Shinging Moon Episode 24: Environmental and Cli-Fi II

Hello, and welcome to Shining Moon Episode 24. Today we’ll return to the themes of environmental fiction, cli-fi, and solarpunk, on what will be our last episode for the year. Joining me today are Priya Chand,  Amelia Gorman, Floris Kleijne, and Tehnuka. Let’s get started with some introductions.

 Priya Chand is a California transplant living in the Midwest, where she regularly cuts down trees and sets them on fire (as a certified volunteer forest steward). When she's not reading, writing, or eating, she enjoys swimming, martial arts, and naps.

Amelia Gorman lives on California's redwood coast, where she spends her free time removing invasive ivy from the forests, and trash and sea urchins from the beach. Her chapbook, Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota, from Interstellar Flight Press, won the 2022 Elgin Award. Other climate related poems of hers can be read in The Gargoylicon, Eye to the Telescope, and Parks & Points.

Floris M. Kleijne  (Floor-is Kleine) juggles two writing careers while paying the bills with an unrelated day job. In English, he’s the author of some fifty speculative fiction stories, some of them award-winning. In Dutch, and without middle initial, he’s an acclaimed thriller writer. In between, he translates.

Tehnuka (she/they) is a Tamil tauiwi writer and volcanologist from Aotearoa New Zealand. She was a finalist for the Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest, and the winner of the 2023 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best New Talent in speculative fiction. 

Stories and poems and collections featured in this episode:

Priya Chand
“On the Destruction and Restoration of Habitats,” Reckoning, February 20, 2021. https://reckoning.press/on-the-destruction-and-restoration-of-habitats/

“Demeter Seeks Persephone in the Year 2210,” Little Blue Marble, July 29, 2022. http://littlebluemarble.ca/2022/07/29/demeter-seeks-persephone-in-the-year-2210/


Amelia Gorman
"Field Guide to the Invasive Species of Minnesota," https://www.interstellarflightpress.com/fieldguide.htmlhttps://www.interstellarflightpress.com/fieldguide.html


Floris M. Kleijne
“An Oasis of Amends,” Reckoning 2, May 2018, https://reckoning.press/an-oasis-of-amends/

“Encroachment” Little Blue Marble, May 2020, https://littlebluemarble.ca/2020/05/08/encroachment/ 


Tehnuka
“El, the Plastotrophs, and Me,” Grist’s Imagine 2200 Climate Fiction contest, Sep 14, 2021. https://grist.org/fix/arts-culture/imagine-2200-climate-fiction-el-the-plastotrophs-and-me/

“Why we Bury our Dead at Sea,” Reckoning 7, January 29, 2023. https://reckoning.press/why-we-bury-our-dead-at-sea/

Mo Usavage
“What it Means to Love a City,” Reckoning 7, July 2, 2023. https://recko

"Don't tell me that the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." -- Anton Chekov

Piano music for closure

Thank you for listening to Shining Moon! You can reach the host, Deborah L. Davitt, at the following social media platforms:

www.facebook.com/deborah.davitt.3

Bluesky: @deborahldavitt.bsky.social

www.edda-earth.com

Transcript

Deborah L. Davitt (00:02.317)
Hello and welcome to Shining Moon episode 24. I'm your host, Deborah L. Davitt. Today we'll return to the themes of environmental fiction, Clifi and solar punk on what will be our last episode for the year. Joining me today are Priya Chand, Amelia Gorman, Flores Kleijne and Tehnuka. Let's get started with some introduction. Priya Chand is a California transplant living in the Midwest where she regularly cuts down trees and sets them on fire as a certified forest steward.

When she's not reading, writing or eating, she enjoys swimming, martial arts and naps. So we share many things in common other than the fire setting. 

Priya Chand (00:48.546)
Thank you so much for having me. It's exciting to be here with everyone. I was hoping, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (00:54.261)
Yeah, it's exciting to have you.

Deborah L. Davitt (00:58.913)
Ah, you wanted to say something else before I blurted out?

Priya Dugad (01:01.651)
I was hoping to be able to say that I've just come to this from an exciting morning of cutting down more trees and setting them on fire, but alas, rain.

Amelia Gorman (01:10.37)
I'm sorry.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:11.273)
Oh, well, better luck next weekend. Actually, next weekend is probably a holiday. So for most people anyways. Amelia Gorman lives on the California Redwood Coast where she spends her free time removing invasive ivy from forests and trash and sea urchins from the beach. Her chap book, The Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota from Interstellar Flight Press won the 2022 Elgin Award. I am so jelly.

Amelia Gorman (01:15.146)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:41.709)
Other climate-related poems of hers can be read in the Gargoylicon, Eye to the Telescope, and Parks and Points. Hi, Amelia! Welcome to the podcast. I understand that you were collecting ivy and other such things in the redwoods today.

Amelia Gorman (01:54.338)
Yes, I was actually doing that this morning. So we were working on taking as much ivy as we can out of a small patch of old growth redwoods near my house. So anyway, it's fun to be here again.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:05.805)
Fantastic. It's wonderful to have you back. I envy you all of your energy. Floris Kleine juggles two writing careers while paying the bills with an unrelated day job. In English, she is the author of some 50 speculative fiction stories, some of them award-winning. In Dutch and without middle initial, he's an acclaimed thriller writer. In between, he translates. Again, somebody with more energy than I have in a lifetime.

Welcome to the podcast or welcome back to the podcast, Flores, it's wonderful to have you back.

Floris Kleijne (02:38.365)
I'm glad to be back, but rumors about my energy have been highly exaggerated. And apologies, I do nothing with trees in my day job, though my wife did plant a lot of trees in our garden today.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:42.401)
Hahaha!

Deborah L. Davitt (02:51.413)
Oh wow!

Floris Kleijne (02:53.281)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (02:54.905)
Tehnuka is a Tamil Tauiwi writer and volcanologist from Aotearoa, New Zealand. She was a finalist for the Imagine 2200 Climate Fiction Contest and the winner of the 2023 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Talent in New Speculative Fiction. Welcome to the podcast and I am so sorry for mangling anything that I mangled.

Tehnuka (03:24.765)
Thank you so much for having me. That was not too mangled. And unfortunately, I am also not that good with trees, but I like them.

Deborah L. Davitt (03:35.037)
We're allowed to like things that we're not good with. 

Let's go ahead and dive right into the questions. Last time we talked a little bit about definitions, what is Cli-fi and what is solar punk and what is environmental fiction. And I think I would probably wind up getting as many questions as many answers as there are people because everybody has a slightly different and more nuanced definition of each of those things.

I wondered where each of you stood on it. I'm going to start with Priya. And since you've edited Clifi and solarpunk and environmental fiction, how do you differentiate between the subgenres, I guess, is the question.

Priya Chand(04:22.418)
Oh, goodness. Well, the nice thing about reckoning is the specific focus is on environmental justice. So honestly, we don't need to worry quite as much about the distinction between the sub genres. And I mean, I will admit, I don't pay that much attention to it, because I think there's a lot of bleed. I mean, fundamentally, like, I think one of the things that happens when you're writing about something that's a very contemporary thing in your life is that

Deborah L. Davitt (04:41.923)
Mm-hmm.

Priya Chand(04:52.65)
you know, you end up drawing a lot from what is kind of going on right now and what the current trends are, even at a subconscious level. So I think what ends up happening is, you know, you can say CLIFI, but I would say a lot of CLIFI has those aspects of solar punk where it's like, you know, solutions from the ground up, working outside established structures and everything, because, I mean, let's be real. We all have a lot of reason to...

Deborah L. Davitt (05:00.47)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:13.336)
Yes.

Priya Chand(05:20.546)
distrust the established structures when it comes to this kind of thing right now. Yeah, so, you know, I think it would actually be a really hard sell to push a clif-fi story in that's kind of more top-down, although there are some real world examples of that too. They're just not nearly as prevalent, especially in the kind of English speaking science, science fiction. Sure. So.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:25.707)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:46.52)
Yeah.

Priya Chand(05:48.106)
Yeah, my answer to your question is trick question, non-answer.

Deborah L. Davitt (05:55.17)
I love it though because it's. There is a lot of bleed between the different sub genres. There is a lot of overlap and I'm perfectly fine with that. When I've encountered something that has more of that punk feel, I'm more content with being able to say, yeah, OK, that's solar punk. That is.

the defiance, the, yeah, I can put my finger on that, but the rest of it does sort of work along a continuum, at least for me, and at least as far as I've read so far, because I'm not as well versed in this as the rest of you are. Tehnuka, I'm gonna get past that question, and I'm gonna ask you, what do you hope people will get out of reading your Clifi and solar punk stories?

Tehnuka (06:50.094)
Oh, that's a good question.

Tehnuka (06:54.109)
I think maybe I'll answer that in a roundabout way, talking about what I get out of reading Clifi and Solarpunk, because that's kind of what I want to reflect. And some of it is a sense that there is a future. I think we often see these narratives of disaster is coming, like we're already in a disaster, and it can be hard to see how we get out of it. But I think...

Deborah L. Davitt (07:09.256)
Mm-hmm.

Tehnuka (07:24.233)
there's getting out of it, there's a future where people are working together to survive, to thrive. And then there's also the side of it about what we do now and how we work together now. And I think even though we're often writing about the future, even if we're writing in speculars of worlds that we can't imagine being in because they're fantastical, there are common elements to do with how we relate to each other in the present.

Deborah L. Davitt (07:51.521)
Yeah, that is definitely one of the common themes that, or hallmarks of CLIFI that we talked about in the last episode is how we relate to each other is as least as important as how we relate to the environment and how we, finding regenerativity in each other also helps promote finding regenerativity in the environment. We're all part of the system. We're all part of the problem as well as the part of the solution.

I thought that was just something that I found very moving and very meaningful out of the stories that we read last time. Amelia, what are some common themes or hallmarks of cli-fi? We touched on communalism last time. We talked about how no single person or narrator or protagonist will solve the problem heroically as we see so often in other types of science fiction.

Floris Kleijne (08:42.723)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (08:44.461)
We talked about it being the literature of hope, of giving people ideas that they can have agency in the fight, even if it's in small ways. Would you agree with these ideas or would you go further? Or do you think that there are other hallmarks that could be discussed?

Amelia Gorman (08:55.858)
Um, I agree. And like one thing I think is really important that Priya already touched on is I really want the punk and solar punk to stay there. Like you often, you've really seen it kind of watered down in steampunk and even cyberpunk and these genres. And it's like, it doesn't have to be this big protest or resistance, but like it should have some punk element, some anti hierarchical element. Um.

Whether that's like, it's maybe it's a story about kind of anarcho-primitivism or about, you know, these very small communities. Like, keep it, keep it anti-authoritarian.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:35.842)
Ha ha

Deborah L. Davitt (09:39.053)
Hey, Floris, I see you're no longer reading, no longer catching up on your homework.

Floris Kleijne (09:46.29)
I can't read and listen to the conversation, so I kind of gave up on that.

Deborah L. Davitt (09:51.205)
Okay, then we will go ahead and just move on to, I know that you as somebody who lives in the Netherlands do live in an area that will be subject to catastrophic climate change in the future. How does that move and influence and inflect your work?

Amelia Gorman (09:51.867)
Mm.

Floris Kleijne (10:09.496)
Well, one of the stories that I brought to this conversation is a story about where the Netherlands have already submerged under the ocean. And the upside is that we're a fairly wealthy nation, but the downside is that 70% of our nation will be underwater when things go south. So

Deborah L. Davitt (10:18.388)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (10:28.894)
Yeah.

Floris Kleijne (10:33.836)
When I wrote the story that I brought to this conversation, it was very important for me to show that if things go wrong, there are entire countries that will suffer. And ours is one of that. And I wanted to bring that into the conversation because we as a country that is at risk of being submerged and we're also a country where more and more political movements are moving towards climate change denial. And...

Deborah L. Davitt (10:45.419)
Yes.

Floris Kleijne (11:03.992)
which is a bizarre and incomprehensible paradox to me that we're living on the sea level and people living here on the sea level think it's wise or plausible or useful to claim that it's not happening. Wow, our country gets wetter and we're building higher dice every decade. And so...

Deborah L. Davitt (11:09.13)
Yeah.

Floris Kleijne (11:31.06)
It feels rather urgent living in the Netherlands. And it feels rather urgent around the world, but particularly where we, dykes keep us alive, basically. It feels a little more urgent than possibly when you're living in a mountainous area. Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:42.958)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (11:49.385)
Yeah, exactly. I find it amazing that people are in the Netherlands, of all places, engaging in the climate denial, which just boggles my mind. We are going to move on to people's individual work because we have a lot of stories to move through today, and each of them is interesting in its own right. So we're going to start with Priya.

And the first story that you sent me for this podcast was on the destruction and restoration of habitats. And this is more of an essay. It appeared in Reckoning on February 20th of 2021. I will include a link to the essay in the podcast notes. This is a beautiful short essay on the work it takes to be a restorer of native flora and a habitat overrun by colonist organisms that destroy other wildlife around them.

like the buckthorn you described, sending out chemicals that harm other plants around it. The whippy little seedlings that you mentioned reminded me very strongly of my ongoing battle against the zombie crape myrtle in my backyard. Do not even get me started about this. I removed both of the ones that we had in the backyard, but they cling to tenacious life, and it drives me nuts that the only way to get them is through poison, as you said, about the glycophosphate that is necessary to take out the buckthorns.

This essay has some really interesting points of conflict in it. For example, a lot of people are saying these days this is a rebellion against neatly manicured lawns. And this is like the entry point for a lot of people to understanding more about the environment. They say instead of using herbicides on your lawn to kill off the dandelions, you should let them bloom because they support bees. And of course, herbicide washes off into the water system with a secondary stage effect.

yet you see them as an invasive competitor to shy native plants that would otherwise be hustled off the stage by these bright yellow blooms. My question for you is, how do people know that they're doing the right thing to support the environment when there are so many competing ideas of what the right thing is? People get absolutely paralyzed when everything they do has a possible negative consequence, and it's so difficult to know what to do.

Priya Chand(14:06.294)
Yeah, that is an excellent question. I'm gonna say now, like one, it's a learning process. Like literally in the two years since writing that essay, there are actually some big changes I would make to it. The biggest would be in fact mentioning introduced alongside invasive species. So for instance, in Amelia's wonderful collection, one of the invasive species mentioned is Queen Anne's Lace, eh, hey, the wild spirit. And I mean,

Deborah L. Davitt (14:17.785)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (14:31.698)
Mm-hmm.

Priya Chand(14:34.294)
That's one of the plans we basically don't worry about. Like it isn't nearly harmful enough to merit active removal, at least where I am. So, and the other thing I would really recommend too is, Leslie, oh my gosh, I'm horrible at names, but the name of the book is The Aliens Among Us. And it's centered, it's a Canadian scientist perspective on...


Deborah L. Davitt (14:55.275)
Yeah?

Priya Chand(15:00.066)
primarily the Great Lakes area, and it really does get into these distinctions between invasives, introduced species, and I don't recall if it also mentions weedy natives, but yeah, so, so yeah, I mean, honestly, fundamentally, I would say there's no shortcuts. You have to learn your region and your locale, and you've really got to do it by getting involved locally. Like, I mean, you can't, I...

Deborah L. Davitt (15:11.83)
Yeah.

Priya Chand(15:29.65)
There might be some kind of web resource that actually says that, by the way, the soil near me happens to be part of a 14,000-year-old deposit. And for that reason, we try to avoid just pulling plants out of it because it disturbs the soil. But I didn't learn that online. I learned it from actually getting my hands dirty and volunteering in the preserve.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:47.135)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:53.401)
Oh, that is beautiful. Thank you. I love that.

Priya Chand(15:56.714)
It's really cool, right? Like, yeah, and no, I mean, I will admit one of my hopes for it is cool mushrooms because they do well in old school.

Deborah L. Davitt (15:58.561)
Yeah it is!


Deborah L. Davitt (16:06.148)
You and Amelia are going to have a wonderful conversation as soon as we get offline because she is all about the mushrooms.


Priya Chand(16:13.326)
Yeah, but yeah, like, yeah, I mean, honestly, yeah, it's tough because there really aren't shortcuts. And I mean, you just really have to learn your region and your locale. And you have to accept that, you know, it's OK that one, again, that knowledge is going to increase over time and potentially transform. And two, it's not going to be universally applicable. Like, it actually feels really weird to me now whenever I go to even California on the coast where I had grown up.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:30.205)
Okay.


Priya Chand(16:42.29)
just to be like, whoa, I don't know anything about if this is normal for this time of year. Yeah, I mean, especially with all the stuff happening with global warming, changes brought about by land use, all that stuff. It's like, yeah, you just really have to dig your fingers into the ground.

Deborah L. Davitt (16:50.613)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:06.537)
So environmental work has its own terroir.

Priya Chand(17:10.158)
Mm-hmm. Very much so.

Deborah L. Davitt (17:11.497)
I love that. All right. So, one of the most seminal and impactful sentences in this piece, and I loved it, is 'Not everything we do outside has to be a conquest.' Would you like to speak to that a little bit more? Because that to me just summed up the piece and elevated it and had so many other things that it could go into. So, I would love to hear you talk more about that.

Priya Chand(17:34.206)
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's fundamentally this idea of approaching nature with a little more humility, like stepping back and seeing, you know, what is this ecosystem and where do we fit into it instead of, you know, like obviously one of the things that I mean, we know is that we technically are one of the invasive species just on account of being quote unquote not technically, you know, like

Priya Chand(18:03.338)
part of the landscape originally. But a lot of these landscapes, especially with the indigenous peoples, these landscapes did actually evolve alongside humans for thousands of years. Like one of the things that's being brought back here and one of the things that the local forest preserve district has in kind of its acknowledgement portion is that they have inherited an actually long running tradition of stewardship and that they also get back to. So...

Deborah L. Davitt (18:05.743)
Mm-hmm

Priya Chand(18:32.486)
So I would say a lot of it is about not going, okay, well, I'm not really supposed to be here in this ecosystem. So I'm just going to exist on top of it. But really looking at how we can kind of fit better in and, you know, the places where maybe past people or even just recent events have disrupted things. How do we help restore that balance? Because you can't you know, you can't you can't always put something back, but you can find ways to bring back some kind of.

Deborah L. Davitt (18:55.16)
Yeah.

Priya Chand(19:02.346)
balance maybe a new balance but yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:06.465)
Yeah, that to me speaks to the California wildfires in enormous ways because there was a tradition of stewardship among, yeah, and it hasn't been done in recent years. And you're, yes, and yeah.

Priya Chand(19:21.034)
Yeah. I... Yeah.

Amelia Gorman (19:21.345)
They're doing it! They're finally doing controlled burns. They're allowing like native groups to do their own controlled burns, like, finally.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:28.415)
Oh, thank God.

Priya Chand(19:30.734)
I, yeah, no, I'm looking at the collaboration that's finally starting to come back and this whole pushback on, you know, the only science that matters is Western science in a laboratory and these traditions don't count unless they're studied the same way. Like it's nice to see that attitude finally shifting.

Deborah L. Davitt (19:50.813)
yeah, I have a whole story about finding that balance that's been circulating for many moons now, and I'm hoping to find a home for it. Well, we'll see where that where that goes. I might wind up sending it to reckoning. Who knows. Um, Floris, we mentioned we touched on your story and Oasis of Amends, which appeared in Reckoning 2 May 20.

May 2018, the narrator poured billions of dollars into sustainable energy, into reinforcing sea walls so that people could continue to live in low areas like the Netherlands, which it's already below sea level people. While their husband Roland told them that they did nothing, told them that nothing that did matter that the ice caps were going to melt regardless of anything they did. Their husband was lost during the catastrophic flooding of the Netherlands.

which is pictured as a single event as opposed to a gradual event. And as a men's narrator has poured their resources instead into moving icebergs inland to places like Algeria, where the pristine water content makes oases and wadis bloom into new life. The solution here is technological. It's almost heroic in a way, though tragic at the same time.

The icebergs are crushed down into car-sized chunks by a massive platform called the Nutcracker and the ice is flown inland using large helicopters, presumably still using fossil fuels, while the farms in Algeria use solar. Quite a lot of the cli-fi I've read so far on the podcast borders on the anti-technological in a lot of ways, but your story embraces technology as a possible solution. How do you bridge that gap? How do you maintain that balance?

Floris Kleijne (21:10.612)
Thank you.

Floris Kleijne (21:36.615)
First, the icebergs are not flown by helicopter. There's a giant conveyor belt, electrical. So, yeah, that's that.

Deborah L. Davitt (21:40.637)
Okay. I am I'm picturing this now going across all of Europe and down into okay. I see.

Floris Kleijne (21:49.764)
Yeah. But in terms of technological solutions, I think like the cat's out of the bag, the Pandora's box has opened and we won't be able to close it again. We won't put the cat back into the bag. Technology is inevitably part of solution, I'm sure. And yes, technology

Deborah L. Davitt (22:10.111)
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne (22:19.152)
from the way humanity has evolved so far is a huge deal. And I don't think it's realistic to expect that, to make a huge shift. We need to have like a cultural shift and a mindset shift. But expecting a solution by moving away from technology, I don't see that happening.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:37.697)
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne (22:48.456)
And yeah, and yes, the heroic Elon Musk-like individuals, I'm gonna fix it by myself, I'm tossing money at it, that's absurd, and I mean, the guy in the story is an idiot. That's clear. Idiot at the beginning and he's still an idiot at the end, and it's all out of love and guilt, but technology, I'm sure, will be a major part of any solution we come up with, like solar, like wind.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:48.67)
Yeah, I, yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (22:59.253)
Yeah. Ha ha ha.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:15.069)
We are tool using apes. Our instinct is to use our tools to try to solve problems. So, yeah.

Floris Kleijne (23:20.844)
Yes. Yeah. And we have tools that help. We have wind, we have solar, that's technology. We have any direct or indirect use of solar will be part of the solution.

Deborah L. Davitt (23:35.053)
Mm-hmm. All right, we're going to move to Tehnuka. I'm going to skip past one of your stories because it's going to require so much conversation. We're going to move to the one that's going to require less conversation first, if that's OK with you. All right, so the first story we're going to talk about is Why We Bury Our Dead at Sea, which appeared in Reckoning 7, January 29, 2023. Again, I will drop a link to this in the notes for the episode.

Tehnuka (23:47.433)
Sure.

Deborah L. Davitt (24:04.313)
Cavieri is the narrator's cousin and Cavieri is on trial on suspicion that she blew a hole in the side of a deep sea trawler looking for rare earths that would allow for energy production without the use of fossil fuels. The trial is all based on basically at most circumstantial evidence. It's based on what she said about the deaths of 97 people and social media since. And what she said is that their bodies replaced the nutrients lost to the deep sea by the loss of the whales in their habitat.

Her cousin defends her in court, saying that she's not capable of having conducted the bombing, but people worldwide hear the footage and begin a movement to bury their dead bodies at sea as a way of giving back to the ocean from which all life ultimately comes. This story, like Priya's buckthorns and herbicide and dandelions, brings up the question of what's the right thing to do. Moving away from fossil fuels in general is the initial take that people have as the first right thing to do.

But for Cavieri, what we might move to in their place is also not a great option. How do people make choices when every choice has those second and third order consequences? It's sort of like the good place where the point system says that you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. I don't know if you've watched The Good Place, but it's fun. So how do you envision people making good choices?

in a world where every choice seems poisoned somehow.

Tehnuka (25:34.185)
That's a good question and everyone's going to do it differently. I'm not sure we can find a right answer when there isn't one. I think one aspect of this is sustainability and there's a tendency for humans to see one solution and not think much further ahead than the immediate benefits of that solution. And to my mind, that's definitely, yeah, and that's what's happened with renewables.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:47.724)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (25:57.205)
Yeah, I would totally agree with that.

Tehnuka (26:04.081)
In many cases, the people benefiting from renewable technology in the first instance aren't seeing the impacts down the line. So mining, like where are our rare earths coming from? Currently there's humanitarian crises, there's slavery, there is talk of getting these rare earths from the deep sea, which...

Deborah L. Davitt (26:15.305)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:20.873)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:26.217)
Mm-hmm.

Tehnuka (26:31.465)
comes with its whole other set of environmental concerns. And I think part of the point of the story was making people more aware of that. Not to say that there is a solution, but to say we need to think about these repercussions of everything we're doing. Even if it looks like we've found the perfect solution, it's not. And we need to think sustainably. We need to think about.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:35.533)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:42.922)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (26:50.742)
Yeah.

Tehnuka (27:00.229)
What are we taking out of the ecosystem? What are we putting back? And that's kind of where the replacement of whale falls with human bodies comes in. I don't know that that's really a practical solution to losing whales, but I wanted people to think about, you know, how are we, like we're taking away from the environment and what we're putting back in tends not to be very good for it on the whole. So how can we change that?

Deborah L. Davitt (27:03.901)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:09.773)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (27:26.901)
Yeah, I did love the imagery. I did love the imagery of sense of burying people at sea to renew the ocean. It might not be a practical solution, but it's a beautiful solution. I'm going to ask you what gave you the inspiration, the direct inspiration for this story? Was it, did you just happen to be reading about deep sea trawling and or what gave you the original idea?

Tehnuka (27:57.333)
I've been thinking about the elements in this for a long time, not in the context of the story, but reading about whale falls and the occurrence of these rarests on the sea floor and the talk of trawling for them. The impacts of social media, the way environmentalists are targeted sometimes is being seen as, you know, eco-terrorists. There is something.

Deborah L. Davitt (28:17.519)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Tehnuka (28:26.165)
called ecoterrorism, but environmental activism is separate to that. And the way the main character is targeted for her comments on social media, we're kind of reflecting that. We get mass strandings of pilot whales here. And that was kind of a... Shortly after I wrote the story, I think it was still in the reckoning submission queue I was reading about a mass stranding of pilot whales. And...

Deborah L. Davitt (28:45.548)
Yeah.

Tehnuka (28:55.973)
about your decisions being made on whether deep sea trawling would be allowed. So all of these were sort of current and brewing in my mind and came together.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:10.521)
Well, it came together beautifully, tragically, but beautifully. It's basically, it's poem-like near the end. So I really appreciated the ending in particular. And I just wanted to say that other people should read this. We're going to bop to Amelia to talk about actual poems. And I'm going to bop back to her a couple of different times because each of her poems is relatively short compared to the rest of your stories. So we're going to talk a bit about the field guide overall.

Tehnuka (29:12.669)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (29:40.137)
And then we're going to talk about a couple of the individual poems and that way we get a little Amelia dispersed amongst all the stories. Alright, so the field guide is a collection of 21 poems, each of which is obliquely written and doesn't open up to just a casual surface reading. Most of them can be read on more than one level at a time and each takes as its title and subject a different invasive species. For example, Elodia is at first blush.

A poem about an aquatic weed that's wildly invasive because it survives freezing and can be replanted through mere fragments of the original plant. And as such chokes the oxygen light out of ponds and waterways wherever it gets a foothold. But it's about much more than that. It's also about how the plant has no choice but to grow where it's at, that's its nature. And by extension to there is the, an obliquely referenced female character, referenced only in the final stanza and conflated with the plant who's also doomed to live in a world without choice.

So it's meaning is moved up to side long, it's moved away from, you are told by the text to figure this out for yourself. There's very little hand holding. It is an incredible set of poems. I had the pleasure of recommending it to the editor of Interstellar Flight Press when I was slush reading, so I am a big fan.

Talk to me about the writing process for the Field Guide. How did you first come up with the idea of the sequence, or did you find that you'd written a number of the poems first and then come up with the idea of creating a collection based around?

Amelia Gorman (31:15.538)
So I think first I just wrote Zebra Muscles and I kind of sent that around a few places and no one was interested in it. And then I think I wrote Earthworms and one other one, and I was sending all three of those out together to like places that really liked publishing multiple poems by a poet. And no one was interested in any of them. And...

Deborah L. Davitt (31:34.633)
Mm-hmm.

Amelia Gorman (31:38.802)
It's like, well, what's better than like three unpublishable poems is 20 unpublishable poems. Like if I'm in this, like I'm in this all the way. So then I decided I was just going to do a whole book about it, you know, just for my own sake, because it became more and more interesting to me the more I worked on it and the more I learned about these things.

Deborah L. Davitt (32:04.521)
Yeah, all right. So a number of the poems are, as I referenced earlier, obliquely written. Each one is lovely and resonant, but they come at meaning from the side, veiling it in metaphor, whereas most of the rest of your work invites the reader in a little more. Was the obliqueness by design, or was it just a place that you were at as you were writing it? Would have been six years ago now?

Amelia Gorman (32:27.006)
I think it's definitely something that comes into my work a lot. Like, I think I might've even said this on your last podcast, but like growing up in a white Midwestern family, like we didn't really talk about our emotions with each other. We definitely didn't like publish them, you know, in public or, or talk about them with strangers, like God knows. So.

So in a sense, it's always felt more natural for me to use poetry and it's like, you know, persona poetry, to use metaphor, to use allegory, to just get across what I want to say feels very comfortable to me.

Deborah L. Davitt (33:11.273)
We're gonna go back to Priya now, which is for her second story, which is Demeter seeks out Persephone in the year 2210, which appeared in Little Blue Marble, which we just had the editor of on last week, I believe, or perhaps the week before last. They all blend together now. This appeared on July 29th, 2022. And again, I will drop the link in the comments.

This is a lovely chilling retelling of the myth of Persephone and Hades, except in a world in which humans have ensured that there is no more winter. The ancient gods cannot reenact their ancient rituals. Persephone can't eat the pomegranate. Last year she vomited up two of the arils and this year she can't even chew them. Without her mother's carefully manicured grief, there is no winter. Without winter's harshness, crops have no more vigor, despite food scientists' efforts in to add vitamins and antifungal strains to them.

This is a fable for the future mixing myth and science in a warning bell that tolls out loud and strong. While many Clif-Fi sub-stories contain a seed of hope at their hearts, this one, as far as I was concerned, didn't really have that going. It's warmly written in that the gods' relationships border on humorous and cozy, but that only serves as a juxtaposition against the horror of nature and upheaval. I loved this story, if you cannot tell. What did you hope people would take away from this story?

Priya Chand(34:35.21)
Yeah, thank you. So yeah, the first thing is I wrote it and looked at it and was like, shit, this is really depressing. So I kind of threw in that very last line to be glimmer of hope. And yeah, I was just like, yeah, I need that yet. I really need that yet. There is a singular hope in this story. So.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:43.298)
Yeah

Deborah L. Davitt (34:50.425)
I'm gonna go to bed.

Deborah L. Davitt (34:57.914)
Yeah, so there's a lot balances on that yet.

Priya Chand(35:04.158)
Yeah, yeah, the hope thing is actually has never been my strong suit. So I can't say I'm totally surprised that was the takeaway. But yeah, so I studied classics in college. So I mean, my angle is definitely very much scholarly. I'm not coming at it as someone actually from Greece with, you know, kind of grew up with those stories and has more of like that kind of direct regional connection to it.

Floris Kleijne (35:21.296)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:31.335)
Mm-hmm.

Priya Chand(35:31.478)
But yeah, very much from a scholarship perspective, I mean, you know, there are versions of this myth where she eats exactly six seeds and that's why winter is six months long. So I thought that was kind of interesting to tie it so quantitatively, again, in some versions of the story. So I wanted to play with that. And then I really wanted to play with the Greek chorus. Yeah, I had a good time making it a lot more active.

Deborah L. Davitt (35:56.129)
Yeah.

Priya Chand(36:01.662)
I mean, you see the progression over time in the classics, like Euripides kind of gets closest to having more of a active rather than a passive chorus from vaguely remember from school a million years ago.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:12.959)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:17.45)
That tracks with what I vaguely remember too. So I think we're on track with each other.

Priya Chand(36:22.453)
I mean two vagues make a right. I'm sure that's the thing.

Floris Kleijne (36:25.904)
I'm sorry.

Deborah L. Davitt (36:26.855)
We can look it up on the internet and see if it's right because the internet is never wrong, right?

Priya Chand(36:30.114)
Oh yeah, absolutely not. But yeah, anyway, so I was just like, I kind of recently revisited some of the stories and was just like, winter. And you know, I was looking outside here. So I live in the Midwest currently and it was December. And I mean, quite frankly, I don't remember the last time there was snow on Christmas day, December 25th.

Amelia Gorman (36:31.004)
Yeah.

Floris Kleijne (36:32.548)
Thank you.

Priya Chand(36:57.466)
It used to be common when we first moved here and it's just gone away. And so I was definitely just in a place of like, man, you know, like winter's going away. Um, there are studies showing that plants actually need that kind of winter cycle to be more nutrient rich. So, so the nutrition, yeah, like literally the nutrient content of plants is not as good if they don't get a kind of full winter to go dormant in, or at least for some key crops.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:01.942)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:14.157)
Yes.

Yes.

Priya Chand(37:26.802)
including wheat, if I recall correctly. But yeah, so I was thinking about that. I just kind of got back into some of the myth stuff that I used to read more frequently and was like, winter, winter. And you know, that's kind of where it came together in my head, so.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:28.505)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (37:44.217)
I kind of want to throw in there that I have also read studies that say that insect damage also is vital for plants to have that nutrient denseness, that richness to them. So we're actually in some ways doing a disservice with the pesticides. We're doing that disservice to ourselves. So that's something that I thought about as I was reading this because I have definitely read those same studies about needing winter, needing harsh conditions to...

be a better plant. And yeah, so we'll move on to florists. And we're going to talk about encroachment, which appeared in Little Blue Marble May 2022, no, May 2020. Joel and Olivia are a pair of scientists sent to Capitan B as a seed colony to see if humans can be, if human crops, as well as humans, can be grown on this alien world.

Floris Kleijne (38:25.904)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (38:41.013)
As they fight and argue, their crops fail, a gray fugue coming over them. When they make up, giving up hope on the land and coming to terms with each other, the gray haze retreats from the crops, leaving them to wonder what is the cause and what is the effect. The story asks questions about how we relate to each other as well as to the environment. I wanted to ask if the intimation that is that in order to heal the land, we have to heal ourselves. Is, was that an intentional theme or is that just a lucky happenstance?

Floris Kleijne (39:07.032)
Well, it kind of depends on your definition of intentional, I'm afraid, because I always claim that as a writer, I don't do metaphors. They kind of happen to me. And so, and basically, I think looking back when I wrote this story, the implied relevance was mostly that's

Deborah L. Davitt (39:16.609)
Hahaha

Floris Kleijne (39:34.74)
I may have been in a difficult place in my relationship at the time. And the fact that when the relationship is all gloom and doom, the world seems all gloom and doom. And it's very hard, at least for me, to look at the positive around me when the relationship is in a hard place. And but yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (39:39.771)
That happens.

Floris Kleijne (39:59.46)
Some of my convictions about this must have transpired in the story, because yes, I do believe that... Well, the quote you said from Priya's story, that not everything needs to be conquered living at peace with and going from a place of peace and calm into the environment works better than going from a place of conflict. So...

Deborah L. Davitt (40:12.748)
Mm-hmm.

Floris Kleijne (40:28.672)
I didn't think of that before I wrote it, but in retrospect it must have come from some place inside me.

Deborah L. Davitt (40:35.433)
Yeah, and it's beautiful. It's a wonderful story. And you've already touched on some of the inspiration for the story in that you say you were in a different place in your relationship, in your head at that point in time. So we will go ahead and move to Tehnuka. And Tehnuka, this story of yours inspired a lot of back and forth by email. And it's definitely worth talking about. I'm just going to

introduce it and then we I'm gonna let you I'm gonna wind you up gently I'm gonna let you turn you loose to talk about that is this okay? Okay I'm getting a nod. L the plastrophos plastotrophs and me grists imagine 2200 climate fiction contest September 14th 2021 again I will drop a link in the comments and a future in which there are two types of community the

so-called de-evolved co-ops that live a deliberately rough, hewn existence using wood fires to cook and walking and canoeing where they need to go, and the super community. Malar is part of a co-op that works at culling introduced flora and fauna that don't belong in the native environment while maintaining a sort of subsistence existence for themselves. She's also part of a unique relationship between herself, Yoshi, and Aroha. She's in love with Yoshi, and Aroha and Yoshi are also a couple.

but Aroha wants a co-parenting relationship with Malar, not a loverly one. Malar expects to grow old, taking care of the child of the other two members of the relationship, but is stunned when the village elders allow her to conceive the next grandchild of the village. And by the way, there are so many beautiful Maori terms in this story that Google does not translate. I gave up when Google decided to translate grandchild as being a shark.

And I said, nope, that can't possibly be right. And I've managed to find where it was correct. So do not trust Google necessarily as you're going through the story. Just kind of surf above the words and let context be your guide is my advice for reading the story and appreciating it for what it is.

Deborah L. Davitt (42:45.201)
Unfortunately, when Yoshi grows ill, possibly with a variant of the malaria they thought had been eradicated centuries ago, and on a trip to the New York super community to seek treatment, Elle, another woman of the village, confides that she's accidentally become pregnant, meaning that in an age of population control that Malar won't be permitted to have a child in the near future, or if at all. When I-

While I viewed the stories being analogous to the Bronze Age collapse in many ways, going from densely interconnected trade partnerships to everything becoming intensely local, from our conversations before the podcast, I know that you view most of these change living sciences as deliberate and chosen life patterns for the betterment of humanity as a sort of a guidepost for the smaller communities are basically heralds for the bigger communities.

Would you like to talk about that? I'm going to duck and get out of the way. Cause I know you got a lot to say.

Tehnuka (43:39.309)
So, I guess there's different ways of looking at climate fiction and imagine 2200 was about looking at an equitable future. So there are a lot of ways we could have ended up in this situation. One of them, as you say, is like a loss of internationality and interconnectedness. And we can see...

Deborah L. Davitt (43:51.033)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:00.184)
Mm-hmm.

Tehnuka (44:03.921)
ways in which we'd get into that now. So there are different types of climate disaster, including what humans are doing. So if you look at what happens in wars, what happens during a genocide, we also have ecocide. There was a report on Al Jazeera I was watching two days ago where they were talking about what's happening in Palestine and the long-term environmental consequences of that, talking about building rubble and asbestos, talking about what happens to the water supply.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:13.881)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:27.574)
Oh boy.

Deborah L. Davitt (44:31.145)
Oh yeah.

Tehnuka (44:33.973)
damage the sewage systems, salination of groundwater, and then the white phosphorus residue that's now gone up into the atmosphere and is potentially contaminating rainwater. So this is humans causing the destruction of the environment as well as of other humans. So I think there are ways in which we can get into these sorts of situations very quickly.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:00.438)
Mm-hmm.

Tehnuka (45:01.469)
And I want to talk about that because I think writing from a privileged position, we don't always see all of these things. I'm living in middle-class Aotearoa, New Zealand. We aren't necessarily living in a dystopia yet, but what a lot of us write about as climate dystopia is what's already happening in other places. And so I didn't want to focus on how we get to that situation because people are already living that.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:12.002)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:25.11)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:31.884)
Mm-hmm.

Tehnuka (45:32.805)
And to look at equity and social justice, I wanted to look at how we keep moving into the future, working together rather than how do we go from where we are now to losing connection. So I hope that gives some context for that side of the story. Within that, I had the super communities and the co-ops. I was, as you described, I was seeing them as

Deborah L. Davitt (45:48.547)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (45:53.973)
I hope so.

Tehnuka (46:01.757)
Sort of an experiment. I don't know if that's how things would look in the future, but because the contest was sort of framed as the, I think, the future ancestors. So we're talking about like how things look, how we guide each other in the future. And because it was centered on equity, I wanted to look at a small community where people from different cultures, different backgrounds are working together.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:03.902)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:18.553)
Mm-hmm.

Tehnuka (46:32.521)
And technology becomes sort of secondary to that because the focus is on living lightly on the land using local resources. So for example, they're not using renewables because they're not bringing in various elements from somewhere else within that small co-op. But elsewhere in these super communities where the focus is on, you know, keeping people alive and living well, not so much on local environmental impacts.

Deborah L. Davitt (46:48.537)
Mm-hmm.

Tehnuka (47:02.253)
they might still have a lot of the resources we do now. And the reason for doing that is it's clear that the way Malir and her community are living, you know, there will be issues with things like accessibility, healthcare. There's a controversial question of how they're controlling or limiting local population within their small community. And I didn't want to imply that was happening all over the land. I wanted that to be just part of her experience.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:05.623)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:16.237)
Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:24.706)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (47:29.549)
Yeah.

Okay, I did want to say that this strongly reminded me of the third book of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, Blue Mars, because in Blue Mars you have people who live in a utopia of sorts on Mars, where they have the high technology that's allowed them to live there, but they're living deliberately rough-hewn existences.

Floris Kleijne (47:44.367)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:00.237)
so that they're living locally with under these domes under these shells and so on and so forth. And so they're living off the land, they're living communally, everything is a social experiment. And so I wanted to draw a line between those two books and stories and say that if you liked Blue Marsh, you will probably enjoy Tehnuka's work. So you might want to take a look at this.

Deborah L. Davitt (48:28.557)
We're gonna bop back to Amelia now, and we're gonna talk about your individual poems. And Grecian Fox Club, which is one of my favorite poems in the collection, on the face of it, it's about losing our bodies, uploading to machines, and along the way, losing the beauty of nature. As solution undercut with a savage final line, hoaxes are the oldest medicine we know, which suggests that uploading our consciousness is as much a placebo as anything else.

It invokes the foxglove, which is a non-native plant, but one used in medicine since time immemorial, but it would be one rendered obsolete in a world that has no more need of nature. The poem asks if it can be digitized, which renders a faint echo of the name for heart medicine made from foxglove digitalis, while asking if our skipping hearts rendered into imperfect data can be treated with an echo of medicine while doubting that too.

It is a lovely poem and can you recall the inspiration for it? I know it's been a while since you wrote this and you've slept since then. And.

Amelia Gorman (49:26.278)
I did have to go back and read it and like try to remember. But actually it wasn't too hard. And this is the sort of, you know, fighting words with florists, I guess. This one is kind of about how technology is not going to save us. I hate the sort of tech disruptor culture of parts of California, not even the part I live in.

Floris Kleijne (49:28.498)
I can read it. I'd like to know.

Amelia Gorman (49:51.922)
I hate the sort of move fast and break things you hear and it's like, sure, we can make a better car, but why not make like a better bus instead? Like, it isn't just a technological solution. So that a lot of these things that are promised as environmental saviors are kind of our vaporware and our hoaxes. And I, I've written about that before. And I think that was what I kind of wanted to get at with this poem.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:22.537)
Interesting. Thank you for unlocking it a little for me. My another favorite poem of mine is Queen Anne's Lace and we talked a little bit about this with Priya. It takes us its initial image the invasive weed or at least introduced weed to use the correct term Queen Anne's Lace, which the poem still loves for its beauty and extends into a vision of how people might make themselves more plant like growing leaves from their legs, carrot skin grafted on ramps, which is a kind of wild edible beloved by foragers.

Amelia Gorman (50:24.46)
Hehe.

Deborah L. Davitt (50:51.513)
growing from the mouth and nose. It takes this as a solution, if a kind of fanciful one, to famine as rewilded humans turn their faces to the sun. How did you get from the tatted lace of Queen Anne's lace to wild vegetable humans? What's the through line or thought pattern that took you from one place to another?

Amelia Gorman (51:06.44)
Oh.

So this one, I mean, I had to write about this one just because of that like folktale you're sometimes told about this plant, which is the little red flower you sometimes see in the center is a drop of blood is because Queen Anne bled on it at some point. Yeah, yeah, that's one folktale associated with this plant. And then for me, it's kind of like, well, if let's say it really is blood, what I wanted to do is...

Deborah L. Davitt (51:24.641)
did not know that. That's interesting.

Amelia Gorman (51:37.954)
what might people do with it? And the sort of very negative take is extraction. People are just going to look at this and say, not why does it do this? Not how does this affect other plants? Not does it need help? It's like, what can we take from this to help ourselves? Being the, what I very cynically am suggesting would be the first question people ask.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:43.917)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (51:56.761)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (52:03.657)
Interesting. All right, we're going to move from our mutual admiration society to talking about someone else's work because part of what we do at Shining Moon is lifting other people up. And we had a recommendation from I think Priya for a story called What It Means to Love a City by Moe Usevich. I apologize if I mispronounced the last name. I have not met this person, so I do not know how to say their last name.

This appeared in Reckoning 7, July 2nd, 2023. Again, as always, I will drop a link in the comments. A boy lives in a time and place where people enter their families into a lottery and receive tax breaks for doing so, enormous ones, because the chances of being chosen are so small. What's the lottery for? To determine who might be taken to become the basis of a quote unquote living city with their eyes melted and their hearts and flesh used to build the city as a whole.

His younger brother is the newest living city, and he's here simply put to visit what's left of his little brother. The story doesn't put it that simply though. It's hinted at so subtly that it took me two reads to understand what was going on. It's surreal and sad. And other than the fact that it appeared in reckoning, I didn't really read this as clifify, except that it's in some alternate universe where magic and science have progressed to a point where such things are possible, and yet there's also still climate devastation.

What did you guys like about this one? What didn't you like about this one? How did it, what makes it clarify in your opinions other than the fact that it appeared in Reckoning? So let's get started. I see Priya is smiling and it looks like she's ready to say something, so Priya.

Priya Chand(53:40.67)
Yeah, oh, I'm always ready to say something. But yes, having suggested it too, I do feel like one of the things I should highlight is the actual kind of more formal definition of environmental justice, because honestly as a term, I think it can be a little bit misleading, but environmental justice is actually really about acknowledging the impact to human groups. So frequently,

Deborah L. Davitt (53:58.573)
Mm-hmm.

Priya Chand(54:07.886)
frequently racial groups, also socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, that has resulted from basically extractive practices that have benefited kind of the wealthier and basically more privileged classes. So I mean, for instance, setting up a pet coke plant in a low-income neighborhood here, so those folks ended up exposed to pollution, whereas the benefits were predominantly going outside their community.

Deborah L. Davitt (54:10.024)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (54:20.83)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (54:33.627)
Mm-hmm.

Priya Chand(54:37.042)
So that's one thing I wanted to note. Now, whether or not you consider that to strictly be CLIFI, I leave to other folks.

Deborah L. Davitt (54:37.08)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (54:41.753)
Okay.

Floris Kleijne (54:42.512)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (54:49.945)
It's strongly metaphorical as a story goes. So it may just be that my lump of my bump of logic where I'm sitting there going, yes, but how does a little boy become a whole city I don't understand and I get locked in on the logic of it and I can't move away from that into the metaphorical. So it might just be on me.

Floris Kleijne (55:00.432)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:12.373)
Amelia, you're raising your hand.

Amelia Gorman (55:15.21)
So actually one thing I noted down was when they first used the word pool and like this the family mentions they have entered the pool and they're getting financial benefit from it. It was like I wrote down like okay this is when my mind went like this reminds me of the ones who walk away from Omalas.

Floris Kleijne (55:29.456)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:30.099)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (55:37.241)
Mm-hmm.

Amelia Gorman (55:38.126)
very much, you all of a sudden realize something terrible is going to happen to the children who are chosen in this pool, you just don't know what yet. So maybe thinking about it that way would help you, because that story is less surreal, but no, how to put it, like no more believable, it's still there's almost this cruel absurdity to the-

Deborah L. Davitt (55:44.505)
Mm-hmm.

Amelia Gorman (56:02.338)
the situation in Le Guin's story where this child has to suffer for everyone to have a peaceful, wealthy, great home. Here we again see that this child has to suffer so some people can have a home in this somewhat difficult to live in world. And getting at then who sacrifices and...

Deborah L. Davitt (56:27.093)
Mm-hmm.

Amelia Gorman (56:28.01)
Is it exploitative how we decide who sacrifices things? Really resonated with me as an environmental story.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:38.425)
Okay, Tehnuka, did you want to say anything about this one?

Priya Chand(56:39.47)
Not- not-

Tehnuka (56:42.617)
Yes, I have a couple of angles on the climate or environment side of it. One is thinking about rural to urban migration, how people from disadvantaged rural communities are often brought in as labor for wealthier urban communities and the impact on the land. So...

Floris Kleijne (56:47.759)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (56:56.384)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:02.622)
Okay.

Tehnuka (57:07.993)
In this story, it sounds like outside of the cities, the land is really struggling, that it's quite desolate. And then you have these cities that are alive. And so what's actually happening when people are being brought in to support this urban life? And I think that can be seen as a metaphor to what's really happening in our world. The other angle, and I want to also highlight Octavia Cade's recent collection from Stelliform Press.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:13.002)
Yeah.

Tehnuka (57:36.901)
You Are My Sunshine and other stories, because they both look at communities and ecosystems in different ways using different metaphors. And so if you see a city as a human, how would you treat its ecosystem differently? In this story, still quite cruelly, because they've taken this boy and his body into a city. But does that change how we see our environments, even our urban environments, if we see them as human?

Deborah L. Davitt (57:37.44)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (57:51.703)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:06.434)
Mm-hmm.

Tehnuka (58:07.453)
And Octavia Kaye does this in some of her stories, looking at people as coral reefs. So just thinking about these different metaphors for individual humans, for cities, for natural landscapes that can help us relate to them and think more about our impact on them.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:14.806)
Mmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (58:30.197)
It's interesting that you mentioned Omalas, Emilia, because I've actually, take away my sci-fi nerd card, I've never actually read that one. But what.

Amelia Gorman (58:38.592)
Well, you should follow it up as a corollary to this story and see if you...

Deborah L. Davitt (58:43.381)
What I did flash to was actually The Lottery by, I wanna say Shirley Jackson. And so I was reading this far more as a horror story in many regards, because that's what I flashed to. So I appreciate all of you giving me your insights because that gives me a richer way to read this story when I go back to it. And we're gonna move now to a reading from Amelia Gorman. You're gonna read us what, two, three poems?

Priya Chand(58:47.63)
True. Yeah.

Amelia Gorman (58:48.058)
Shirley Jackson.

Floris Kleijne (58:53.24)
Thank you.

Floris Kleijne (59:08.855)
Thank you.

Amelia Gorman (59:09.778)
I'll do three, I guess. They're pretty short poems. Okay, first, obviously, because of Priya's piece, I gotta read Buckthorn. So, Buckthorn. There is no catching the fruits that shivered, quivered, and rivered inside you. There is no eating back the bush, not with the help of goats or swine, not fried into Buckthorn flower pancakes. There is only you reckoning sand, counting the replicating droops until the numbers get too large.

forcing your way through the ecophagic wood as it slivers, quivers and slivers inside you. And soon there will be no you, just endless reproducing thorns.

Deborah L. Davitt (59:52.165)
I love that one.

Amelia Gorman (59:56.618)
I love that I got to do this book in alphabetical order. It makes it so easy to find poems. And I didn't have to come up with an order for it. Oh, and I'll read Grecian Foxglove since we talked about it. What good is Foxglove now that we've removed our bodies? We've gotten away from the grind, the gore and the rats and the crowds, the electrical storms, the exploding transformers, the rising waters and death riding war into the mall.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:01.581)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:10.157)
Okay.

Amelia Gorman (01:00:26.206)
In Mother Hutton Hall, we digitize ourselves, subtract the charcoal lungs and the sloughing skin. But the skipping hearts still transfer binary. The defects run straight through our code. Can we save the digitalis on disk too? Love is treatment, flowers kind. Hoaxes are the oldest medicine we know.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:48.137)
I love that final line, it hits so hard.

Amelia Gorman (01:00:52.119)
I know I did my book launch during the pandemic and it had a very different feel then than when I wrote it.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:00:57.604)
I bet it did!

Amelia Gorman (01:01:02.626)
And then I was going to do walnut twig beetle. Because I think when we talk about climate change, the first thing we think is often, is it going to be too hot for something to survive? Is it going to be too dry for a species? We don't think about all these little things, where obviously invasive species are a huge part of it. But also the spread of disease and how diseases are going to be spreading much more virulently. So walnut twig beetle.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:01:24.13)
Mm-hmm.

Amelia Gorman (01:01:31.406)
No one dies of thousand cankers disease. No one but trees, my doctor said. You're not a tree, are you? Not last time I checked, but I've been eating beetles since the crops died, and the basement with the preserves flooded, and the DNR stopped giving cash for clams, and more than my stomach went hollow. They used to say black walnuts poisoned every ground they touched, but at least they were edible. What poisons the poisoners? I can't walk to the clinic anymore.

Floris Kleijne (01:01:51.877)
I'll just say a few last moments before we really touch.

Amelia Gorman (01:01:59.934)
My feet full of holes like cigarette burns. My knees like joinery waiting for joints. My face taking comfort, pressed against the cool of the heavy walnut dining table, while a hole riddles my heart.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:16.185)
Well, thank you. Love listening to you read those. All right, so what's next for each of you? What do you have coming out soon or already out recently that you'd like people to read? I'm gonna start with Floris because he hasn't had a chance to speak recently.

Floris Kleijne (01:02:33.149)
Well, the answer is the same as last time, except much closer now. My new book launches on January 11th. So we're gearing up for promotion for that. And quite unrelated to the topic of this podcast, specifically the topic of this episode, it's a Dutch language thriller set in the Netherlands, not yet flooded.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:40.64)
NOOOOOO

Deborah L. Davitt (01:02:59.074)
What's the title?

Floris Kleijne (01:03:00.6)
The title is Kleinstekwaad, which means lesser evil.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:05.105)
Okay, sounds like it's going to be fun and I hope that it does very well because I know the first one did.

Floris Kleijne (01:03:11.364)
You did, you did. Yes.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:14.109)
Do you hope to have these translated into English or is it just that they are such going to be so local in some regards that it wouldn't do well translated?

Floris Kleijne (01:03:24.144)
No, it might do well, I believe. And my publisher does chase after selling the international rights. It hasn't happened yet, but I remain hopeful. I do remain hopeful. Yeah. Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:03:38.361)
Okay, fingers crossed. Amelia, what is, I'm sorry. You had something else to say? Oh, okay, you're welcome. Amelia, what's next for you? What are you out coming out soon or out recently that you'd like people to read?

Floris Kleijne (01:03:44.72)
Thank you guys, I thank you.

Amelia Gorman (01:03:54.41)
Um, it's very like scattered stuff lately, but I'm very interested in like writing about what I'm calling high concept cryptid poems at the moment. And I had one published in Strange Horizons about two issues ago at the time of saying this called Pickling Dog. And another one called Literary Hagfish in Utopia Science Fiction Magazine.

which that one also has a number of environmental themes as well. So I'm going to keep plugging away on those.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:25.557)
Interesting.

All right, I am hoping to read a full chapbook of these or a full collection of these soon. Tehnuka, what do you have out recently or coming out soon that you'd like people to read?

Tehnuka (01:04:41.489)
I will have a story out in Haunted Hallways next year, which is an anthology set in a boarding school all by Asian writers. And that story, it's not obviously climate fiction in the sense that this is a horror anthology, but it does have climate themes. And I'm working on a novella called An Effective

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:50.414)
Hehehe

Deborah L. Davitt (01:04:53.703)
Okay.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:03.853)
Okay.

Tehnuka (01:05:10.117)
a diasporin's guide to effective integration, which I will be working on during a residency in February, so hopefully that will be finished soon.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:14.055)
Oooo

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:19.093)
You've got a residency! Where is it at?

Tehnuka (01:05:21.925)
It's at the Michael King Races Centre in Auckland. It's just a two week residency, but that should hopefully be enough to get the first draft completed.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:25.95)
Okay!

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:31.397)
Oh, fantastic! Congratulations!

Tehnuka (01:05:33.958)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:05:35.865)
Priya, what do you have coming out soon or out recently that you'd like people to read?

Priya Chand(01:05:40.89)
Oh no, I'm actually wait, this is easy. Cause the answer to that is nothing really recent. I did have a reprint horror story that you, yeah, I don't think you could even make that remotely seem connected to Clifife, but it was in the dark if you like horror. And I will have another horror piece out next year in the second Death in the Mouth anthology and.

I would like to claim that one has something to do with Clif-I, but really it's just got an apocalypse in it. So not much at the moment, but we'll see. I try to keep things chill because I too have an extremely unrelated day job and also important hobbies chopping down trees. Especially Buckthorn.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:15.062)
Woohoo!

Amelia Gorman (01:06:15.482)
Thanks for watching!

Floris Kleijne (01:06:17.569)
Thank you.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:26.903)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:06:37.339)
I just love watching the expressions flicker between you and Amelia when you talk about chopping down buckthorn

Amelia Gorman (01:06:42.877)
Do you do any of the native planting afterwards?

Priya Chand(01:06:46.594)
Um, we did do seed collecting. Um, I'm not as involved with the distribution portion because quite frankly, they don't need as many hands for that, but, um,

Amelia Gorman (01:06:54.618)
Mm-hmm. I was gonna ask if you knew what species they're putting in

Priya Chand(01:06:59.21)
Ooh, well, I know on some of the burnt scars, we've put down Solomon's Seal, Fall Solomon's Seal, Rye, Sina. Yeah, I know I'm for, ooh, Bottle Brush. Those are the main ones that come to mind. I'm forgetting Joe Pyeweed. I don't remember if we had enough Joe Pyeweed seed to put down, but yeah. Yeah, basically.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:12.93)
OOF

Amelia Gorman (01:07:14.297)
Cool.

Amelia Gorman (01:07:24.858)
Cool, it's so exciting. Guy, I wish we got to burn stuff. We just put it in a green waste bin. At least some of it. In theory, you should burn a number of things, but we mostly do holly and ivy, so those can just be composted.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:28.513)
I blew it.

Priya Chand(01:07:36.376)
Yeah.

Floris Kleijne (01:07:37.584)
Thanks for watching.

Priya Chand(01:07:40.078)
Oh nice. Yeah, yeah, I mean like garlic mustard we cannot compost either. It's also allelopathic. So.

Amelia Gorman (01:07:42.914)
Mm-hmm.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:47.469)
Ooh, okay.

Priya Chand(01:07:49.474)
Yeah.

Deborah L. Davitt (01:07:50.957)
I'm going to leave the two of you to get each other's contact information after this, because I think you guys could have productive and wonderful conversations and I think you will become great friends to be perfectly honest. Thank you all for having been on the podcast. I really appreciate your time. This is my last podcast for the year and we'll be taking some time off before the next episode goes live simply because the holidays have totally gotten in the way.

We will be returning in mid-January with a series on flash fiction and interview with with a co-writer. The first flash fiction episode will feature Michael Haynes, Kat Day, Tara Campbell, and Amy Pichii. 

Also, it should go without saying, but if you enjoy the content I provide, hit the like and subscribe buttons to know immediately when the next episode goes live. Apparently, it really does help placate the algorithm, so do so. And thank you all for listening, and we are out!