Children deserve better
Who I'm writing for.
One of the characters in my story is a non-binary teenager named “Dex” who uses they/them pronouns and becomes a close friend of my main character. I named them for Jadzia Dax, a joined Trill in the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine. Jadzia is a 30-something female “host” to a multi-century old creature, Dax, a symbiont who has inhabited multiple hosts—male and female—over its lifetime. But I might as well have named them for Nex Benedict, the gender non-confirming teenager who was assaulted in a school bathroom in Oklahoma this week and died the next day.
Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinian children and their guardians are dead, dying, starving, raped, unhoused, orphaned, and in every way imaginable made deeply unsafe in the name of Jewish safety. Alabama put the safety of millions of American women and LGBTQIA+ couples, and their hope of ever having children, at risk by essentially declaring IVF illegal. This news broke the day after I scheduled my own egg freezing consultation appointment here in the state of Maryland.
I am crackling with rage. We are condemning the futures of the children who are already here and we aren’t doing enough to create safer futures for the children who aren’t here yet.
When I started writing climate fiction in 2019, I didn’t know who I was writing for besides myself. I was deeply anxious about the climate crisis and writing was a tool to process my doomer mindset. Then the pandemic happened. We were the household stocking up toilet paper and canned goods in February, a month before shut-down. I can still remember the Costco cashier asking us if we knew something he didn’t. My doomer mindset felt smug and validated. “I can see the future, and it’s dark, y’all!”
I stopped writing but I kept reading. I enrolled in and completed a two-year Sustainability graduate program through Harvard. I was steeped in the science and am no longer shocked by climate disasters; I’m pretty clear on what’s coming. In the words of David Wallace-Wells, “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”
But I also got into science fiction. My husband and I made our way through Star Trek TNG, DS9, and Voyager. I read more of Ursula K. Le Guin in earnest, including her essays, young adult fantasy and even her translation of the Tao Te Ching. I also started Book Club for the Planet. I made a promise—to myself and my book club—that we wouldn’t just read dystopian novels or the non-fiction of white male scientists. I had read enough of those to know that they all begin to bleed together with apocalyptic foresight and “technology will save us” solutions. Instead, we read what dozens of Black, indigenous, female and queer writers have to say about climate justice, safety, and future-building in an increasingly unsafe world.
Now, I don’t think we’re doomed. I do think it’s bad and many humans, animals and other life forms will suffer, die, go extinct. The global South and BIPOC communities are experiencing the trauma first, but no one will be left untouched for long. Planetary warming has happened many times before but will happen on a much faster timeline than what human adaptation is historically accustomed to. But in the long, long term, our planet has been much warmer than this and life will thrive again, eventually. Humans will adapt, too. We’re a scrappy bunch.
Last year, after my surgery and after I began writing again, a friend asked if I had any climate-related book recommendations for his 11-year old daughter. I didn’t have any then and I don’t have many more now. There are plenty of books for children about nature and polar bears and heaps of dystopian YA novels about a climate ravaged future. But there is an almost total absence of books for children and teenagers that portray a future they would want to see themselves in. I can count those books on one hand.
This is devastating to me and should be for you, too, whether you have kids or not. Our planet’s warming is accelerating and we’re not giving our kids the basic creative technology they need to imagine and build a better future for themselves. As a kid, books were where I both escaped the world and expanded my worldview. Books are an old technology and remain a vitally useful one. In the safety of a couple hundred pages of paper and ink, we can try ideas on like hats, putting them on, taking them off, seeing how they fit. If those climate positive stories don’t exist, the only stories our future is being fed are a whole lot of bad.
After that coffee date, I knew who my audience was.
I write about imperfect but hopeful worlds where kids can see themselves and have a role to play. I write worlds where adults take them seriously. I write worlds where their identities and feelings are honored and validated. I write worlds where they are safe, loved, and cared for. I write worlds where they have agency. I write worlds where they can play and make mistakes. I write worlds where they are supported by friends and community. I write for Nex, whose future was stolen from them.
What I’m writing
I continued developing a scene with my main characters and their guardians. As part of the world-building, I wanted to develop a local myth that helps explain a part of the story. I was a bit stuck on what the myth would entail and closed my computer one morning when I didn’t know how to take it any farther.
Later that same day, I saw this Instagram post from Ursula K. Le Guin’s estate with a recording of Ursula talking about just that—writing myths in her world-building to help her writing get unstuck. It was just the inspiration I needed to keep writing.
What I read
Wahoo I finished two books this week!
I completed the audiobook version of A Council of Dolls by Mona Susan Power, narrated by Isabella Star LaBlanc (of Night Country fame!) It’s a story of three generations of Dakota girls experiencing traumatic events with the emotional guide of their dolls. I learned a lot about story structure, writing through a child’s perspective, and more about the United States’ horrific residential schooling than I would ever want to know. Power took an unexpected turn at the end though, offering near a quarter of the book to process, integrate and heal from prior events as her character does the same. Ultimately, a deeply healing book about ancestral trauma.
I also read The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson for Greedy Reads’ Translated Fiction Book Club. This wintery short novel, written by Finnish legend Tove Jansson, reads like an adult fairy tale with inverted tropes, subverted “good” and “bad” binaries, and a sparse, direct writing style. I paid close attention to how Jansson described a small, isolated community entrapped by snow and ice.
What I’m reading
I started White Heat by M. J. McGrath and continue to listen to Saqiyuq on audiobook. McGrath seems to be deeply knowledgeable of Inuit culture and land use and I’m learning a lot while reading it, while also enjoying the mystery that’s driving the plot and characters forward. A great read if you’re mourning the end of True Detective: Night Country.
A helpful thing
Call your senators and representative and chew them out. Cease fire now. Codify abortion rights at a federal level. Protect trans kids.
Donate to The Trevor Project or your local non-profit supporting LGBTQIA+ youth.