Despair is a Luxury with Nina Schuyler and Susan Kaye Quinn

Nina Schuyler, Susan Kaye Quinn, Doug Henderson and T. K. Rex discuss writing climate fiction and one central theme: hope. How to have it, how to write it, and why it’s more important than ever.

Nina Schuyler’s short story collection, In This Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and was published in July 2024. Her novel, Afterword, won the 2024 PenCraft Book of the Year in Fiction, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Science Fiction and Literary, and the PenCraft Spring Seasonal Book Award for Literary and Science Fiction. Her novel, The Translator, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction. Her novel, The Painting, was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Her books, How to Write Stunning Sentences and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal are bestsellers. Her short stories have been published by Zyzzyva, Chicago Quarterly Review, Fugue, Nashville Review, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies, The Writing Salon, and Book Passage.

Susan Kaye Quinn is an environmental engineer turned author, writing and publishing speculative fiction since 2011. Lately, she writes hopeful climate fiction, trying to change the narratives that are destroying the world. You can find her short fiction in Reckoning, Solarpunk Magazine, and Grist's recently released Metamorphosis collection of solarpunk stories. All her short fiction and novels are on her website, https://susankayequinn.com/. She's the host of the Bright Green Futures podcast, stories to build a better world: https://brightgreenfutures.substack.com/

Other stuff we talked about in the episode:

• The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger
• Songs of the Humpback Whale
• Sounds of Nature by Karen Bakker
• How to be Animal by Melanie Challenger
• Glide Memorial volunteer program
• The Great Derangement by Amitav Gosht
• The Hopepunk Panel at Watertown Public Library
• Object oriented ontology
• The Overstory by Richard Powers
• "Mazes" short story by Ursula LeGuin
• Metamorphosis: Climate Fiction for a Better Future
• The Great Mississippi Tea Company
• Grist
• Bright Green Futures Anthology