Beyond Cli-Fi: Why Every Story is a Climate Change Story

I started my second novel, The Emilys, with a single sentence: “What did I love about going to get the vaccine?” All I knew was that a mom was leaving her house before dawn. I knew she was so happy to walk the streets of her small town alone in the darkness without cooking cereal or warming milk or finding the right stuffy. I knew that when she arrived downtown, a line had already formed in front of the CVS, circling the block. She joined the end of the line in front of the yarn store.

I wrote this in 2019, before we all started waiting for the COVID-19 vaccine I’d eventually get at that same CVS. As my character waited, the mood was joyful. Neighbors chatted, shared muffins. But then word spread that there wasn’t enough vaccine for everyone. And protesters appeared, urging people to avoid the shot.

Like a floral calendar, every novel records what we’re able to imagine of this time of terror and delusion and longing.

I didn’t predict the pandemic. The vaccine I imagined was for a tick-borne illness, not a virus. I was writing myself a fantasy, a cure. I live in rural Massachusetts and ticks are everywhere in the grass, crawling up our legs, nestling in our hair. I wanted them in a book, too, climbing through its pages. I love to be out in the woods, and I’d grown scared to be out in the woods. Desire and fear. That seemed like a good enough start for a novel.

The day I read that Lyme disease is considered the first epidemic of climate change, I saw my novel draft rise from my computer, a little spindly thing, a sapling, and expand, like that scene in the Nutcracker when the tree grows and grows to reach the top of the theater while Tchaikovsky’s music soars. Oh, I thought, looking up to see my novel touch the attic ceiling. I’m writing a climate change novel!

But could I? Even though I’ve worked as an environmental journalist, even though I think and read a lot about climate change, I felt like an imposter. I don’t read much cli-fi, because I get too anxious spending time in post-apocalypse. But I dug in, reading novels where the power grid fails and novels where most of earth is uninhabitable. I understood that climate fiction teaches us how bad it can get, and I rolled up my sleeves and began to pour my story into this shape. I’d planned to keep the tick-borne illness confined to the bucolic college town of Northampton, Massachusetts. Now I let it spread ever outward until only a few people could go outside. I scrapped the vaccine, took away the cure. I’d show readers the horrors on the horizon. I’d point a finger and say, “Wake up!”

Then I read Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible. The story opens in a multi-family summer house. The parents are louche, disinterested in their kids. The kids are savvy, scheming to avoid their parents. A typical vacation, until end-times interrupt. Biblical rain takes down civilization as we know it. The catastrophic part of the book is shockingly witty and beautiful, but the first part shook me even more. In the prelapsarian present, the parents are naïve and totally unprepared, yet climate anxiety thrums in the background as they drink vodka, prepare tofu pups, check the weather. It felt familiar, how climate disaster sits with us in our ordinary lives. We push it away, and still it changes us.

After I finished this book, I started to see climate fiction in all the fiction I read. I saw it in a man’s mid-life crisis trip around the world. I saw it when a crotchety old lady in Maine notices the changing leaves. Arthur Less and Olive Kitteridge are in a relationship with the warming world, as are their authors, no matter if it rises to the level of consciousness. I saw climate forces in the flowers Mrs. Dalloway wanted to buy herself and the green lawns of Cheever’s suburbia. When characters scrolled their phones, I wondered if they saw headlines about existential demise and how this felt in their bodies. When I read beachside stories, I wondered if the rising seas crossed the characters’ minds as they took their morning swims. Did they notice the erosion in the dunes since last summer? Did they consider that the family home they were all vying to inherit would soon be worthless?

Once I saw every story as a climate story, I became less interested in imagining future apocalypse and global worst-case scenarios, worthy and entertaining as that is, and more interested in thinking about how the local climate crises that we’re already living through, the floods and ticks and fires, alter our relationships: the relationships between those who fear a truncated future and those who deny the change, the relationships between us humans and the plants around us, the relationship between a brain that wants a break from thinking about climate and a body that feels the grief of a too-hot spring day.

If we name it, our collective climate fiction, millions of pages long, we can build the capacity of our imagination, we can help each other through.

I threw away yet another draft and started again. Instead of asking how bad things might get, I asked: What happens when a local climate affects one friend and not the other? How does it intrude in a marriage? How does it give new shape to our old yearnings and jealousies? Can we care for each other more fiercely than ever? I didn’t put the vaccine back in, though. By 2020, my niche CVS fantasy had become a national CVS fantasy. Instead, my characters look to the past for a cure and look to the warming world for instruction on how to live with change. “What did I love about going to get the vaccine?” became “What did I love about going to the seed exchange?”

In the nineteenth century, upper class American women who had leisure time and literacy became really into keeping floral calendars to note when wildflowers bloomed. Each spring they’d tromp into the fields in their long dresses, their vasculum, their knives, to record the first trillium, the first jack in the pulpit.

The calendars that remain, found in attics and at church book sales, have become invaluable, teaching botanists how rising temperatures have altered flower habitat. Now that trees leaf out sooner, many spring wildflowers don’t have enough sunlight to grow where they used to. The calendars, made to entertain, tell a climate story.

Like a floral calendar, every novel records what we’re able to imagine of this time of terror and delusion and longing. My hope is that if we see what we’re doing as climate fiction, our range of vision will expand to the dunes, the trees, the grief in our bodies. If we name it, our collective climate fiction, millions of pages long, we can build the capacity of our imagination, we can help each other through.

I borrowed the first line that began the first draft of The Emilys from the poem What Did I Love by Ellen Bass, which starts with the exuberantly feral line: “What did I love about killing the chickens.”

What did I love about writing The Emilys? It wasn’t easy or straightforward, but novels aren’t supposed to be. I loved that it opened my mind to the realization that every climate story is a love story.

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The Emilys by Heather Abel is available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.