From Peak to Abyss

Sara St. Antoine and Adam Connors discuss their middle grade novels and explore climate at two ends of the Earth

Adam Connors: On the surface, our books couldn’t be more different. Front Country is set in the wide open spaces of Montana, The Girl Who Broke the Sea is set at the bottom of the ocean in the most claustrophobic environment I could imagine. But at the same time, both books are about a troubled girl who’s forced into a hermetically sealed environment with a group of strangers, and in navigating that environment she grows.

Sara St. Antoine: I had the exact same thought when I started reading The Girl Who Broke the Sea, Adam. They’re two sides of one coin: My high-achieving Ginny freaks out when she realizes she’s signed up for a camp with a bunch of troublemakers. Your Lily, a bit of a troublemaker, can’t believe she’s stuck in this deep-sea mining rig with a bunch of overachievers. In both stories, our girls are the misfits in these places . . . with no way out.

ADAM: Your book is very expansive, both in terms of the setting, but also in terms of the topics and characters you include, but it’s also rooted in climate change and an almost planetary sense of loss that comes with that. I’d love to hear where your book started: what parts of the story were there from the beginning, and what parts emerged as part of the writing?

SARA: It’s funny you should start with expansiveness: the first iteration of this story actually took place almost entirely on a single city block. A middle school girl gets so undone by worries about climate change that she starts skipping school and sports to hang out in a vacant field favoured by her delinquent classmates. There were many of the same elements as in Front Country—Ginny’s core personality, her sense of otherness, her attentiveness to a natural space that the other kids don’t really register. But when I hit a rut in my writing, my agent took a look at the manuscript and said she thought the big questions I was raising would be better served by a big, dramatic landscape. So I signed up Ginny for a backpacking adventure in Montana. She thinks it will be a great escape from her parents and her existential angst until she learns, as you know, that the program is designed to help struggling kids get “back on track.” Per my agent’s request, I sketched out a rough outline of the whole plot before I began the new draft. But the kids’ relationships and Ginny’s physical experiences of the mountain unfolded pretty organically along the way.

What about you? Did you always want to write a story about deep-sea mining? Was the extraction-for-green-energy piece always a key part of this, or did those climate connections come along later?

ADAM: My journey was similar to yours, I didn’t start with the deep-sea at all.

My original idea was focused on something that I’ve seen happen a few times, sadly, with friends, where a family breaks up (and that’s traumatic enough), but then the children have to leave their family home as well, often for financial reasons.

I thought: what’s the worst possible place somebody might have to go after a family break-up?

The deep-sea (specifically the abyssal plains, which are vast flatlands 5 km below the surface) was just my answer to “what’s the last place Lily would want to go”. It was only when I started doing my background research that I really discovered how incredible it is down there. Everything about the deep-sea works against our technology: the pressure, the cold, the salt water. So it’s only in the past decade or so we’ve come anywhere near being able to really explore it.

As a result, the most striking thing about the deep-sea is how little we know about it. To give just one example: a few months ago an academic paper was published that described dark oxygen for the first time. An entirely unknown process by which the metallic nodules on the ocean floor electrolyze the water to create oxygen. It’s the only naturally occurring process on the planet known to create oxygen without photosynthesis. And it’s not in any text books because we only just discovered it.

SARA: Science is a really central element in the story. How much did you know and how much did you have to learn to write about Deephaven?

ADAM: I’m a physicist by training. I got my PhD at CERN, helping to build the Large Hadron Collider. But I knew absolutely nothing about the deep-sea when I started.

I think a lot of the mindset of science is transferable. I was comfortable going from newspaper articles to research papers, and then to phoning up the most commonly cited researchers and asking for their help.

Oceanographers are, in my opinion, the coolest scientists. They’re half-scientist, half-sailor hybrids, they wear lab-coats and have tattoos. I did a lot of research because I wanted to get the language and the voice of that community right. The sea exerts a massive cultural and emotional pull on them, and science does the same. The combination of the two creates some really interesting characters.

Over to you: I love the way your book captures the feeling of being immersed in nature. There’s a line where you describe the forest as smelling like vanilla and butterscotch. I love that, it’s very specific, and that makes it incredibly evocative. What advice do you have for people who want to engage with and experience the outdoors more vividly?

SARA: Thanks for that, Adam. I noticed that butterscotch and vanilla scent on my first visit to the Rockies as a teenager. And you’re right—I’m a big fan of being outdoors in wild or even not-so-wild green spaces. It’s an innate affection. I’m actually not a skilled naturalist, but I have enough training to know how to ask the right questions and how to find the experts who can make sure my organisms and ecosystems are rendered with scientific precision. Having said that, you don’t really need a scientific vocabulary to smell a pine tree, and I think those of us who love art and language can offer new pathways into looking, sensing, relating. What works for me is just to pay attention. I don’t mind being still and silent for long periods of time. I love getting outside in all kinds of places and seasons. I think if you do that enough, the wonders reveal themselves to you. Just in the last six months, I’ve seen a huge raccoon grooming itself on my fire escape, spotted a bobcat from a canoe, and been clocked on the head by a juvenile barred owl (I was jogging; he thought I was invading). So that’s my advice—go outside, put away your phone, be humble, tune in—for more than a minute or two—and just have fun. Oh, also . . . watch your head.

ADAM: That’s great advice! It’s hard though—I’ve tried it, and my mind wanders, my brain sings songs to me and writes lists… I guess, like a lot of people, I’m a product of my environment. But we should all be practising more stillness.

One of the things you do very effectively is put clear views about the state of the world into the voices of your characters. Mr Stelling, Ginny’s teacher, says: The. World. Is. On. Fire. Things are going to start dying faster than you ever thought possible. What’s really effective here is that such direct statements could easily alienate a reader, but by putting them in the mouth of your characters you avoid this.

Theo performs a similar role, but in a much more positive way. How did you go about matching the messages you wanted to convey with the characters and the story you wanted to tell?

SARA: Oh, the joys of fiction. So many characters, so many perspectives! But honestly, the things my characters said were meant to be in service of the story more than any agenda of my own. When I started the manuscript, I wasn’t sure kids would understand Ginny’s climate angst without seeing who or what really triggered it—like the way a single nuclear disaster film gave lots of people of my generation lifelong nightmares. Mr. Stelling was that trigger for Ginny. I needed his words to echo some of the scariest views about climate disaster that kids might encounter in the news, online, etc. But I also had to make him a believable science teacher. So I ratcheted up the bad middle school behaviour in the classroom so he’d really come uncorked. (For the record, if I were writing the story now, I don’t think I would have needed the scene at all; the rates of climate anxiety and climate grief among teens are so high that Ginny’s feelings need no explanation).

As for Theo, she represented something else to me. I think a lot of us reach a point in our lives—a true coming-of-age moment—when we realize that there are things we want to learn, beliefs we hold, that don’t match what our parents can offer us. For me, encounters with certain key mentors in high school and college were absolutely life changing. I no longer felt like the crazy outlier in my fascination with the animal kingdom and my budding interest in the environmental field; I felt heard and respected and encouraged. I wanted Ginny, who is feeling real pain about our planetary crisis, to have one of those encounters with Theo and, perhaps, offer the same kind of affirmation to readers who feel similarly alone with their thoughts and feelings about the state of the world. At this same time, it was important to me that Theo (and even, to some extent, Ginny’s parents) offer a more nuanced view of the world than frazzled Mr. Stelling.

I’d also love to hear you talk more about Lily. I don’t think I’ve ever read a story written from inside a kid with her kind of anger and impulse control issues. (And in a deep-sea space with windows that better not break, no less!) How did you come to the point of being able to inhabit this brilliant, complex, wounded kid? And was it ever hard to write her into so much trouble?

ADAM: I was a pretty socially awkward child at school, so it felt like something I could do a decent job of writing about. It also felt like something readers would recognize and relate to.

My favourite review on Amazon was from somebody who said: it’s so refreshing to read a book that has neurodiverse characters without actually being about neurodiversity.

I felt proud of that, because I hadn’t consciously made Lily neurodiverse, but as a family we have plenty of neurodiverse traits, so it was kind of unsurprising they would show through. 

SARA: By the way, it’s true your story has lots of tech and engineering, but you feature some notable organic matter as well. The euglenoid, I mean—it’s a fascinating, unknown kind of algae. Did you notice the amazing coincidence that when my Ginny meets her first pika (a charming little alpine mammal) and your Lily recognizes the presence of the euglenoid in her own head, they utter the exact same line— “Hello, you.”—?! So tell me, was there something you wanted to convey about other life forms, or even plant/animal intelligence?

ADAM: This is a really important point for me. We tend not to think about the deep-sea all that much—the abyssal plains cover about 50% of the Earth’s surface, but not many people have even heard of them. When we do think about the deep-sea, and on the rare occasions it makes it into a book or a film, we treat it mostly as a place to put ghastly, betentacled monsters.

There’s a lot of reasons for this. We are, essentially, “land dwelling mammals”, the deep-sea is incredibly hostile to our flimsy bodies, and so it’s not surprising it’s become a reservoir for our darkest fears.

But that’s a challenge from a climate perspective—as soon as you start thinking of a place as other, it’s easy to let whatever is happening to it happen.

I knew Lily would have to find something new to science at the bottom of the ocean. But I didn’t want it to be a monster to be defeated, or even a benign entity to be saved. By making Lily encounter something that is both a threat, and threatened, just as she is, and by making her journey primarily one of self-acceptance, I hoped to emphasise the similarities rather than the differences between us and the deep-sea.

The euglenoid — a kind of distributed intelligence that makes sense of the world by rifling through people’s memories — is as far from human as it gets, but it has human traits that Lily relates to. I worked hard to make the deep-sea a place of emotional discovery and connection, rather than a place filled with monsters to be defeated, because I think the deep-sea needs more of our empathy, not less.

SARA: In The Girl Who Broke the Sea, there’s a clear conflict between the scientists who want to study deep sea life and the head of the underwater mining operations who wants to blast, blast, blast. But everyone recognizes that to make green energy happen, we do need those rare minerals. This part of the story isn’t much of a deviation from a real world dilemma facing all of us who want to drive electric vehicles or store up solar power in giant home batteries. Can you tell me more about how you approached this part of the book—touching on timely, political questions while keeping the focus on your character and her personal journey?

ADAM: The debate over mining the abyssal plains is huge, potentially one of the biggest anthropocene changes humanity is on the brink of making to the planet. There are already over a million square kilometres of the Clarion Clipperton Zone licensed for exploratory mining; by some estimates, they’ll have to strip about 500 square kilometres of the ocean-bed every year to make commercial deep-sea mining viable.

And yet we hear very little about it, largely because the deep-sea is invisible, and we don’t emotionally connect with it in the way that we do with, for example, a mountain, or a field.

I didn’t know about deep-sea mining until I was a few months into writing and researching. It was a bit scary, because I knew at that point I couldn’t write about the deep-sea and not mention mining, but I also knew it would exert a huge gravity on the story.

In the end, it’s the relationship between Lily and the intelligence she discovers down there that anchors the story. The conflict between mining and not mining fits around that. I think Stephen King said that stories happen when two disconnected things come together and fit, and that’s how it worked with The Girl Who Broke The Sea. The debate over mining polymetallic nodules adds the necessary tension to Lily’s newfound connection, and the book pivots around that. One wouldn’t work without the other.

As an aside, on the subject of deep-sea mining, the debate is actually quite simple. Science is united in saying that we just don’t know enough about the abyssal plains to start commercial mining—they’ve petitioned for a ten year moratorium. Meanwhile, the mining companies just want to dig up the money…

It’s worthy of our attention. Anyone interested in the environment should invest a little time Googling deep-sea mining and learning a bit more about it.

SARA: Adam, I want readers to know how high-paced and thrilling your story is. There is literally never a dull moment here. Tell me…is this a reflection of the genres you love, the stories you think kids connect to best, or even your feelings of urgency about getting technology (green or not) right in this moment of rapid change? Whatever it is, you do SUCH a good job “starting in the middle of the story” (said the author of a comparatively quiet story…).

ADAM: Thank you :)

I think it’s much harder to write a “quiet” story.

My main bar, when I’m writing, reading, or watching, is whether the story surprises me. There’s a saying: You don’t know what you’re made of until you’ve had the stuffing knocked out of you. That’s pretty much my whole method for writing. I sketch out some characters and then I knock the stuffing out of them until I figure out what they’re made of.

I think, in answer to your questions above: yes, to all of them.

SARA: Since we’re discussing our books for the Climate Fiction Writers League—where does climate change figure into your own life’s work and life thinking?

ADAM: I feel a bit stuck to be honest. I hate to admit to it, but I think I’m a little bit like the father in your book. I care, surely everyone cares, but I feel so powerless, and that makes it easy to become passive. I try to live a small and grateful life, but I’m not sure that’s enough.

I’m sorry, that’s probably not a very good answer.

One of the really great things you do in Front Country is take Ginny on a similar journey. Her reaction in Chapter 3 is really recognisable. If the world is burning, nothing else matters. Her opting out of all the things she used to care about feels quite sensible in response. Dad’s answer is to keep perspective, but that feels like an excuse to bury your head in the sand.

Cleverly, you guide Ginny from her original, understandably self-destructive position, to something more positive and accepting, without falling into Dad’s passivity. How would you summarise Ginny’s journey? What would you like readers to take away from the journey Ginny goes on?

SARA: This is a great question to wrap up on, Adam. Like I said before, I know a lot of kids who have great big feelings about climate change, and it breaks my heart to think that they feel alone and so overwhelmed that they can hardly get out of bed. So what can a story offer?

I have a friend who volunteers on a teen crisis hotline, and whenever a kid calls in a state of high panic or distress, he begins by telling them he gets it. The world is hard right now. It’s different from the one he (and I), and presumably their own parents, grew up in. As he tells it, their breathing immediately slows down. They’re better able to talk, absorb, and reason. One of them even said once, “Can you tell my parents that?”

I think Ginny’s arc is similar—a movement from out-of-control grief and life paralysis to growth, life, restoration. A big part of that happens because Theo validates what’s incredibly hard—just like my friend does on his hotline. Theo doesn’t pretend everything’s fine; far from it. But ironically, that’s the first step in Ginny’s feeling a little lighter, maybe because she no longer feels like she’s carrying this burden all by herself.

Another part of Ginny’s movement from grief to re-engagement with the world happens  because she stumbles into all these moments of delight, whether that’s chatting with a furry pika or falling for a brooding young man from Kansas. She knows how imperilled the world is, but she can’t help but fall more deeply in love with all the wonders she encounters.

The thing is, love and loss go together, right? Every living thing we could possibly love is also something we can lose, whether on an individual, species, or landscape level. That’s always been true, of course. Climate change has just upped the perils by many degrees (no pun intended) and forced kids to think way more than we ever did about the loss side of the equation. But they need joy and mystery and fun and beauty as much as ever. Otherwise, what’s the point of being here at all?

In the end, I hope Ginny can be a kind of companion for readers sorting through these big existential questions, sharing her journey to eyes-wide-open and heart-wide-open living in this tumultuous time.

ADAM: Nice. You’re right, that’s a perfect note to end on.

Find out more about Front Country and The Girl Who Broke the Sea.

A. Connors is a former physicist and former child who likes writing stories and building unlikely, poorly thought through gadgets. His favourite bio tidbits include: spending his PHD underground at CERN, helping design one of the detectors for the Large Hadron Collider; teaching physics in Sudan; selling encyclopedias in Chicago and fitting Wi-Fi in the refugee camps in Greece. In his spare time he manages an engineering team for Google Health, a project that aims to use big data and machine learning to improve the quality of healthcare. He lives in Hertfordshire with his partner, two boys, and a dog.

Sara St. Antoine is an award-winning author and freelance writer. A graduate of Williams College, Sara holds a master's degree from the Yale School of the Environment. Her debut novel, Three Bird Summer, was selected as a Boston Globe Best Book of the Year and an ALSC Notable Children's Book for middle grade readers. She also edits the Stories from Where We Live anthology series, which celebrates place-based literature from different regions of North America. Originally from Michigan, Sara now lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two teenage daughters.

---

Solutions Spotlight

In Ice’s End, P. Finnian Reilly considers a futuristic farm:

He swiped to the next photo and saw a three-story dome with a circular floor divided into garden plots, all centered around a small pond. A skylight at the dome’s apex scattered shards of light and shadow around the space. Zooming in, Roscoe saw the skylight was actually one of the boulders. Zooming back out, he saw a few people kneeling among the rows, pulling tubers from the soil, while a spindly robot arm picked berries. Around the perimeter, others lounged by doorways, reading, chatting, or playing cards.