With great sadness, the Climate Fiction Writers League mournes the passing of a founding member of the group, Nicky Singer. Nicky’s climate novel The Survival Game was hugely influential for many of our writers. Our condolences are extended to her family. You can read Nicky’s essay for the League ‘Putting a Narrative Loop around the Future’ here.
I was delighted to read Nicola Penfold's recent essay for this forum, "On Hope and Writing the Future" (May 16, 2023) suggesting that we give kids some alternative narratives to the dystopian climate futures in which humans have done everything wrong, and introducing us to her new novel, Beyond the Frozen Horizon, in which humans have done everything right.
And here's another idea: What if in addition to writing about imagined climate futures we wrote about our actual climate . . . now?
I may be an outlier in the children's book world, but nothing fires up my imagination more than stuff of real life. I grew up on a steady diet of All of a Kind Family, Mildred Taylor, and Judy Blume. As a young kid, I'd take the quotidian dramas of skinned knees and burnt toast and sibling rivalry any day over swordfights, dragons, and treasure. I can't explain why (I quake to consider what psychoanalysis might illuminate), except to say that escaping reality didn't seem very interesting to me; I wanted to go deeper into it. Books allowed me to peek inside people's brains, hearts, backpacks, bedrooms--people like the ones slamming their locker door next to me at school, or passing me the salt at dinner. Imagine! Or people I might yet meet, living in places that I could someday go out and see for myself. A thrilling possibility, too.
It's probably not surprising that I also relished the way books took me very, very close to other creatures. Nose to nose with a bear? Thank you, Blueberries for Sal. Close enough to feel the fur of a wolf? It's all you, Julie of the Wolves. Digging in a secret garden? Pushing through prairie grasses? Holed up in a tree on the side of the mountain? The books in my school library gave me all of those experiences and more. I was an armchair traveler of the whole wild world before I'd taken much more than a car ride to Cleveland.
Which brings me to my work life today. Trained in the environmental field but still immersed in literary pursuits, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what stories do for us and our relationship to our home planet. And I keep ending where I started: believing in words that buzz and hoot and metamorphose with the pulse of the actual life right here around us, convinced they can widen our imagination and deepen our sympathies in all kinds of ways.
Ironically, though, it's real nature-- spongy fungi and dusky birds, quiet vernal pools and forested valleys with no cell service--that's becoming most, well, alien to many young people today. What's the first thing kids picture if you say the words "cell" or "tweet" or "wolverine"? When's the last time they climbed a tree?
I get it. I really do. It's not just that the virtual world is a glowing joy ride you can control with one finger, but that the real world can feel like a big bummer--scary, beat-up, and burning out of control.
But can't we talk about that too?
Call me crazy, but I decided to try. My new novel Front Country is about an ordinary 14-year-old girl from Massachusetts trying to make sense of her present and future. Like a lot of kids these days, Ginny Shepard is riddled with climate angst. But unlike a lot of kids, she has a fondness for her fellow creatures that only makes the pain worse. When she's offered a chance to swap a pre-college program her parents favour for a backpacking trip to the mountains, she's all in. Only when she arrives and discovers this is a camp for kids who need extra support--full of misfits and delinquents--does she realize her parents have led her astray. Feeling more alone than ever, her real journey begins.
Like Nicola Penfold, I wrote my novel during lockdown. Yes, I've been spent many days and nights on a mountain trail, but now I had to write about everything from the warning cry of an American pika to the sight of alpine wildflowers from memories and, ok, I'll admit it, YouTube. That was awkward, to say the least. But writing the novel did make my confinement more colorful and imaginatively eventful, which is the very role that stories have always played for me.
And in fact, much of Ginny's journey is a joyful, funny, friend-filled adventure. She meets her favorite wild animal, sees soul-stirring starry skies, develops a crush on a fellow camper, and falls more deeply in love with the world she has been so afraid of losing. Still, she can never quite shake her deepest climate concerns. At the end of the day, when she meets the first adult whom she can really trust, she asks the biggest questions of all: how do we love what we know we can lose? How do we go forward when we can't see what lies ahead?
These are heavy questions for a book for tweens and teens, I know. But kids are bearing the weight of these concerns whether we write about them or not. And for those readers who, like me, seek a greater understanding of the world through realistic fiction, my aim was for Ginny to be a friendly, compelling companion, honoring their pain and offering them a reassuring hand, as they walk this trail together.
Does Ginny find the answer? Well, she finds some answers, a place between denial and despair that might just be the truest way we have of loving real beings in a mortal world. And I've been reassured to have readers tell me that the book actually made them feel more at peace with living in this climate-tossed world than they have been in a long time. At the very least, I hope I've helped round out the offerings on our climate fiction shelves.
A positive climate future. A realistic climate now. What other new settings or forms have the rest of you employed to tell your climate stories?
Find out more about Front Country.
Sara St. Antoine is a freelance writer and author working at the intersection of story, childhood, and the natural world. She has been an at-large writer for the Children and Nature Network and written educational materials for such organizations as the National Audubon Society, World Wildlife Fund, National Wildlife Federation, Conservation International, and the Trust for Public Land. Sara launched and edited the Stories from Where We Live series of literary field guides with Milkweed Editions. She is the author of more than a dozen novels and short stories for children, including Three Bird Summer (Candlewick, 2014), an ALA Notable novel for middle grade readers.
NOAA Planet Stewards Book Club
The National Ocean Service’s Planet Stewards book club has a great line-up of books slated for discussion for this academic year, including League member Craig Russell’s novel Fragment. Anyone can join the discussion meetings on Zoom.
Virtual Workshop - Weaving climate change themes into fiction
31st October - Join Climate League founder Lauren James and learn how to weave climate themes into your storytelling with two YA authors from Walker Books. Climate consultant Lauren James will break down a scene from Sara Barnard’s writing to show how climate change can be incorporated naturally into scenes.
This session will allow publishing professionals to see first-hand the process an editor and author would go through when focussing on ‘climate sensitivity’, as well as Sara responding to the editorial suggestions in the moment.
Book here through Society of Authors UK
Virtual Climate Fiction Play
11th November - Come along (virtually or in person) to the upcoming event: ‘Murder in the Citizen’s Jury’. This is a one-man play of 25 minutes performed by multi-award-winning actor, Jack Klaff (Star Wars and others).
It explores the ethical dilemma of the Director of Public Prosecutions who must decide whether to prosecute a murder. If he does so, he will alienate his family, and it will mean the end for citizens’ assemblies – a form of direct democracy which many believe could be the silver bullet to avert a climate crisis. Drawing upon the tradition of ‘theatre-in-education’, the objective is to use the play to raise awareness of citizen’s assemblies.
It’s on Saturday 11th November at 3pm GMT. The event lasts an hour and includes Q&A afterwards.
The event will be live streamed here. For those who can attend in person at the University of Southampton, it is free but registration required here.