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Welcome back to the Reckoning Press Podcast! I hope you’ve enjoyed these last couple of episodes featuring fiction from Reckoning 8 edited, produced and hosted by Aaron Kling, because there will be more of them! But for this month, it’s me again, and we’re taking a short interlude from fiction to run a roundtable conversation I had last fall with Reckoning contributor and editorial staff member emeritus Giselle Leeb and LCRW 33 alum Deb McCutchen, both of whom had new books out (and I had a novel forthcoming, which is now out). So as you’ll see, some topical references here are a bit out of date, but the discussion of climate writing and its relationship to the state of the world very much continues to apply.
I hope you get as much out of this conversation as we did.
Michael J. DeLuca: Well, hello and welcome to an interesting discussion we’re about to have about climate writing. I’m Michael J. DeLuca. I’m the publisher of Reckoning, a journal of Creative Writing on Environmental Justice. I also was the guest editor of an issue of Lady Churchill’s in 2015, Issue No. 33, which featured both Deb McCutchen and Giselle Leeb, who are here with me today. And that’s how I met the two of them.
And in that issue was an excerpt from Deb’s novel, which has just come out, Jellyfish Dreaming, so 2015 to now. That’s way shorter than it took me to finish the book that I have coming out next year. Meanwhile, Giselle has been writing short stories that whole time and has had her debut collection come out, Mammals, I Think We Are Called from Salt, and it’s great.
The three of us thought we would get together and try and have an edifying and inspiring discussion about what we learned writing about climate, climate collapse, climate grief and all this stuff. But first, will the two of you introduce yourselves? Giselle, you could go first.
Giselle Leeb: Sure. As Michael said, I’m Giselle, but just explaining the obvious. So far, I’ve written a short story collection. I think about four of the stories in there are overtly about climate change. Some also have other storylines running within the story, two at once. I’ve actually written quite a lot more climate addiction stories and I found myself writing more. I couldn’t include all of those in that particular connection because it wasn’t specifically all about climate change.
But it’s something that’s I think about a lot. I’m sort of tentatively writing a novel about climate change at the moment. I think that’s just in terms of writing. That’s all I need to really say at the moment. I don’t know if you saw my books. It’s on the longlist for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.
D. K. McCutchen: Congratulations.
Giselle Leeb: Did I tell you about that?
Michael J. DeLuca: I did not hear that. That’s awesome. Congratulations.
Giselle Leeb: Thank you. It’s like the biggest—and only, actually—Short Story Prize in the UK and Ireland for a collection. So I was pretty, as they say in the UK, gobsmacked, to be honest, because the longlist is—
Michael J. DeLuca: That’s awesome.
Giselle Leeb: It’s 10 books and it’s all connections. It’s been won by really big writers, like Sarah Hall and Eddie Smith and people like that. Hilary Mantel, a shortlist and winner. So to be on the longlist is a major boost in terms of promoting the book and just, hopefully, being able to get some more funding at some point to write some more. Because it’s always a struggle when you’re writing and working, trying to do both at once, I find.
D. K. McCutchen: Yeah, that’s true.
Giselle Leeb: I was also really pleased because I call my stories literary fantastical, but it’s a lot harder sometimes in literary magazines to get stories of fantastical elements published even now. Someone like Kelly Link, who’s one of my opposite hero writers, obviously George Saunders, but even the UK people aren’t as receptive sometimes to fantastic or anything with a hint of sci-fi fantasy in it.
Michael J. DeLuca: I think that’s true here too, for literary magazines anyway. And then, when you’re Kelly or George Saunders, I don’t know how that works, honestly. I do know how it worked for Kelly, and it was that she self-published and convinced everyone that she was amazing and then they started publishing her work.
Giselle Leeb: Yeah, absolutely. I read her recent book, she just blows me away. George Saunders, he won The Booker Prize, which was originally only UK writers, but he’s such a brilliant writer as well. He’s superseded all categories, but Kelly Link is amazing; incredible. She just makes me laugh and laugh.
D. K. McCutchen: She is.
Michael J. DeLuca: I’m reading her collection now at the moment too, coincidentally.
D. K. McCutchen: Which one, Michael?
Michael J. DeLuca: White Cat, Black Dog. That’s the newest one? All right, let’s try and focus. Deb, could you please give us a little intro?
D. K. McCutchen: Yeah, my newest book is Jellyfish Dreaming, it’s gender-bender speculative fiction. It won a Leapfrog Press Global Fiction award, so it just came out in both the UK and in the US with Leapfrog Press and Can of Worms Press. And it won an award for YA, which is kind of odd because I never saw it as YA. But I definitely edited it towards that goal when I applied for it. And I think I would call it a upper-end YA like 16 to 18 plus or something like that.
Michael J. DeLuca: I have very little sense of how these categories work.
D. K. McCutchen: Yeah. To be honest, when I talked to the editor the first time about it, he said, “We’re not puritanical like you Americans.” So that worked out pretty well. But it’s interesting; I was thinking about Michael’s book, Night Roll, and that near future link to climate change with this peopled landscape that’s disintegrating and deeply linked to the inequities of the past, but with this strangely positive outcome for the disenfranchised who are able to learn from the past and create strong, diverse community.
And I was linking it to this article I read once by an economist who said that until we address social inequities, we could never address climate change. And I’ve been trying to find that article again and I haven’t been able to, but I was impressed that an economists knew that somehow.
Michael J. DeLuca: I generally don’t put a lot of faith in economists, I have to admit. That’s something I’ve heard. As editing Reckoning, I talk and think about this stuff a lot. And addressing social justice first is kind of what got me going on a journal of creative writing about environmental justice. I put out that issue that you both were in of Lady Churchill’s, and I didn’t have those words. I didn’t have the words environmental justice.
And in the process of discussing that with people, I came to that and it’s revolutionized my whole outlook on how all this works.
D. K. McCutchen: Well, it made me feel like your book was ultimately very positive, even though it was in this disintegrating landscape.
Michael J. DeLuca: Thank you. I try. This segues into the first question I wrote down, which is about our three very different approaches.
D. K. McCutchen: And if I could spin off that for just a second. I was thinking about Giselle’s Mammals, I Think We Are Called as well as, frankly, Michael’s book, darker than mine, but with these amazing flashes of color. Are we allowed spoilers in this?
Michael J. DeLuca: Good question, Giselle. Should we spoil or not spoil?
Giselle Leeb: Yeah, spoil it. Because I had in a few interviews where I thought no spoilers, and I realized there’s actually people quite like a bit more of the story. That’s fine. Go ahead. Yeah.
D. K. McCutchen: Your very first short story, “The Goldfinch is Fine”, it had me so in the main character’s head that I was absolutely certain I knew what was coming next.
Michael J. DeLuca: I love that story.
D. K. McCutchen: And I was so happy to be wrong. I felt that you flipped the mood of tension and kind of horror of what was happening at the very end where, the end is still nigh, but there’s this fantastic flash of color of the yellow raincoat coming through the gate. So this tense prophetic tale ends on a happy note of relief, even though we know that it might not last.
Michael J. DeLuca: It’s the big and far away versus the immediate. That moment is very human and it really rings true with my experience of climate anxiety, I guess I’ll call it in this instance. I also really like how your collection, Giselle, starts on that note and then the flash of color that you’re referencing there, Deb, bleeds out and becomes the whole world in the last couple of stories.
Giselle Leeb: In the one about the giant fish, yeah.
Michael J. DeLuca: Yes. “Hooked”, right.
Giselle Leeb: And “Barleycorn”, yeah. Well, the one about the fish I think is a very positive story in terms of change. But “Barleycorn”, it’s dark, but it’s also got positive notes about doing things in a different way, I think.
D. K. McCutchen: When you say fish, were you talking about “Wholphinia”?
Giselle Leeb: The one called “Hooked”. Where it’s set in London and these giant fishes hung up on this hook, the seal can, and then it sets off down the river eventually. But then it’s just about people. I used to live in London when I first came to the UK for about six years, but it’s just about everyone doing things in different ways at the end. I thought it was quite a positive story but obviously there’s always the positivity, but then the mess of overwhelmingness of big business and very rich people in terms of climate change or vested interest.
D. K. McCutchen: Oddly enough, I found “Wolphinia” one of the most satisfying, but it’s probably because it satisfied my need for revenge over climate change.
Giselle Leeb: I don’t know how you even pronounce it. Yes. Well, “Wolphinia”, that was definitely—it was slightly about MPs as well which it’s a bit like you’ve probably got even more to contend with in America at the moment. But the last 10 years of the Tory party, they’ve destroyed the National Health Service deliberately.
Even the Doctors of General Medical Council said it’s deliberate, it’s a political act. “Wolphinia”—people have lost faith. What used to be hidden is pretty blatant now, spent a lot of corruption during COVID that before MPs would’ve definitely had to resign for. And now they’re just doing it and everyone just keeps accepting it and they just stay in power. And what’s happened? Obviously, you’ve had a terrible time, but similar type of thing.
D. K. McCutchen: Oh God, have we ever. Sorry, Giselle is in the UK and Michael and I are in the US, so.
Michael J. DeLuca: I’ve been watching Extinction Rebellion for a long time with a lot of confusion. And I see the starkness of what they do, but I don’t perceive what they’re reacting against because I’m not surrounded by it. And you’re right that the US, everybody brings up 1984 and the double speak. All that stuff absolutely does apply, even though I am so tired of the analogy to 1984 that I could bang my head against the wall.
Giselle Leeb: Absolutely. They had a few weeks ago what they called the Small Boat Week, Rishi Sunak and company. And they’ve all known each other at the same public schools. When Boris Johnson was elected, they were all in the same debate. It’s very corrupt. Everything they say, there’ll always be a newspaper report and they get a quote on it and science, everything is falling apart. But then they have this, it’s like news peak at the end.
They completely contradicted and say, “We’ve done 50% improvement.” But recently, just a few weeks ago, they decided that they’d lengthen the cancer waiting time. So people have been dying of cancer because they haven’t got treatment soon enough recently, which is unheard of before in this country in health service. Ten years ago it was actually in very good health, robust, and they basically were spinning it that somehow this would be more evenly spread.
So it was better for everyone and it was absolute rubbish, but they just keep repeating. Someone like, obviously Donald Trump, it drives you insane, doesn’t it? Because everyone knows it’s wrong, but it’s really bizarre to just keep saying the opposite.
D. K. McCutchen: Oh yeah. He just lies constantly. Well then, the horror as well is that he’s been indicted for so many of these crimes that he’s committed and it just makes him more popular. It puts him back in the news again.
Giselle Leeb: Yeah. Storming the capitol. You couldn’t really get more blatant than that, could you? It’s just insane. It’s like Big Oil, they’re always pretending they’re doing things and they’re doing the opposite. They’ve made huge profits recently during the last few years. How do you combat that type of thing? In terms of action, all these fires and stuff, how much time is there left? What is the average person supposed to do?
It’s also all your friends still flying everywhere. A lot of people I know, they are concerned, but I’ve read surveys in Europe, 70% of people are very concerned, but they won’t give up anything that really pains them too much like their holiday or going on an airplane however many times. There’s a limit and it’s your family and friends who are behaving like that regularly, so it’s difficult. But it’s too late for persuasion on me. I don’t know what people—I’m a bit at a loss.
Michael J. DeLuca: Me too. Well, it certainly all strikes me as all the same big problem.
Giselle Leeb: Yeah.
Michael J. DeLuca: What’s the word? Intersectionality; so calling back to the idea that we need social justice first. It’s too late for first. We need social justice at the same time and in order to get to a point where the people holding the microphone aren’t also the people holding the purse strings and the keys to the drilling equipment, et cetera; it absolutely is despair-inducing.
I’ve given up flying except to see my family, and that’s the only way I can find a compromise that lets me fly less. I still feel guilty about seeing my family, but they’re my family. They have not done this and they are confused as to why I’m doing it. The reason for it, it seems obvious to me, is that all the mouthpieces, other than the independent ones, which is where I’m going with this, are shoring up the doublespeak.
You don’t have to pay attention to this as long as the economy is still working, even though the economy is not working. It’s absurd. And the only place I can look for any level-headed observation is not those mouthpieces. That’s why I am desperately clinging to independent publishing. That’s where I hear the sane, creative and supportive voices coming from. And Giselle, that story, that did a lot for me. That really helped me despite the absurdity of it. I’m talking about the one with the fish on the hook.
Giselle Leeb: Which one?
Michael J. DeLuca: “Hooked”.
Giselle Leeb: Excellent. That’s nice to know. I just write stories. I have no plans—I just sit down and write whatever happens, really.
Michael J. DeLuca: That is amazing. I want to know how that works in your brain. I realize that’s the difference between the reader and the writer, that you can never really find your way through that, but talking about it sure is fun. So Deb, can I ask you, what feelings about this stuff led to the world that is depicted in Jellyfish Dreaming?
D. K. McCutchen: I think, honestly, this idea that so many of my students were just resetting, saying things like, “We’ve got 10 years until the tipping point.” And then the next group would come in and they’d say, “We’ve got 10 years.” Obviously, I’m pretty sure we’re past the tipping point at this stage. And the themes in Jellyfish Dreaming are that everything the protagonists try to solve their problems fails. I don’t know if it’s a lighter story than either of yours, but I kind of see it that way, I think.
Because ultimately the story is about something that could work, which is marginalized peoples that deal with vastly reduced resources and being creative and as altruistic as possible about solutions can keep creativity alive for the survivors and can survive. So that doesn’t really happen until my epilogue, I suppose, though, but I think it’s starting to come out in the other two novels.
Well, I know it is in the middle one of the trilogy. I read trilogies backwards. I don’t know why, but I also seem to write them backwards. Jellyfish Dreaming is set in the Boston area. [Electric] Ice, which is coming out in March of 2024 with Leapfrog Press, is set in the Great Lakes. It’s a survival adventure across the Great Lakes. And I’m currently working on one, which, this isn’t going to be the title, but I’m calling it Chasing Coyote for now, where as we go back in time, it becomes more mythic.
And I noticed you guys using myth as well in both your books, but I think the idea is that my protagonist lives so long that at least he could see what others can’t see anymore, which is this loss of diversity. It’s like the idea of a marine park, where in a marine park, we know what the ocean should look like. We’ve got a baseline maybe or something close to it. But if we don’t have those parks; either land or ocean, we don’t know what the baseline is.
We don’t know what things should look like. So each generation that comes through just accepts. What they see is what the older generation would perceive as loss, they just accept as the norm.
Michael J. DeLuca: Right. It’s the frog in the boiling water metaphor, which—it’s amazing how my reaction to that metaphor—I remember the first time I heard it was years ago. I was in my 20s probably. And I got really jaded about it and hated it as a metaphor. And now I can’t help turning back to it and going, “Oh, yeah.” It’s rough.
Giselle Leeb: Well, it’s interesting, it’s a connection with politics as well, and also consumerism. Obviously American consumerism is ahead of here. We used to be, in a massive way. But I think the same as political … like what expectations, they might go up and down and round and round, but there’s a baseline that younger people say now they would think is the norm.
And with consumerism as well and all sorts of things, there might be challenging things, but it’s like expectations of a comfortable life. I mean, I think that’s quite a threat to changing the world in terms of the environment is: people are too comfortable, or some people are too comfortable and others are obviously dying of starvation or whatever, or being affected by climate change, but it’s just people; like, even now, well, these fires are burning, people are still going on holiday.
I don’t know what it takes to wake people up. The boiling has increased drastically quite quickly, quicker than people thought, I think. But no one is really—maybe it’s like a numbness from too much news and nothing shocks people, and then I think people have this—I don’t know if you’ve heard of M. John Harrison, he’s an amazing writer. I read an article recently with Olivia Lang, and they’re talking about this, about people being padded from reality.
No offense to the USA, but I think like a lot of people, he has watched Americans and thinks they have this strange hero, kind of. Some Americans, at least that you see on reality TV, practice this strange hero complex and it’s very unreal. And the same here in that people in Europe perhaps have got used to this weird padded life that now seems totally normal. And so they won’t give it up. They won’t suffer even a little bit for anything really. I’m generalizing, but I think that’s something I already noticed.
Even coming from South Africa as well and compared to, say, the UK, I noticed that a lot as well, just because there’s a lot of people in South Africa suffering very much and then you come to somewhere like the UK and people are suffering now, people can’t afford to eat and so on. But it’s just this expectation of having lots of things and everything is simple and easy and people just—I think they actually believe that something is just going to come along and solve it despite the massive evidence to the contrary.
D. K. McCutchen: Michael, you had put together this idea of marginalized people and queerness. Could you elaborate on that theme?
Michael J. DeLuca: Sure. I’ve even got a segue here from where we are in this discussion. So there is the worldview that the people in control of the purse strings are pushing on all of us. I live in Detroit; I see the automakers doing this around me constantly. I see the graphs of pedestrian deaths in the US. There’s a huge spike over the last 10 years as the Detroit automakers have been building bigger and bigger tanks to run people over. As someone who bikes a lot, and Giselle, I know you bike a lot as well, incredibly dangerous for cyclists.
And cycling advocacy is all up in arms and trying to get people to be aware of what’s happening. In order to do that, of course they have to overcome this juggernaut of advertising money. Anyway, the connection here is to the much-adapted and constantly evolving quote from, I believe it’s William Gibson who said the thing about “the apocalypse is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”. He said it about the future. I put the apocalypse in there because that is just how I think about it now.
So Detroit: I wrote Night Roll, this novella that, Deb, you perceive it to be about people building something out of this bleakness. I’m surrounded by this; Detroit, when I got here, in 2011 is when I moved here, it was the bottom of the housing market. People were burning down houses in Detroit just to get them out of the way. The city was burning down houses just to get them out of the way so they wouldn’t be dangerous. There was a whole business of people scavenging pipes. It was bleak and dystopian.
I came there from Boston, which is quite economically stable and intellectually elite. The shock produced that novella; Night Roll is totally a result of that culture shock. So for Detroiters who had to live among all that and make something, I think that’s a lot more like what the world has looked like their whole lives.
D. K. McCutchen: But the positive that I pulled out of it was that your marginalized people were the ones that had the strongest community.
Michael J. DeLuca: Right. They have been forced to acquire the resourcefulness to not think along the lines of the worldview that is fed to them by, for example, the car companies. We can’t afford a giant tank of an SUV, so we’ll get along with bikes if we have to. I was trying to lead from that into queerness because each of our books here is full of some form of, what did I put in my question here? Resistance to norms, interrogation of norms, smashing of norms, gender, sexuality, and otherwise. I have a book idea—
D. K. McCutchen: Interestingly, they also, all of three of us, I think, treat queerness as normal, as just part of the landscape, which I really like. I think that’s something that I think we have in common, maybe.
Michael J. DeLuca: I agree, and I think that’s wonderful. What I wanted to ask was, do you see it that way? I’m super straight and super cis-gendered, so I’m just exploring these ideas from the outside. The main character in Night Roll has an infant child who she chooses not to assign a gender to. In the same way, I’m an outsider to this, but I want my kid to grow up with a blank slate. And I have a young kid, I had an infant kid when I started writing that book. And so I was thinking along those lines and wondering: a blank slate is not a fair generalization here.
But to think about kids around here who grow up with no choice but to not drink the water coming out of their tap or get lead poisoning, that’s not a blank slate. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up not feeling comfortable in my body, for example. But the metaphor has occurred to me repeatedly that not feeling comfortable in your own body might be like what it is to not feel comfortable on your planet because it’s changing so fast. You can’t keep up.
D. K. McCutchen: Or just being female.
Michael J. DeLuca: Sure.
Giselle Leeb: That’s right, yeah.
D. K. McCutchen: It’s a very patriarchal society.
Michael J. DeLuca: Right, absolutely.
D. K. McCutchen: I have a very gender-diverse family, and I don’t particularly feel the need to specify what that is for anybody, not just here. But I think the idea that I wanted to get across was that truly marginalized people are the best suited for survival, like the ones in your story that had more of a sense of community and more of a sense of helping each other.
I’m writing a new book now, and it feels like it’s pulling together some of the themes in Jellyfish in that when you go back to the beginning of the climate disasters, when you go back to the mythic beginnings, because even my protagonist can’t really remember clearly, it’s the people that, like on the Indian reservations, who are surviving the best, because they’re used to deprivation, they’re used to reduced resources, they’re used to living off the land.
I feel like it’s part of their creation mythology too. Coyote is a trickster god who is literally riding my protagonist like a yokai. He’s like the invisible friend in his mind. And Coyote is done. He’s finished with the world. He wants to go back to the Happy Valley so he can party with his friends, and he wants to hand his immortality to my protagonist, Jack, who doesn’t want it. So I’m having way too much fun with this idea.
And it’s fitting what’s happening at the end of Jellyfish, which is, it’s the people who accept the idea of reduced resources and accept the idea of, okay we’re going to need beer or peyote or something like that just to change our minds sometimes. And they accept that they have to be creative in some way. And in the end of Jellyfish, they’re working towards cleaning up plastic in the oceans. But it’s just what they do. They have limited food, they have limited everything, but they can still move forward.
And I think right now, what I’m finding for me is that if I don’t stay creative, I get really depressed about what’s going on in the world, and I can’t move forward that way. So I keep encouraging my family to do this too. One of my daughters became a weaver during the pandemic lockdown. One of them became an amazing graffiti artist and taxidermist. My husband learned to play banjo; my dad’s old banjo. I just worked with other teachers for the most part until suddenly these books started happening.
But it’s that idea of social justice, which we all supported our youngest with, but I just feel like if we don’t do that, we can’t move forward. We have to keep trying. That’s just how life is, isn’t it, I suppose.
Michael J. DeLuca: Giselle, how do you see all this?
Giselle Leeb: Well, I grew up in a very macho male-dominated society, but I’m gay. I don’t think…. But I always rejected gender stereotypes from about the age of 12, but not consciously. Because I never thought girls, men or boys should behave in particular ways, and I got a lot of flack for not being girly enough from all sides, really, but I just carried on.
So I think that’s quite natural for me. I think growing up in South Africa, it’s a pretty fraught society politically, and it was during apartheid, so it was pretty awful society. And my parents divorced when I was quite young, so my mother is pretty left wing, unusually in that society. But she also very auto crazy, quite a sense of politics was always there from a very young age. And I was arguing with people about it at school, and it’s always been there.
We were quite poor growing up, even, it’s relative in South Africa, but after my parents divorced, and my mom is a single mother and very difficult person. So yeah, quite difficult. So it’s all related, to me. I’m very interested in the—how things change on a personal level connected to a social level. But I think—creativity, I was always quite creative. I was good at drawing and stuff. I denied it for a long time. Since I started writing, I finally made some breakthroughs.
But I think it’s really connected to just letting people do what they want. Now, at the moment they’re stopping funding arts courses and even English literature and universities here. It’s always comes from a more right-wing point of view, but in terms of freedom, I do think if you take away creativity and forms of creativity and people enjoying them, society does become pretty bleak. So I think it’s actually quite essential to human freedom, really. It’s very connected, all of those things together.
And it definitely, creativity has to go to some extent. Obviously some people have created things which aren’t connected to that, but with a point of view that allows people to just be who they want to be. Obviously, people always have to sort out issues between them, but I think they’re interconnected: creativity, freedom and politics, queerness, allowing people to and be here where they want to be and not judging people. It’s very interconnected, those things.
Michael J. DeLuca: Yeah, absolutely.
D. K. McCutchen: I feel like getting rid of the patriarchy and the matriarchy was key in Jellyfish, just to be able to move forward, and that was the cause of all the small disasters that happened.
Giselle Leeb: In a way there’s no blank states in the sense that you’re always influenced, say your children, no matter what you do, one way or the other. It’s just more like a, I suppose, creating an atmosphere where people are open-minded enough to debate stuff and accept stuff, but have to make a choice about these things, about the world. It seems a bit of a no-brainer to choose not to destroy the planet that we’re living on.
D. K. McCutchen: It seems that way, doesn’t it?
Giselle Leeb: Yeah. Some things seem a bit more right than others, but I say going back to changing people’s minds, it’s always difficult because everything can turn to propaganda advertising even. Not saying that trying to change people’s mind is necessarily those things, but I suppose it’s how to take action, I suppose is what I’m trying to say in terms of persuading people or trying to influence people or just trying to talk to people. I think a big problem is how to address the big things.
Because I think at the moment, in terms of the big things, big companies– oil companies—if every consumer turned around a collective action problem tomorrow and said, “I’m not taking this anymore and I’m not paying the bills” all at once, but that’s an ongoing problem and that people won’t—it’s hard to get people to act like that and how do you do it and et cetera. But how do you stop these huge companies and not feel defeated by it?
I read something that recently this—someone quite was saying that people have this fatalism that, well, it’s too late, but actually it’s not too late. It’s just enough people going to stop being—the people who have the power tend to be wealthy and have more control over everything in the world at the moment. So it’s a big problem, because everything is at such a huge scale with billions of people.
D. K. McCutchen: Barbara Tuchman, who wrote The March of Folly and got a Pulitzer Prize in the ’60s, I think, basically said that all cultures race towards the thing that they perceive as the thing that’s going to undo their culture. Like Cassandra; nobody believed Cassandra when she told them not to bring the horse into Troy. And I don’t know if I want to believe that entirely, but I do see that happening here in the States in terms of people just—
I’ve even heard people say, “Well, we might as well vote for Trump because then it’ll all be over quicker.” I’ve heard people say that. I was pissed. But it was really horrifying to hear that. Do we have time to talk about humor a little bit, Michael?
Michael J. DeLuca: Yes. We should talk about humor a little bit. I think we should not end on this horribly bleak note.
Giselle Leeb: Okay.
D. K. McCutchen: Yeah.
Michael J. DeLuca: Go ahead, Giselle.
Giselle Leeb: About humor? Yeah. Well, I think humor is integral for me. It’s like lifesaving. It’s just, not to go into personal stuff, but I did have pretty hardcore upbringing, but humor was essential. When some awful things happen in our family, we just laugh and laugh, me and my brother and my sister. As I said, it’s all connected, the greater world, everything is connected like that, I think. But it just comes out naturally. I’ve always liked Kurt Vonnegut.
I think I read when I was 20 or something, but I think that influenced my humor. And George Saunders I find hilarious. I’ve always liked really dark humor and Kurt Vonnegut has written some very dark, humorous books. But I think it’s a vital tool for cheering you up. And I do think those things go together. Often, incredible bleakness and humor, seems like a human thing that saves people from total despair.
And I think actually humor is very effective sometimes at changing people’s minds in the sense that a story with a blatant message, I don’t think it goes down very well, but humor softens it and makes it easier to read in a strange sort of way.
D. K. McCutchen: Your Wholphin story, that made me laugh out loud. Because there was some dark, bleak stories in there, but they always had these wonderful flashes of color too. And that one, I found delightful.
Michael J. DeLuca: Me too. And yes, it made me laugh out loud. And I believe I have been responsible for publishing two of your stories, Giselle. And the other one, Ape Songs, which was in LCRW 33 is the same way. I believe it’s been a while, but now is it a robot monkey that is just once in a while just has these outbursts of cursing. I laughed and laughed and it did, it changed my perspective on dystopian fiction a little, I guess.
D. K. McCutchen: Interesting.
Giselle Leeb: Excellent. I was very sad not to include that in my book. I had to decide; I could only choose four, and I was trying to, but I often think I should have included that. But I know it’s good to know. I just think humor connects with people, basically, with everybody; how people feel and their emotions and in a very direct way perhaps.
D. K. McCutchen: I love the absurd, but I don’t think I’m particularly good at writing humor. So when it does creep in, I find it quite delightful. And I think my form is just a contrast between formal and informal language or ideas, maybe. I find it funny, in my very Italo Calvino description of the tsunami of trash in Jellyfish Dreaming that collapses into town. I write it as a list of the undead detritus of a dying civilization with barrels of toxic waste, contrasted with old bones, refrigerators, plastic forks, rotting corpses, broken bicycles, old shoes, porcelain doll heads.
So the absurdity comes in with just the difference between the horror that’s happening and these silly things that are part of the tsunami, part of the trash wave that swallows this town up. But maybe I find that funny and nobody else does, I don’t know.
Michael J. DeLuca: It definitely works on me that way. The juxtaposition of the vernacular spoken by your teenagers and the high intellectual elite of the university. I’ve spent a lot of time on the outskirts of academia and I find all that absurd, and I am encouraged to by my loved ones who find all that absurd. I wondered if you were deliberately sending up academia?
D. K. McCutchen: Are you kidding? I’m in academia too, there’s so much to set up.
Giselle Leeb: Yeah, that’s ripe for it, isn’t it? But humor has got many forms, many ways to do it, I guess. But does yours just arise spontaneously in your writing?
D. K. McCutchen: Yeah, although I’m very aware of that juxtaposition and language, I think, between the formal and the informal. In my new work, the book I’m working on right now, I have this very mythic idea of the protagonist riding into an Indian reservation in Idaho on a ghost bison with this whole herd of ghost bison behind him, only to face the Nimmi Po Fish and Wildlife Committee. So there’s this juxtaposition between myth and something more contrasting and for real-world titles.
And they’re not welcoming him. They don’t want him there, and they eventually kick him out. But I think these contrasts are important because they make the characters more real, and hopefully they make us laugh. I think I learned some of it from John Edgar Wideman. He was my supervisor in my MFA program. He would get into these lyric writings where he would be imagining a news article of a child that was thrown into one of those trash shoots in a tall building.
He imagined what it was like going down each level, and then suddenly he would just shift his language. So you’ve got this lyric formal writing that suddenly goes, “Oh shit.” Because it doesn’t swear or that—and I just was so taken by that, that I think it made me notice that formal-informal language idea a little bit more.
Giselle Leeb: Yeah, absolutely.
D. K. McCutchen: Michael, I would like to know what you think is the most humorous part of your story, honestly.
Giselle Leeb: I was thinking about that.
Michael J. DeLuca: I am afraid that I do not have an answer for this question. Is Night Roll funny at all?
D. K. McCutchen: I think the Elf is hilarious.
Michael J. DeLuca: Okay, good. I guess I can get that. He’s chaos and chaos is funny. I have a six-year-old, so I spend a lot of time engaged in being amused by chaos. I hadn’t thought of it that way, so thank you.
D. K. McCutchen: I guess that’s something I really do think each of us does. I know Giselle has mythic elements in the Barley story. “Barleycorn”, is that what it’s called?
Giselle Leeb: “Barleycorn”, yeah.
D. K. McCutchen: The “Barleycorn” story. You’ve got the Elf, I’ve got, well, Coyote and the new piece. I don’t know what I have in Jellyfish for myth, but I really love the way history informed the future in your piece. It was like a dynamic way to ride through the city to see the history of what was happening, to see the Elf in these different roles over hundreds of years. And I don’t know if funny is the word, but it certainly was very pleasing.
Giselle Leeb: I think that’s mythical. People often ask why use one, some hardcore realist, but I think it’s, like you said, there would been in that case about the history, but perhaps it’s like it elevates the particular to the general and brings them together like in Night Roll, that’s what that did in a way, didn’t it? It’s almost like that part of our brain that is creative and almost out of time in a strange way as well, at the same time, fantastical elements and then that’s at least one of the things that they do in stories.
D. K. McCutchen: Yeah. The absurd like in wholphins when the wholphins grow legs, it’s a dolphin with legs. And that’s freaking hilarious.
Giselle Leeb: I actually got that from a fact. They said that dolphins did once—I think they lived on land or something, and they withered away.
D. K. McCutchen: Yeah. I was big on marine mammals for many years. And one of the ideas was that they believe that dolphins, they came to land first and then they went back into the water. So we see it probably related to cows, to be honest.
Michael J. DeLuca: It is a wonderful and inspiring weird thing. Thank you, Giselle, for speculating about that.
Giselle Leeb: Absolutely.
D. K. McCutchen: Could we maybe—end on a couple questions for each other. Would that work?
Giselle Leeb: Yeah, sure. No, go ahead.
D. K. McCutchen: For Giselle, I was thinking, is there a mood that you think links these stories? Maybe a dark mood. I’m imagining it with flashes of brightness, doom, long memories, reversals of understanding, surprise endings. I just want to ask you, what is it like to have these kinds of stories in you? What drives these kinds of moods?
Giselle Leeb: Well, in terms of moods, I think I very much just write; I started writing when I could cut my head off quite literally, because I had a few dreams. I sometimes put in the dreams. And Barleycorn is the wild man, and that was actually from a dream. I had another dream of someone trying to cut my head off, but I basically learned to write when I discovered free writing; that’s how I got into it.
So it’s all quite unconscious. I just write and write and write and then edit, edit, edit it, and then the story forms gradually and it just comes out somehow and then I work on it. And I just play around though. I never feel any pressure about writing, about how it’s going to turn out or anything. I think everything has come from your concern. So the climate change stories have come from that.
They’re just—in terms of moods being linked to my collection, basically I’d written I think about—well, I’ve written about 60 stories, but had about almost 40 published, and they’re all quite different. So for that collection, I chose the fantastical element for the link. Probably the majority of my stories have a fantastical element, but that just came spontaneously. I have no idea why.
D. K. McCutchen: Would you call it stream-of-consciousness writing or?
Giselle Leeb: Initially, yes. And then it’s massive editing. I used to write essays like that as well. Just put the bits all together, which is why I’ve been struggling a bit with a longer piece actually, because that’s how I write. Probably like most writers do short stories sequentially, but I just play around, but it’s always something gets hold of you, something that’s important. And non-fiction books I find really stimulating for writing.
So I read Sapiens, but the Dawn of Everything, which I read, finished recently, that’s really given me hundreds of ideas for writing short stories and about climate change and social justice. But often it’s like an idea. But a story from an idea would be very clunky. So something always comes in somewhere. Foro “Wholphinia”: cars make me incandescent, especially sometimes I do feel like going and slashing everyone’s tires.
Because I haven’t had a car for a long time now. Every time I’m riding, I just—on the roads and it’s just seeing all those cars, it’s like a symbol of the worst excess. And it obviously, originally something was useful, but it says so much about everything, these endless cars that have taken over so much surface there. So I think it often comes from that. Also, I have had intermittent depression in my life. Sometimes it actually is quite good for writing. Sounds weird, but it is that mood. But the great thing about writing is one thing always transforms into another.
D. K. McCutchen: I like that. I like that a lot. Please don’t slash my tires. I drive a EV. I know they’re not perfect, but I did my best.
Giselle Leeb: I won’t slash your tires, but people drive their cars to drop 10 minutes down the road and obviously it’s a massive problem, isn’t it? But in terms of writing moods, fantastical, I have no idea why I write fantastical things. It just happened that way. As in, I also write quite a lot stories about apes. I didn’t put them all in my collection.
D. K. McCutchen: You do. You use the word monkey a lot in your stories.
Giselle Leeb: Yeah, monkeys, apes. I use dreams a lot as well, because I wrote them—I was interested. Someone introduced me to Jungian dream analysis when I was young, and I just started writing my dreams down. And I’ve actually used dreams from when I was younger for quite a lot of stories, but it’s just like a starting point or elements in the story.
D. K. McCutchen: Michael, your book, Night Roll, like at least Giselle’s first story, “Goldfinch”, it’s set in the now or the near future. It also has deep ties to the past, and I was somehow really relieved after writing Jellyfish to read about a fully peopled landscape. But my question for you is, how does such a dystopian story end up feeling so positive, or does it to you?
Michael J. DeLuca: It definitely does. It is something I set out to do.
D. K. McCutchen: To be positive?
Michael J. DeLuca: Yes. Also, like I was saying, it was something I needed because the setting of Detroit when I was introduced to it, and even now, there’s a lot of bleakness there. It is microcosmic. So I can’t take a lot of credit for the people working together creatively outside of the normal avenues of consumerism to make something functional, because that’s what’s happening in Detroit. And I’ve been introduced to a lot of radical organizers here–ah, “a lot”. I’ve been a fly on the wall for some radical organizing here, and it is incredibly inspiring.
Grace Lee Boggs and her husband, Jimmy Boggs, spent their entire lives pretty much organizing in Detroit from the ’50s on. I found out about her when she was 101 and just about to die. But she was this fixture of this kind of thinking in Detroit; community building and anti-capitalist radical thought. She was like a Socrates figure, encouraging you to go back and think about your own stuff and work on it. Just super inspiring.
I just feel like I’m the tiniest cockroach in the shadow of that community. But yes, to take credit for what I can take credit for, and to refer back to the question of the mythic that we were talking about earlier, I feel like what things like the idea that dolphins once had legs, the idea of people painting on cave walls, what all that gives me, the horned god, or John Barleycorn who Giselle is referencing there, all that stuff reminds us that we are alike in a lot of ways.
Even though my neighbor drives a giant SUV and I totally want to—there’s this organization in the UK that I follow, they’re called Tyre Extinguishers. What they do is they put a little lentil in each of your tire valves, and then you just screw it on and the lentil causes it to slowly deflate and then you walk away. So I think about that a lot. I love it. I think about doing that to my neighbors. I don’t because I would get in a lot of trouble.
But they’re my neighbors and yet I share something with them. And what I share with them is this mythic, even if their ancestors were the worst colonizers, and so were mine. I’ve changed all this, and then there’s ways that I haven’t changed. The mythic and the flowing of the past into the future is reassuring to me. It gives me a sense that there is continuity. Another thing I think about a lot is the conquest of the Americas and the Indigenous experience of that. The Mayans had this prophecy about the feathered serpent.
D. K. McCutchen: Quetzalcoatl.
Michael J. DeLuca: Some of them may have thought that Cortez was that. And so that was their end of the world. And then it’s been 2,000 years since then, and they’ve all had to function all that time. And I look to them and this is what the book I have coming out next year is about. They have all this insight from having experienced an apocalypse that I want and I feel like we all need. Detroit was that for me too, on a different scale.
D. K. McCutchen: You want the apocalypse?
Michael J. DeLuca: I don’t want the apocalypse, but I want the secrets of having experienced and lived through and made something of the ruins.
D. K. McCutchen: Interesting.
Giselle Leeb: You really should read The Dawn of Everything, Michael, because it goes back with recent archeological evidence to about 6,000 years, even before the Mayans. And it’s just the most amazing book. It challenges all sorts of ideas that people just accept about history and linearity of history. It’s an amazing book. I really recommend it, especially with what you’re talking about, because it’s completely relevant to that.
Michael J. DeLuca: Awesome. Okay.
Giselle Leeb: It’s all about Indigenous critique of European society, which actually then fed into, say, the French revolutionary ideas of equality, because I said, when people colonized the Americans, they didn’t actually live in democratic societies and that, so it’s an amazing book.
Michael J. DeLuca: That sounds great.
Giselle Leeb: Yeah. That sounds very exciting, your book. But that fantastical element in your book, how did you decide to write that or did it just come in naturally when you were writing your book with the Elf and—
Michael J. DeLuca: Right. I too don’t really know how to write something without a fantastical element. The Elf is drawn from a historical figure who is not called the Elf. They call him the “red dwarf”, the Nain Rouge. There’s a “joke” Mardi Gras—that is, I don’t want to say it’s a joke. It is newly invented as a way to give Detroit some color and some celebratory partying in the face of all this crumbling stuff. So the Nain Rouge is this; he’s a gremlin, a sabotager of things.
D. K. McCutchen: Trickster.
Michael J. DeLuca: Yeah. And I wanted to make that my own. So I changed the name and some of the features, but there’s a lot of direct references to copious research I did, which I will never be able to come up with now.
Giselle Leeb: And that’s the way of writing. It’s like a tiny bit of your research comes into the whole thing. When I was researching those giant waves, it was stiff climate change reports. It’s quite high level, some of that stuff on climate. But it’s very effective. I think, as I said, it’s almost, not to be too direct and clichéd about it, but it’s like an element like that is a hopeful thing.
I think the whole idea of a timeless overview of history or maybe even circulative history is very cheering actually. In terms of everything, things that happen that things aren’t necessarily going in straight line at all. Maybe in circles or spirals or something like that.
D. K. McCutchen: I find it very comforting to think about the tenacity of life. That life will go on whether humans do or not. I find that comforting. I don’t know if most people would, but when I was writing Jellyfish, I was actually commuting. And back then it was a gas car. But on my commute to work, I would do my lesson plans. On my commute away from work, I would just allow myself to free associate and I would write scenes in my head and then write them down when I had a minute. Usually, when I should have been grading, probably.
And it became a patchwork that somehow fit what I was seeing happen with my dad’s decaying memory. I think he was 89 when he died, but he was definitely losing his memory and I felt like anybody would if they had too much in their head. So I think that kind of patchwork worked a little bit, for Jellyfish at least. But I like what Giselle described as, for me, I guess it was stream-of-consciousness writing.
I would just plop the scene down and move on. And then of course, spent years editing. I really wanted to do a Faulkner and write a book like As I Lay Dying in six weeks. I think Jellyfish got roughed out in about eight weeks. But it took several years to edit, so. Well, more than several years, maybe a decade.
Michael J. DeLuca: That is certainly one of the things that won me over about it initially, is the scintillating phantasmagoria of—I mean, a trash tornado is not what the whole book is because it’s not trash. Some of it is absolutely wonderfully valuable, but it sure is a tornado.
D. K. McCutchen: I was really into magical realism reading South American literature when I was in college. I also did a thesis on the use of myth in fiction. So it’s just a deeply embedded piece of my study of writing. But guys, I’m going to have to go soon. So is there any way that you want to wrap this up or?
Michael J. DeLuca: Thank you both. This has been a wonderful and far-ranging and weird conversation. How will I ever edit it all together? Good luck me.
Giselle Leeb: I know. I’ve edited things before and it can take a lot of time, I guess, so.
Michael J. DeLuca: But it’s also fun to get a sense of how conversation flows. I find it informative for writing dialogue, which I’m terrible at.
Giselle Leeb: Excellent.
D. K. McCutchen: I actually called a couple friends for my first book, Whale Road, and I called them and I said, “Can I quote you saying this?” And then I recorded what they said and used that as dialogue. That was nonfiction.
Michael J. DeLuca: Anyway, it was great talking to you both.
D. K. McCutchen: Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Giselle.
Giselle Leeb: Thanks. Lovely to chat. All right.
