by Joanne O’Connell My debut novel, Beauty and the Bin was partly inspired by my food journalism, particularly by a column I wrote for the Guardian, about giving up supermarkets.    For twelve months, I whizzed nettles into pesto, baked my own bread, grew vegetables, and stocked up on everything from chilli flakes to tomato ketchup at my local independents. At first, it was about saving money (it was for the consumer affairs section of the paper) but alongside the savings (£2,000 in a year, by the way!) it allowed me to explore how to live and eat in ways tha ..read more

Charlotte Mendel and Clyde Boyer talk about their time travel books. Charlotte and Clyde were introduced through the Climate Fiction Writer’s League and have since engaged in a series of climate conversations and mutual admiration sessions. Both authors used time travel as a lens to look at our current climate crisis, providing a realistic look at our current mess, but also a path to better, possible futures.  Clyde Boyer: Let’s start with Reversing Time. This isn’t your standard YA novel, and I think that’s a good thing. The concepts and emotions in this book are complex and there are no ..read more

by A Connors Did you know that if you look at the Earth from directly over the Pacific, you hardly see any land. It’s pretty much all water. We live on an ocean planet. One of the marine biologists I spoke to while researching my book, The Girl Who Broke The Sea, had a nice way of putting it. He said: If aliens ever visit Earth, they probably won’t even bother looking at the sticky up bits of rock on the back. But, land-dwelling, fruit-eating mammals that we are, we tend not to think about it like that. We tend not to think about the deep-sea very much at all.  I didn’t set out to write ..read more

Marjorie Kellogg (author of Glimmer) and Mary Woodbury, pen name Clara Hume (author of Bird Song: A Novella) compare their individual approaches to writing about climate and ecological changes. 1.      Future vs. Near future: When does ‘near’ become ‘far?’  How do the world-building challenges differ?  Marjorie: Far-future often extends into the infinite, as humanity is imagined to spread across the universe.  Exciting, mind-expanding, but not something you can expect to experience personally.  So, because I want the reader to walk in my characters ..read more

Michael J. DeLuca talks to Catherine Rockwood Michael: Hi, I’m Michael J. DeLuca, publisher of Reckoning, the journal of creative writing on environmental justice. To celebrate the release of Our Beautiful Reward – Reckoning’s special issue on bodily autonomy – editor Catherine Rockwood agreed to talk to me about the issue. Catherine Rockwood (she/they) lives in Massachusetts with her family. Their poetry appears in or is forthcoming from Moist Poetry Journal, Strange Horizons, Scoundrel Time, Contrary Magazine, Rogue Agent Journal, Lady C ..read more

I write novels centered in the natural world in which the joint catastrophes of climate change and the nature crisis loom large – perfect, terrifying ingredients for post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction. Which have always been my favourite type of stories. But because these things are not in the realm of fantasy, sometimes even I have to admit, you need a break from the world’s unfolding disaster. You want to imagine better outcomes. Ones where we do actually ‘look up’ – to borrow the allegory from the 2021 blockbuster movie – and see the comet coming in time. Writers for young people have a ..read more

Manda Scott talks to Michelle Cook Michelle Cook: Manda, I’m excited to meet you. I was wondering if Thrutopiawas something that you made up, because it isn’t a thing that I’d heard of before, even though I suspect I was writing around it. Manda Scott:Really good to meet, you, too. I loved Tipping Point—really impressed with the way you handled such a complicated subject and kept the action moving in ways that gave us such a clear insight into the politics of your world. I’ve just downloaded Counterpoint, and read your outline and you’re definitely writing around it. Michelle: Thank you! Mand ..read more

Or, the risks and rewards of writing eco-fiction while working on environmental issues by A.E. Copenhaver In an essay published in Liberties journal, critic and philosopher Becca Rothfeld brilliantly topples a few monoliths of contemporary writing by declaring them ‘sanctimony literature.’ After first commenting on some of the “riskless and conciliatory” novels (and novelists!) of the 21st century in an essay for The Point, Rothfeld then more deeply mines this trend of simplistic and performative wokeness in modern literature. She notes that often these novels are full of characters who are “s ..read more

by Sarah Blake, author of the adult dystopian novel Clean Air Most of us are familiar with parts of nature being personified in our books and in the shows and movies we watch. My earliest memory of personification might be a face drawn on a cloud, cheeks puffed out, blowing a gust of wind through the sky. Or maybe it was what’s still one of my favorite instances—the grumpy trees that throw apples at Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Years later, I remember watching Blue’s Clues with my sister, and there was the sun wearing star-shaped sunglasses and singing about the planets. Then there was the Pix ..read more

A ..read more