The audacity to unflinchingly believe in the future

An interview with a Imagine 2200 short story competition writer

GIVEAWAY

To celebrate the new Grist’s Imagine 2200 climate fiction stories, today we have an interview with one of the writers. You can win a copy of Grist’s anthology Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future, by leaving a comment on this blog post with a recommendation for a climate fiction novel. The giveaway is open internationally. Two winners will be chosen on 30th January.

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Imagine 2200, Grist’s climate fiction initiative, has been publishing new cli-fi short stories this summer, exploring hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress. The summer’s stories have had a particular focus on stories that center queer and Black characters, and author Joy Donnell’s story Heirloom is deeply tied to Blackness and connections between its past and future. 

In Heirloom, a woman’s life in a thriving city of scientific progress is upended when the city’s leaders go on the hunt for an ancient textile. Dru has been hiding it — a dress that connects her not only spiritually, but magically, to her ancestor who sewed the dress during the Jim Crow era. 

Imagine 2200 creative manager Tory Stephens talked to Donnell about the process of crafting this story, what inspired her to explore its themes, and why magic belongs in climate fiction.

The following interview between Tory Stephens and Joy Donnell has been edited for length and clarity.

Illustrated by Cannaday Chapman

When did you get into creative writing, and what brought you into the genre of climate fiction?

In the second grade, I wrote a poem that my teacher submitted to a city-wide school contest. This was unbeknownst to me. They were picking one girl and one boy from each elementary grade level to take a summer poetry course at the local college. I won the girl spot for my grade. 

I’ve been into creative writing ever since and I move across all forms: creative essay, poetry, film poetry, and now, fiction. I’m also a producer, so I’ve written screenplays and produced documentaries. 

Hollywood loves dystopian movies and apocalyptic futures. I’ve spent a lot of time imagining stories centered on a protagonist in a bleak world overrun with carnage and brutality. I didn’t realize how much my imagination had been hijacked until I started thinking about climate fiction a couple years ago. I found it difficult to envision conflict that wasn’t about fleeing cannibals. It’s weird that we tell so many stories with the worst things happening in the face of disaster when the data shows us that after real world disasters, people show up for each other.

What inspired you to write this story? Did a particular event or experience spark the idea?

I was showing my niece a few heirlooms I inherited from my grandmother, her great grandmother. My niece never got to meet her. Of course, I was sharing stories. Then we started chatting about what’s valuable versus sentimental and the energy that pieces hold. They have memory but they also represent intentions, love, rituals, and personal sacrifices.

It dawned on me that I was creating a moment with her that I never had myself. I don’t know of any objects that belonged to my great grandparents, or my great great grandparents. I started thinking about how a lot of Black Americans haven’t had the luxury or liberty of passing valuables to the next  generations. 

I started exploring what an heirloom could mean to a woman living in a very different time from the days that forged the object. I was curious about how the hopes and fortitude represented in the object could travel with the family through space and time, and embody intergenerational tenderness when someone is grieving.

Imagine 2200 is about envisioning the future we all deserve. I love that you brought in the past to an initiative focused on the future. Why did you choose to bring in the history of systemic racism and the injustice Black Americans were subjected to? 

Both of my parents are survivors of Jim Crow. They were legally segregated and turned into second-class citizens in their own country. They were born into the status and they witnessed the passage of civil rights legislation in their adulthood. 

I don’t throw the word survivor around lightly. Not only were Black people separated, they were also subjected to environmental injustice. They couldn’t access parks. Corporations were granted rights to pollute their neighborhoods. People were dispossessed of their land and highways were built in the middle of their communities so that they had to suffer the poor air quality. 

What they endured is unacceptable. Their memories are unquestionable. Their dignity is undeniable. 

This recent history is just one example of how Black folks, and Black women in particular, have been ardent futurists. To see signs everywhere dictating where you can pee and drink water, and to be denied your humanity only to respond with a demand for your rights — wow. That audacity requires unflinching belief in the future, for yourself and everyone else. That energy couples hope with action. That vision is fueled and replenished through joyfulness. 

The forward movement required is individual and collaborative. It’s co-creation. So that became the soil from which the story arc grew because it’s the kindred spirit of what is needed now as we dream and build our climate future.  

Dru is a complex character caught between loyalty to her heritage and the demands of her community. Why did you home in on this as her character arc and what challenges did you face in balancing her personal journey with the overarching plot.

Often, when we’re caught up in feeling obligated to heritage it’s because we fear we’re going to squander the sacrifices our predecessors made. That makes it seem in conflict with our current needs. As the beneficiaries of ancestral sacrifice, we are granted present-day opportunities. We’re the actual reason that our ancestors did all those rituals. The way to squander that is by staying stuck and taking inaction. 

Dru is bumping against her beliefs and the promises she’s made to herself. So there’s also the question of what she owes to herself in order to remain who she is. Our convictions are true when they stand firm in the face of inconvenience.

Watching Dru navigate her turmoil taught me a lot about myself and how I’ve grappled with holding on, letting go, and sometimes letting myself down. 

Ola is portrayed as a haven city with a strong emphasis on community and ecological harmony, but Dru and Kai are also worried about the council spying on them. Why did you add the element of surveillance? 

We meet these characters as they’re being thrown into chaos in a seemingly harmonious place. For me, their fears in the moment felt deeper than the moment. Even their fears have history. 

Folks who survive hyper-surveillance learn to be hypervigilant. You have to survive long enough to get the space to thrive. I envisioned both Dru and Kai having a lineage that understands being targeted, overly observed, over monitored, even though they themselves don’t know that exact type of world. 

I often wonder if hypervigilance has an epigenetic component, like any other survival skill we inherit, so that it can kick in when we need it most. It’s something we don’t expect to pass through the family tree. To watch characters negotiate that energy while supposedly building a safer society fascinated me. 

How did you reconcile the use of magical elements in your story with the initiative's emphasis on climate solutions?

Magic is the ability to create what is possible yet invisible. I’m not sure I know the difference between making your dream come true and invoking some type of magic.  

So when our relationship to something is complex, I love how magic can help illustrate those layers. It frames the emotional back and forth. It merges the spatiotemporal. Magic is resilient while stretching toward solutions. Nothing about that feels antithetical to climate justice. Those working toward change have to imagine into generations they will never witness. 

What does a hopeful future look like for you? 

A hopeful future realizes that equity is not a finite resource.  

What are three books or stories you’d recommend for the audience and why should they read it?

The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison. I mean, it’s Toni Morrison. But also, how she frames human rights and the construct of borders and foreigners is timely.

Don’t Whistle At Night edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. is an anthology of Indigenous dark fiction and these stories dive into complex family legacies, colonization, extraction, and desperation. 

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T Dungy is about environmental justice, nature, and how the push toward homogeneity impoverishes the future. Dungy is a scholar and a poet, so the writing is delicious. 

Read Donnell’s short story Heirloom now, or check out other short stories from Imagine 2200.

Joy Donnell (she/they) lives in Los Angeles where she writes, produces, and serves as an IDEA Practitioner on the Astrophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate for NASA. Her recent poetry collection, Show Us Your Fire, focuses on self-compassion as a birthright. This is their first published short story.