Explained about Jeff Martin and the town council and the aching maw in my chest for all the friends and neighbors content to let another piece of what should be ours be pirated off by a handful of people.

The fish dipped under the water and I thought I had bored it, but then its head reappeared. “You’re a good egg, friend,” it said, “so I’m going to do you a solid. A good egg for a good egg.” It laughed at its joke in a voice like a hard summer rain. It rolled over, water shimmering off its moon-silvered scales, and popped a small shining orb out of its vent. With a flick of its tail, it lobbed the egg over to me. It glowed orange in my hand, no bigger than a pea. “In three days, when the moon is full, make a wish and eat that.” The salmon swam a circle and again came to a stop. “All the usual reminders about being careful what you wish for. You only get the one.” And with that it swam off.

I carried the egg home, cradled in my palm, and not knowing what else to do with it, I filled a glass with water and dropped it in.

I told Andy my story and he peered at the little glob at the bottom of the glass. He put the back of his hand up to my forehead. I shrugged him off.

“I’m feeling fine.”

“Okay,” he said in that way that meant if you say so, and asked me what I was going to wish for. I shrugged again and he left me in the kitchen, watching the egg do nothing.

Over the next three days I imagined all manner of wicked ends for Jeff Martin as I worked. If not death, then public humiliations that left him impoverished. In my kinder moods, I considered wishing him a change of heart. A Scroogening. But wasn’t there always another Jeff Martin, waiting to take his place?

I thought of personal gain—a windfall of money that would set Andy and I up for life. But then I would be the Jeff Martin, wouldn’t I?

On the third night, when the moon rose full and gleaming, I stood on our front lawn and wished the wish of my heart: that good people believed they could make a difference if they tried. I drank the glass of water, the glowing egg sliding over my tongue and down my throat.

I slipped into bed and apologized to Andy for not wishing something for us.

He laughed, “don’t be a fool,” and kissed me until we were peeling each other’s sweats off in the dark.

In the morning, I walked down to the diner for a cup of coffee before work, hoping to find the world changed.

But it was just as it had been the morning before. The Gazette followed a developer looking to tear down waterfront buildings and put up luxury condos along the lake. Old white men grumbled at the counter about immigrants taking away jobs, and when I got to work the foreman told our crew we’d have to put in extra hours to make sure the plumbing was roughed in on schedule, but we’d be shorted hours next week so the company didn’t have to pay overtime.

Frustrated and exhausted, I got home no longer furious only with Jeff Martin and the people who wouldn’t stand up to him, but with myself, for having hoped. Color drained out of the world. Everywhere I looked were signs of the inevitability of everything crumbling to shit.

Andy tried to cheer me, but most evenings ended with me scrolling through the news, finding proof of all the terrible things in the world and the myriad ways people make each other suffer. I had been earnest and optimistic and what had it gotten me? Nothing but a broken heart.

My neighbors were right. Better to tend to your own affairs and hope the burning world arrived at your doorstep last.

Three weeks into my festering, I arrived home to find Andy sitting at the kitchen table, a stack of papers in front of him. I eyed them as I bent to kiss him and he nodded for me to sit down. He handed a page over to me, a yellow stick-on arrow pointing to a signature line, “Sign there.”

“Wha—”

“Just sign.”

He was trying to play it serious, like he was in the law office where he worked as a paralegal and I was some client in a suit and tie. But you don’t spend fifteen years with a person and not know when they’re buzzing to tell you something, so I played along.

I signed three different papers before he hit me with the sidelong smile—his charming snaggletooth crooked and jaunty—that first caught my attention all those years ago. He unfolded a surveyor’s map, smoothed it across the table. There was Jeff Martin’s house, devil horns drawn out of the roof and a fish penciled in the swimming hole. I followed Andy’s finger down to a spot marked with an X.

“About seventy feet south of the swimming hole, the Jenkin’s property line starts.” He pointed to a spot where the river swung a wide arc away from Valley Road and back towards Banks Road before tumbling down a series of small waterfalls out into the inlet and beyond that, the lake. “Liza has agreed to deed access rights for this portion of land,” he circled a rectangle formed by dotted lines, “to the Friends of the River. A nonprofit of which you and I are the founding members. It’s steep, but you can build a good set of stairs that would do the trick and then it’s just a matter of walking up the bank,” his finger trailed back up to the swimming hole.

The world was still on fire, the wealthy were still fucking over as many people as they could, and all manner of horrible shit still needed to be torn down. But look at this man and how he loved me.

I started on the stairs that weekend, clearing a path through the brush and saplings from the street to the cliff edge. About an hour into my work Liza Jenkin’s daughter, home from college, arrived with a tool belt slung over her shoulder and a cooler of cold drinks. By lunch, three more neighbors had come to lend a hand.

We worked every Saturday for a month, our numbers growing so large that half of us were just standing around offering encouragement and memories of summers past (somebody’s story of a talking fish got us all sharing our own).

Where one person’s knowledge faltered—the sturdiest way to anchor the stairs to the rock face, where to get the best price on this material or that—another stood up and offered what they could.

When it was finished we made our way up to the swimming hole, laughing and whooping, our voices amplified off the gorge walls. We cannonballed, or waded in, or sat on the rock-shelf and dangled our toes, and no matter how many police cars Martin called they couldn’t stop our jubilee.

Issue 7 Author Interview: Aparna Paul

Aparna Paul interviewed by E.C. Barrett

Aparna Paul’s story, “Little Apocalypses,” unfolds as a series of stories told first by a mother to her daughter and then by the daughter to her aged mother as their world cycles through disasters large and small.

We spoke about the work of living through disasters and finding hope in our relationships with each other.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

E.C. Barrett: What were some of your inspirations behind this story?

Aparna Paul: I was thinking a lot about my relationship with my mother, which is always a dangerous place to start. My mom is from India and she speaks three or four languages. Her first language was Gujarati, which I don’t speak or read or write. One fear of mine is that she could get a neurodegenerative condition later in life. What if she reverted back to only knowing Gujarati and could not communicate in English anymore? That fear was part of the driving impetus. At the end of the story, the main character doesn’t understand what the mother is saying, but tells a story back to the mother anyway.

I had also just taken a course on climate change fiction with Professor Mary Grimm at Case Western Reserve University and I was thinking about climate change disasters from many angles—different types of disasters, across different landscapes, in different regions of the world. How would that look in a coastal town versus in the desert versus any huge city? I think with this story, I was able to take my many imaginings of the climate crisis and condense them all into one, through the vehicle of the mother’s stories to the daughter.

Also, for this class, I was doing some scholarship on this term, “solastalgia,” which is a form of nostalgia for a place that still exists, but has changed so dramatically that it no longer feels like the home it once was. It was coined by the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who defined multiple ecological dis-eases in his research of peoples’ relationships to the climate crisis. When we reckon with the climate crisis, we can feel a lot of existential malaise, like diseases, one of them being solastalgia.

With this story, I was thinking a lot about how a place can change a lot even though it seems like it should be the same. How do you reckon with the feeling that home has packed up and left without you?

ECB: What do you hope readers take away from reading it?

AP: As huge and pervasive and scary as the climate crisis is, the most important thing that we have is each other and our relationships to each other. In the face of all that change, and that fear, there’s a lot of hope because we have each other and our relationships to each other, which will remain. They’ll change over time, as all relationships and all people do, but they will remain the same in that sense that we’re not alone.

ECB: Your story focuses more on the disasters that we go through in our daily life than the disasters of climate change, which made me think about the fact that we have to continue to live with all of these things, while climate disasters are happening. Life and its troubles don’t pause for disaster. I wonder if that was part of your thinking, or something that you were working out. You were in college when the pandemic started, so you were coming of age at a time when there were plenty of disasters going on, yet you still had to go to college and figure out how to map out a future life for yourself.

AP: Yeah, I think that’s a good point and I like learning a little bit more about myself in talking about the work. I think that you’re spot on. There are a lot of changes and difficulties that the characters struggle with that are within the context of the whole world struggling on a global scale.

I think a lot in terms of cycles. Maybe I sometimes put too much faith in cycles, but I think we might be at the bottom of the wheel right now and we have ways to come back to the top. It might look different from how we originally thought, or from what it looked like before, but there’s still hope to make it back.

I appreciated the theme of water for Issue 7 of Reckoning, because water moves in cycles. There are always going to be dry periods and there’s always going to be hope to replenish as well. There’s always going to be a cyclical nature of a mother and a daughter and granddaughter and a great granddaughter moving forward and forward and forward through time. But they’re not exactly the same. They’ll change from generation to generation, but they’ll move on in that cycle.

ECB: Have you read anything recently that is speaking to you in terms of these themes?

AP: The Past is Red, by Catherynne M. Valente, which takes place in the not-too-distant future where the sea levels have risen to such an extent that there are no landmasses anymore. The remainder of the human population lives on islands of floating garbage that are pretty large—they have huge populations. The main character lives like an exile from the rest of the community and you don’t know why.

I think that book had a lot of potential for disaster and despair, but instead, it was about collectivism and hope. It was also about the main character forming one relationship that she kept coming back to over the course of the book, which I also really appreciated.

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin, which I thought about a lot when writing this story, because in that book, apocalypses happen repeatedly and the characters have to learn to reckon with them. This book also explores people’s relationships with the land, but also how these characters function within systems and how those systems control and exploit them.

When I was writing my story, I felt like the main character, the daughter, had the ability to stop these apocalypses from happening, but the only way for her to stop them was for her mother to tell her the story of the apocalypse. I was thinking a lot about how our actions can lead to that kind of hope and also the place of storytelling and narrative in building those communities and building a sense of resistance in the face of devastation.

ECB: What role do you see speculative fiction as having in the environmental justice conversation?

AP: I think that speculative fiction, climate change fiction, and science fiction are all so important in the conversation of environmental justice, because storytelling is one of the most important tools that we have to mobilize and organize around the climate crisis.

It’s difficult, sometimes, to make people want to care. And I think that all of those forms of fiction build an empathy in the reader that makes them want to care about the greater issues at hand. This type of genre fiction is incalculably important for striving towards a better future. And on top of all of that, it provides a space for us to imagine new futures, which is the most important thing that we can be doing. It’s not enough for us to say: “everything is burning. Everything is terrible.” What can we dream for ourselves? That’s what speculative fiction offers.

Issue 7 Author Interview: C.G. Aubrey

C.G. Aubrey interviewed by E.C. Barrett

In C.G. Aubrey’s “A Predatory Transience,” mysterious text messages direct a kayaking eco-defender to a boat of booze-soaked white men who are shooting bonnethead sharks for fun. We spoke about the importance of individual action and systemic overhaul, and artificially drawn divisions between human and non-human nature.

Our conversation, which contains spoilers, has been edited for clarity and length.

E.C. Barrett: Identity is an integral part of your story. I’m thinking of the different ways your protagonist is conscious of where she exists in the social order in terms of how people perceive her and what that allows her to do or doesn’t allow her to do. What are some of the connections you make between identity and environmental justice?

C.G. Aubrey: My character and I are both middle aged, or close-to middle aged, white women. I don’t get into her economic background, but I grew up below the poverty line in the South Carolina Lowcountry and that creates a very specific sort of worldview.

Environmental injustice is absolutely tied to racism and other forms of human injustice. You wouldn’t have areas that were heavily polluted if wealthy white men—though white women have definitely benefited too—weren’t the ones choosing where their runoff goes, where their factories are going to pollute. Most of our pollution doesn’t happen in pristine, beautiful areas of untouched, unsettled land. The same areas that become undesirable through pollution tend to be populated by marginalized individuals.

In the United States, we have a culture of early conservation that was very much linked to wealthy white people–our national parks being a very good example. That land was taken from people—indigenous people in particular—and then set aside for privileged white use. I won’t say they’re kept wild or kept perfectly, but they don’t have fracking or other sorts of environmental awfulness occurring there. That happens in lower economic neighborhoods, downstream or on the other side of the tracks, or whatever euphemism you want to use for land that has traditionally belonged to people that the elite don’t value. I saw a lot of that firsthand, growing up, because I lived on the other side of the tracks.

It’s also people in the top 10% economically who are doing the most damage, and it’s important to acknowledge that.

ECB: Right. I think about Elon Musk and Taylor Swift hopping on their private jets to get across town and I know nothing I’m doing is actually contributing anywhere close to what they’re doing in a couple of flights.

CGA: One year of their life is more damaging than anything you’re going to do over the course of your entire life.

It’s easy to look out and see things snowballing in a terrible direction and say, “Well, I’m never going to do enough good. I’m never going to do enough to matter when Taylor Swift, or anyone, can fly back and forth across the globe, or across town, and undo any possible good I might have done.” But there are whole species that are rebounding because people have yelled enough to stop stacking rocks in streams. So it’s important to remember that our actions do matter.

ECB: Your story offers some catharsis for that sort of despair, as well as a call to action.

CGA: I think it’s important for us to encourage each other. We have to take direct action. We have to be prepared for not just the good parts of our actions leaving a better world—like saving the sharks in the story—but also how that kind of action will change us. It changes my protagonist. She could be viewed as a very morally upright, good human, but then does these very horrible things without any real sort of remorse. And that changes people. We have to grapple with how we will be changed by our actions to improve the world and that’s one of the roles of fiction, helping us imagine ourselves in other situations, having made other choices.

ECB: Are there any books or writers who have helped inform your thinking about these issues?

CGA: Coyote at the Kitchen Door is a great group of essays that talk about how the nonhuman natural world is now encroaching upon us. More recently, I read A Natural History of the Future by Robb Dunn, which is very good. The world will be around so much longer than we will and non-human nature will rebound and it will produce new, beautiful things and we will just be the tiniest blip on its timeline. I think there’s a little bit of optimism in that, but as a human I would like for us not to destroy ourselves. I love the idea that nature is reaching out, because we all belong in nature, there shouldn’t be such a division between human and nature.

ECB: There were dandelions in my yard this January, when there should be snow on the ground, not flowers. It briefly made me incredibly sad. Then I noticed there were bees out gathering pollen from them and it was wonderful, because the dandelions and bees were working in concert and it was strangely comforting to witness how the non-human world will find a way to survive us. More to your point, though, the dandelions and bees were also in the process of making food and medicine that humans could use in a climate-changed January.

CGA: Bees are a great example of humans and non-humans in community. Bees need us to harvest their honey. Without human intervention, bees will produce so much honey that they then have to build a new nest or they’ll end up with so much extra honey that they produce two queens, which can lead to hive wars. They have evolved to live as long as they have, and continue to do all the wonderful things bees do, because they have done that in conjunction with us.

ECB: Your story blurs the division between human and non-human nature, as it seems the bonnethead sharks are in cahoots with whatever entity is sending the texts that, in effect, use your protagonist as a survival tool. I have to say, it’s a bold move, having a heroine who kills humans to protect marine life.

CGA: Yeah, I’ve read through Reckoning Issue 7 and I think my story may be the most violent–which will be unsurprising to those who know me.

Not that I’m particularly violent, but I have a very strong sense of justice. There’s so much frustration about the injustices going on and it’s important for people to feel that individual action does matter. You can make a difference, especially at the local level, in your community.

Of course, I’m not saying go out and murder the bad guys. Even just going out and picking up trash when you kayak, like my main character does, makes an immediate, quantifiable impact. We’ll be so much better off if enough individuals feel like they can make a difference. That is really important to me.

ECB: I was thinking about the violence in your story and how one of the things it does is take seriously the rights and value of the marine life that these men were killing. When I say take it seriously, I mean, it begs the question: is this violence actually bad? What makes the human hunter’s lives more valuable than the marine lives that they were taking? Could you talk to me a bit about that, and how speculative fiction allows you to take that seriously in a way that you maybe can’t in real life?

CGA: Normal disclaimer: murder is bad. The violence in the story is real, but the murders themselves are a metaphor. And the reason I say it that way is I don’t think that we can affect the kind of change that’s necessary without it being perceived as violence. When you displace people who have that kind of power over other lives, it’s going to feel violent to the people being displaced or even to the people who are affecting that change. Because it’s not as simple as picking up garbage. It’s going to take real systemic overhauls and those overhauls are going to feel very violent, whether they reach the point of actual bloodshed or not.

We know that the choices of the villains in the story are very deliberate. Most of us have, in some way or form, encountered those affluent white men who have no regard for the lives around them. For people that exist on the marsh, and South Carolina Lowcountry in particular, we see those guys all the time. And we know that they’re killing for the thrill of killing–with marine life in particular. Those same types of people are highly likely to be violent with humans in their lives, especially those at a lower power status.

The people who have devalued the lives of others, whether it’s marine life or tree life or marginalized human lives, they’re not going to just do the right thing because we tell them they have to. I think one of the things that happens, once you understand that as an individual, is that you then feel powerless.

Speculative fiction gives us a place where we don’t feel as powerless, a place to explore that systemic upheaval and create the changes we would like to see in our world.

Issue 7 Author Interview: Ruth Joffre

Ruth Joffre interviewed by E.C. Barrett

Ruth Joffre’s story, “Icediver”, centers on Vira, a mer-human Alaskan who makes her way as a freelance underwater cable repair tech. During a lucrative and dangerously deep gig, Vira encounters a hidden mer community and an opportunity to learn more about her heritage.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

E.C. Barrett: What was your inspiration for this story?

Ruth Joffre: I wanted to write my version of a mermaid story, and I wanted to explore some landscapes that I’ve been learning about for the past couple years doing a lot of work in Alaska via my day job. I started thinking, what would a mermaid or a mer-human hybrid be like in Alaska? What would they do? How would that be politically? What would their life in Alaska entail, when so much of the economy is driven by the tourist season? I say that as somebody who has only ever been to Alaska during the tourist season, though I was there for work.

Alaska has a lot of money coming in for infrastructure projects of various kinds, including the big one of connectivity across the state. The story is set in the Aleutians, where one of these connectivity projects is underway. I wanted to think about what a mer society would look like in the Aleutians to a mer-human hybrid if she were to encounter that society for the first time after not having had access to it for most of her life. So all of these bits and pieces of my life and things that I’ve experienced in Alaska filtered their way into this story.

ECB: I know connectivity is an equity issue for rural and low-income communities, but what are some of the environmental aspects of building out connectivity infrastructure?

RJ: If you’re going to build out facilities, does that mean you have to build a road alongside it? If you’re building a road, are you cutting down trees? Are you destroying wildlife paths and habitats? All of the concerns that come with any development. Somebody has to be able to go out there and service the line–that’s a car or a plane burning fossil fuels to get out there. Once there is connectivity, there’s also more “opportunity” for people to start various businesses and for them to move further out without necessarily losing connection to the systems that we have in place digitally. So yeah, it definitely enables a spread of development that can have a really negative impact on the environment.

The other side is that it is important to close that digital divide because of equity. A big reason why governments step in to assist in building connectivity in remote areas is because businesses won’t bother, because it’s not profitable enough. That’s judging entire communities as not valuable.

ECB: What do you hope readers come away with after reading your story?

RJ: I think one of the core things in this is that finding another society or envisioning another way of living is much easier and more possible than we think. Enacting it is really hard, obviously, as we can see with the abolition movement in the United States and attempts to implement new systems of justice. With this story, I was thinking through what it could mean to be a utopian society. What could it mean to enact fair policies? And what would policy even look like in this case of a mer society in the Aleutian chain, very deep underwater?

It’s hard to make an easy, one-to-one analog to our society, because of all of the uniqueness that comes from being in the Aleutians, but I still think the story presents a way for us to think about how we can do better. And also how we shouldn’t idealize other societies that do some things better, as tends to happen when people in the U.S talk about how much better it would be to live in Europe while ignoring all the things that European countries do poorly.

ECB: What connection do you see between Vira’s search for her heritage and environmental justice?

RJ: Searching for your heritage is connected to the landscapes of your ancestors. I’m the daughter of a Bolivian immigrant, and I have not been back to Bolivia. I have all of these connections to the culture and to my family, but how do I engage with and have those experiences that my family members had with the land and the environment in Bolivia, especially since parts of it are also severely threatened by climate change?

For example, there are plants that are moving higher and higher up mountains, because it’s getting too warm down below and they can’t survive at those altitudes anymore. They’ve lived there for 1000s of years. What does it mean for Bolivians if those plants move higher and higher up and run out of places to go? I think there’s a certain amount of heritage that could become completely inaccessible, because you’ve lost native plants to climate disaster.

ECB: I loved how much this story was also about Vira’s alienation from herself as someone who can do something other than earn just enough money for her and her mom to get by. Is that something you regularly think about in your stories–how these people exist in capitalism?

RJ: Totally. That’s a major theme of the new collection that I’m working on, which includes this story. I’ve been working in capitalism, holding a full-time job, since graduate school, and now that I’ve been in it for a decade I understand it better than I ever possibly could have as an undergrad trying to write about adults. As a student, I didn’t really understand the strain on adult life, your time, and your capacity to think beyond your job or beyond paying the bills.

And that is what the vast majority of people in this world are experiencing–the hustle to try and make ends meet, having multiple jobs or one shitty job and terrible co-workers that you hate, but you have to put up with because you have rent to pay.

The reality is that it’s just getting worse and worse. Rent is getting higher. Salaries are stagnating for a lot of people outside of the tech sector or, you know, senators. It’s kind of impossible to think about adult life without thinking about capitalism. A lot of my fiction now is thinking about how to re-envision society without capitalism or fight against it, to find ways to center your life around other things.

Moving forward, I’m more interested in stories that are questioning whether we really need to live this way and presenting new worlds, because I’ve been working this full-time job plus writing, plus teaching, plus, plus, plus all the things for so long. And I hate that I have to. I think a lot of people hate it. So I’m trying to find ways to express in fiction that other things are possible.

ECB: Are you currently reading anything? Or have you read anything recently related to these sorts of themes that you’d like to share with others?

RJ: On the anti-capitalist theme, I just read Nino Cipri’s Finna, which is a novella about working in a huge, obviously IKEA-inspired, warehouse furniture store. It’s about trying to survive going through a wormhole but also deciding whether you come back and what you come back to. Do you just go back to your capitalist service job in this awful warehouse store? Or do you find something else for your life? So I highly recommend that. It was really fun.

ECB: What role can speculative fiction play in helping us tackle, or at least think about, some of these issues?

RJ: Spec Fic is probably our best way of thinking about new structures and systems that enable other ways of being. Realist fiction–even though it is beautiful and incisive and capable of doing so many things–often gets stuck in a “the world is what it is, and we can’t change it” mentality. Whereas speculative fiction imagines many possible worlds and shows we can change everything; we can imagine whatever we want.

With the climate apocalypse, the aftermath of the Trump administration, and the potential for a second Trump administration, it’s really important to think outside of the current systems, because they’re clearly broken. They’re clearly only designed to help a few people. So the question is: how can we break free of them? How can we pack them with different ways of thinking in order to change them from within, if at all possible? That is really what I’m focused on.

Issue 7 Author Interview: Naila Francis

Naila Francis interviewed by E.C. Barrett

Naila Francis’s poem, “After encountering the grey whales in El Burbujon, Laguna Ojo de Liebre,” is a rhapsody of connection with nature and letting yourself be moved to action by an ecstatic moment. We spoke of grief and joy and learning to embrace big emotions and vulnerability as fuel for change-making.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

E.C. Barrett: What was the inspiration for your poem?

Naila Francis: For me, whales sort of symbolize the immensity of grief. After my dad died ten years ago, I started having dreams about whales, and I began to associate them with the idea that you can let your grief be as big as a whale, you don’t have to make it smaller. We’re constantly being told to move forward or keep our grief quiet or private or get over it. But your grief can take up as much space as it needs.

I took a trip last year to a very remote part of Baja California Sur in Mexico, where grey whales migrate south from Arctic feeding grounds down to these lagoons to mate and to have their babies. You go to these lagoons and you sit in boats and the whales swim up to interact with you. They’re so curious, they want your attention, they let you pet them. I kissed whales! I honestly did not know that this was something that happened anywhere in the world—that these whales actually crave human touch.

One of the days we were leaving the lagoon, I was watching this whale that had been following our boat. Tears started streaming down my face and I heard the words, “promise me you’ll cherish and protect what I love,” which I didn’t know at the time would be part of this poem. The experience brought up a lot of grief that I didn’t expect. When I came home, I was in tears for a long time after that trip. I would wake up crying; I would sit at my altar and cry; I was very, very emotional.

So often we have these encounters in the natural world, and we’re moved by the beauty on top of this mountain or the amazing animals we’ve encountered, but what do we do when we come home? How do we keep that with us and let it live through us in a way that we remain connected? How do we honor and protect and revere that place, that tree or flower or animal, whatever it is? That’s what I was thinking about.

ECB: You lived in the Caribbean for the first ten years of your life. Did that geography and those experiences influence the way you see and interact with writing, the environment, or issues of environmental justice?

NF: Wow, thank you so much for this question, because I’ve never actually thought of that at all . . . how growing up on the islands as I did, especially St. Lucia, might have influenced my writing or how I feel about the environment. Among the memories of childhood I treasure the most are the times I spent with my grandfather and my cousins on his farm. He would pile us all into the back of his red pickup truck and we’d drive out to the country with him and watch or help as he tended his animals. We’d play in the river, see how copra was made (the dried flesh of the coconut that we get coconut oil from), eat fresh sugar cane and mangos. Those times were so magical to me.

I have a younger brother, and we also spent so many hours outside, swinging from these vines that fell from towering trees along the hill where we lived, clambering over rocks and mounds and remnants of the old barracks from when the British and French fought over the island. And of course, I grew up going to the beach regularly. When we were really young, my mom would take us every day after school.

I think all of those experiences nurtured a love and reverence for and a joy in nature that I’m not sure I would have gotten growing up in the digital world we have now. They also sparked my creativity because we had toys, yes, but imagination was involved in every aspect of our play. Thank you for helping me connect the dots from those years to now, where some of my biggest inspirations for poems come from being in nature.

ECB: What role does creative writing in general and speculative fiction in particular have in the fight for environmental justice?

NF: I can’t remember who said it, maybe multiple people, but words are wands. They have power. In my work as a grief doula I offer a lot of grief writing experiences, and I often think of the quote by Toni Cade Bambara: “Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.” That definitely feels applicable to creative writing and speculative fiction especially in helping us to not only grapple with the many questions and crises at the heart of the environmental justice movement but also in pointing us toward possibilities, for better or for worse, of what could happen next.

I also love the use of radical and strange imagination, whether it’s grounded in reality or not, to help us think about the choices we’re making and how we’re interacting with each other, new and emerging technologies, and the living world.

ECB: Are there any writers you’ve read recently that are helping you think through any of these issues?

NF: Ross Gay’s most recent collection of essays, Inciting Joy, in particular his essays, or incitements, “We Kin” and “Free Fruit for All!”. I also love the poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil, who writes with such exuberance about the natural world. Francis Weller’s The Wild Edge of Sorrow is a grief book I always recommend. He writes about the five gates of grief that we all walk through as humans and one of them is the sorrows of the world, which includes the destruction and diminishment of habitats and species. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to sitting down with How to Live in a Chaotic Climate by Laura Schmidt with Aimee Lewis Reau and Chelsea Rivera.

ECB: What does it mean to be a grief doula? What do you do?

NF: I hold space for people to explore their grief and to transform their relationship with this very universal experience. I do that in one-on-one and group sessions. I’m also part of a collective called Salt Trails, here in Philly, that holds community grief rituals. I’m a grief-tender. In a culture that is grief-phobic and grief-avoidant, I want to normalize that we all grieve and that it doesn’t have to be such an overwhelming, pathologized and isolating experience.

ECB: The last three years have certainly highlighted exactly how grief-avoidant we are. There’s been no real outlet for grieving over the pandemic and the people and ways of life we’ve lost. I’m thinking also about the grief of climate change. I wonder if you could talk to me about your relationship, or the way you see our collective relationship, to grief and climate change.

NF: I think that’s one of the big griefs of our time. And, whether some of us acknowledge it or not, it’s one of the reasons that depression and suicide, sadly, are so high among teenagers. There is this sense of despair about whether we are going to survive this. Every day there’s a story that could bring us to our knees.

I think it’s important to name it. So often people don’t name the thing that’s causing them grief, and it might be they don’t even realize it’s grief, because it isn’t about mourning the death of someone they love. There are so many things we could be grieving because grief is a natural response to any significant loss or change, and that includes climate change.

It can be helpful to really let yourself feel that, don’t resist the emotion, the anger, the sadness, the despair, whatever comes up. Let yourself feel that and, if you can, let yourself feel and process that in community. Then ask yourself: well, what can I do from this place of such tenderness? Such sadness? What am I being called to do? How am I being called to serve in this moment?

It’s easy to be immobilized by feeling like we have to do all the things because we’re concerned about all the things. But what can you do just in your garden, or in your neighborhood or community? I have a friend and she’s transforming this plot of land, in what some might consider a blighted part of Philly, into a community garden and also creating a space for kids to learn and play. That’s such a beautiful project. I think you’ve got to start right where you are. If you can go bigger and deeper and wider, by all means go for it, but you can also just start where you are.

ECB: It strikes me that it requires a lot of trust to be vulnerable enough to grieve publicly and communally, to process grief communally. I wonder if you see cultivating the ability to trust and be vulnerable as a necessity for survival moving forward?

NF: Yes, I do. I also feel that we have to be able to trust our grief and trust opening ourselves up to feel it. If we didn’t feel grief for all that’s happening in the world right now, what would move us forward into inspired action and change? How are we creating space for something new?

Grief honors emptiness, falling apart, breaking down, disappearance, darkness, loss—all these thresholds and reckonings we’re now facing. There needs to be room to acknowledge and honor all of that to—borrowing the last lines of my poem—bless and save what we cherish.

Part of grieving publicly is cultivating that kind of trust together, building containers where it feels safe enough for people to be that vulnerable. I mentioned poet and essayist Ross Gay. I think often of how he writes of sorrow and joy and their entanglement. He’s always inviting us to join together in grieving as a practice of holding and caring for each other, which he says is a kind of joy. I agree with that, that to sorrow in community is one of the ways we bring healing to this world. It’s also how we soften and deepen in compassion for ourselves and each other. It’s powerful work that connects us to our belonging, and when we remember who we are, we can’t help but be called to show up differently in the world.