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Storytelling in the Near Past: A Climate Chat with Madeleine Watts

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You're listening to Climate Decoded, the podcast that deciphers climate change communication. We untangle how different narratives illuminate or obscure pathways to climate justice. We talk about how we talk about climate change. 

And Welcome to Climate Chats, a series in which we have casual conversations with the top climate experts, authors, and activists from around the world. 

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Today I’m chatting with writer and novelist Madeleine Watts. Madeleine’s recently published novel is “Elegy, Southwest,” about a woman doing her Ph.D. on the Colorado River and grappling with its receding water levels, while simultaneously grappling with her receding relationship with her husband, who has disappeared. Madeleine’s first novel was “The Inland Sea,” which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. She’s also written a novella, Afraid of Waking It, and has published nonfiction in Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, Literary Hub, and others.

In this chat, Madeleine and I talk about climate themes in her native country of Australia, as well as climate themes in one of her chosen homes, the US. We talk about sense of place, the value, specifically in climate fiction, of writing in the near past, and a lot more. It was a real pleasure talking with her and I encourage everyone to check out her writing. 

Without further ado, let’s dive into some climate fiction with Madeleine Watts.

Madeleine: When I started writing and when I started taking writings to seriously, about 15, 12, 15, years ago, when I was just coming out of college, I didn't think of myself as somebody who would write about climate change or who was at all interested in nature or place or anything like that. I grew up so you can tell from my accent. I grew up in Australia and I grew up in Sydney, and I grew up in the city, and Sydney is a city that is very much like LA, it's very, it's very sprawling, and there are like pockets of wildness that are sort of threaded all throughout the city. And I hated it. I was so grumpy and so cranky, and I hated the heat, and I really thought of myself as somebody who belonged in like places that I read about belonged in London or Paris or New York or somewhere, somewhere with like a zippy public transport systems.

Madeleine: And it was only when I moved to America in 2013 that I became aware of how, how much place and environment and nature was really important to me, because suddenly I had no idea what anything was called around me. I didn't know the names of any of the trees, and I really missed the physical environment of Sydney, like I started to feel like that was, that was my natural habitat, and I was out of my natural habitat, and that was okay, but suddenly I became really aware of aware of that sort of thing. So it was partly taking me out of that context that led me to start thinking a lot about nature and just like noticing things about the places I was in, so, which is all a long way of saying that it was those sorts of experiences that led me to start thinking a lot about climate change. Because if you're looking and if you're paying attention to place, and you're paying attention to nature, like climate change is just there, that was when I was writing my first book, which was called The Inland Sea, which came out in 2021. I didn't think when I started writing it, that it was about climate change, but as I was writing it, I kept noticing things that were strange or off or weird. And I was writing about Australia, but I was in New York, and I specifically remember one Christmas it was so warm on Christmas day that I could go for a run that morning without a sweater, and there were flowers blooming in the park,

and a month later, all of those flowers were covered in snow, and they died, and they came back in April. But I became increasingly aware of the way that climate change wasn't just a thing that was sort of happening, in the future. It was starting to just have these sort of like little emergences in daily life, and to feel really uncanny and unsettling. And that became a focus of the work that I was doing, and increasingly, I became the more and more aware of it and more interested in exploring those things deliberately.

Kim: It's one of the things I love about “The Inland Sea”. You have two novels, I should say, “The Inland Sea,” which has already come out, and “Elegy, Southwest,” coming out this upcoming Tuesday, that climate change doesn't seem to be explicitly maybe. Speaking to what you're saying, of not identifying initially, at least as a Cli-Fi author, but those elements are kind of overshadowing or interwoven or naturally part of the backdrop or the context of the novel, which I think is a really helpful way of looking at it in everyday life, because that's how I see climate changes that transcends everything that we're working through in everyday life. It's kind of looming in the background, and sometimes it's more urgent and sometimes less urgent. So I appreciated how it's there in the background, and also the timing. So “The Inland Sea” was set in 2013 and if I have it correct, “Elegy, Southwest” is 2018, so it's a bit near past, almost present day. And a lot of Cli-Fi looks far into the future, or it's predictive, or, yeah, modeling into the future.

Madeleine: And that was something that I found really hard to get my head around. When I first started thinking about climate change, I had this, this moment when I read the great derangement by Amitav Ghosh in 2016 and reading that book was like, really, I've talked about it elsewhere. It was like, it really changed things for me in the way I was thinking about it. And that book is divided into three chapters, and one of them in particular is kind of just directed at writers, right? I think, like, you can, you can take a lot from it, from if you're any kind of art maker. But one of his arguments is, like the very there is in literary fiction, he he does a thing where he really casts aside the importance of the work that sci fi and fantasy writers have been doing for decades. But the importance of, like literary literary fiction was not really addressing climate change. And what was happening was you had these novels that would come out in the 20 you know, you had, you had writers like Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson, who had been writing about climate change. But again, they were always sort of like things happening in the future. Then you had this,

these novels that were marketed as like more literary fiction, like Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy. But again, it was always in the future, and that started to frustrate me, because it, it almost took the immediacy out of the problem, like these were things that would be happening in the future. You didn't need to worry about it. And that was how I felt, like I had, that's sort of how I experienced my childhood, like, you know, I'm a millennial. It was like in elementary school in the 90s, and they would talk about climate change like it wasn't, it was, wasn't, like, we didn't know about it, but they would be like, Well, don't worry about that. That'll happen, like, centuries from now. And so it was really this like, well, we don't need to worry about somebody will fix that.

Madeleine: And it was becoming increasingly clear that these things were not in the future. They were now, but particularly for writing. It was, there was no like contemporary climate change, novel rubric that I was aware of. And then I started to find things that I found really inspirational that made me think like that. Maybe I could do that. But the onus of writing about climate change as it is beginning to happen like what it is like when extreme weather events are, you know, like burning through cities and taking lives, and, you know, like floods, fires, all of that sort of stuff. They're breaking records. But the cities themselves are not necessarily underwater. Yet that felt like a real lack in what I was encountering, particularly because, like, the way you know, as you were saying, the way I experienced my daily life, the way you experience it. We now just sort of, like, live within the context of climate change where, like, we do completely normal stuff. We like, get married, get divorced, have jobs, worry about stuff in the way that we always have, but with this sort of shadow of environmental craziness in the background, and I think, like constant kind of anxiety and worry. So I was really, I was really interested in trying to push and push into this sort of like, like climate change and contemporary life novel, which as it happened, when I was writing my first book, lots of other writers were doing the same thing. So it's really even less than a decade that I think there's been, like a substantial number of those sorts of books that have come out, which is strange, but I think like probably speaks to how quickly it's become, it's really become an immediate issue.

Kim: One blog entry I read, or a Substack, I'm not sure if we call it a blog entry, is about art and how that inspired the writing of your book, both books. Do you find that writing has a, as a medium, has a specific role to play in climate, communication versus art or other forms? Do you think that writing has a particular role to play?

Madeleine: I guess so. I think that like communication, communication can mean so many different things, right? It can mean, like, the kind of thing that you're doing to educate and then that sort of, like educational modus operandi. I don't think it's always there in art, nor do I think it really should be. I think art exists slightly to the side, and it can obviously have, like the, it can have a communicatory and like impact, but I think it's a little bit different. I think that when you're so I sometimes when I teach a lot of like writing, writing about nature, writing about climate change classes. And one of the things that I will often bring up, particularly if there's a group of people in the class who maybe haven't quite decided what kind of art they're interested in making. Like they might be interested in visual art. They might be interested in filmmaking. They might be interested in dance music. It's every every like art form has different things that they can do that the other one can't. And, you know, for a long time, literally, like writing could tell stories and could tell narrative, but film can do that now. So, like, it's not if you're just telling a story. Well, like, film can just tell a story as well. The thing that you can do with writing that you can't do with any other medium, is be inside somebody else's head and experience the consciousness of somebody else. And I think that that is always in at least when I am writing, it's always in my mind like that is a thing that I can do with this thing that I can do. I'm not good at any other art form. I'm not compelled to make anything else. And I think that there's a way in which the when I'm right, when you know, when I'm writing and when I'm writing about, obviously, like things that have relationships to climate change, I am interested in, like, making sure that is known and communicate, you know, communicating things about it. But I'm also interested in reaching across to a stranger who I have never met on the other side of the world, and having and producing a kind of feeling of, like, consolation or intimacy of being inside somebody else's head and experiencing, I guess, like offer, offering, kind of feelings of recognition, and some of that can be produced by the structure. So in this book in particular, I was really thinking about structural, structural kind of inventions for the problems that climate change poses for writers in terms of, like, telling stories, because it's, you know, it's like, really, really, like, the time span is so much longer than a human life. And it's not compart, it's not confined to just one geographic location, and it's really, really slow until it's really, really fast.

Madeleine: And those are, I think, like, interesting, interesting problems to have. But I do think that, you know, like, one thing that I want my books to do is just like be reflections of what it's like to what I find it is like to be alive right now. And that is sort of what I want to that's what I want to offer the reader is like a form of consolation, a way of thinking through things they may not have necessarily thought about. And yeah, hopefully some some sort of feeling of comfort, relatability.

Kim: Yeah, with that unique aspect of writing which has interiority and being able to be in somebody's head and mind and how do you feel a deep connection with the losses of individual characters. It doesn't have to be loss, it can also be gains. But it was a, I don't know if I misinterpreted this as a theme, but combining the personal change or personal loss, I know in one interview, you said that your character, the main character in “The Inland Sea,” doesn't really change, and that's kind of a point in and of itself. But combining the personal loss, perhaps, or emotions and anxiety, and grappling with fear and vulnerability and safety. Do you feel a deep connection with those emotions of individual characters can deepen the connections that readers can feel to collective climate experiences?

Madeleine: Yeah, I was thinking a lot about that in this book, in “Elegy, Southwest.” So “Elegy, Southwest,” I was beginning to write while I was in the process of promoting the first book. And as I guess, a lot of first books do that, that book had really started, you know, with me, sort of like daring myself to write a book. And it hadn't the thing that it ended up being was very different to what I had thought it would be when I first started. For instance, like it had climate change in it. Which one I again, when I said, as I said before, I had no intention of it being a climate change book when I started. But while I was being asked all of these questions in these interviews, often about climate change, often about, like, some of these sort of big questions about, like, what can climate change do in a novel? What can the novel do? What can writing do? And I was realizing I didn't have great answers, or I didn't have like, I didn't feel like I had really thought about those sorts of questions when I was writing the first book. And so the second book was really an attempt to answer some of those questions for myself. And some of those, again, were sort of structural things. But one of the things that came up in that first book was this question of climate anxiety and climate dread, and sort of like suppositions that to represent climate anxiety or climate dread was in some way kind of shallow or unethical or something. And I found those arguments really frustrating, because you can, it felt a bit like, you know, telling people how to feel, it's never very effective. And so one of my answers was to just like, you know, if to really, really go into this idea of climate anxiety and climate grief, and that is, like, the book is called Elegy, Southwest. I was, I was like, let's battle it head on.

Madeleine: So I was really, when I, when I started writing this book, I was deeply, deeply interested in representing it as a story about grief. And so the story about the river is entwined with the story of Eloise's marriage. And what becomes evident over the course of the book is that she's addressing her husband, and what becomes evident is that he has gone missing. He's disappeared. And so she is feeling this kind of individual grief. And at the same time, there is this kind of grief for a landscape that is changing and gone, grief for this place that she loves, which is just like the water, the water is going to run out. And those things were very deliberately intertwined. And so I was giving there, there are all of these sort of losses that she has to deal with, like including various miscarriage that she has towards the end of spoke there is the loss of her marriage. There's also the loss of her husband. Rather, there's also, like her husband is also grieving the loss of a parent. So there's all of these layers of grief, which are, you know, the kinds of things we like, we've been making art about and telling stories about for centuries, about love and about loss, that the things that you know, they're always going to be a part of human life. But in this case, the losses are mirrored and intertwined with these other kinds of loss, and losses that are individual are also being entwined with sort of stories that aren't really hers. So there's a lot of stories that will that I've brought in, which sometimes, like, don't necessarily exist on her, on her timeline. So there's a section talking about William Mulholland bringing water to California, water to Los Angeles. There's another section talking about uranium mining on indigenous land in Arizona. So there are all of these sorts of stories of different losses that are that I'm trying to really like weave together and not necessarily draw like a cause and effect, because that's not realistic. It's not how we actually experience those things, but to just sort of put them side by side and hold them together, kind of at the same level, and put them into relationship with one another.

Kim: I love all of that. So much of life is about grief in the interest of moving along solely for that. What's your creative process when it comes to writing, and is it any different for anything climate themed, or when you start to find yourself thinking more specifically about climate impacts, and what did your writing process look like for “Elegy, Southwest”? Was there anything surprising that came up for you?

Madeleine: Yeah. So I read a lot when I was in my 20s. I worked in a bookstore called McNally Jackson in New York City. I worked in the flagship branch, which closed down a couple of years ago and has moved further down Prince Street. But being a bookseller was so amazing, because I had so much, so much access to all of these books that I might not otherwise have encountered, and it also just it's turned me into a reader who is generally reading seven different things at once with and it's not just like I read relatively quickly, but I kind of read around a lot, and I will follow, I will follow an interest. So, like, if I go to a if I go a place, then I will generally try to read things that were written by like, about that place, or by writers from that place. And so that kind of, what that means for my writing is that for this, for elegy Southwest in particular, I could look back when I started to write the book and see how years and years and years of reading had actually been research. But I hadn't been thinking of it as research. I was just like, following what I was interested in. And so I would read, like, like a really, really big book for that stimulated my thinking. For “Elegy, Southwest” was “Cadillac Desert” by Mark Reisner, which I just, I read because it was gorgeous and because I was interested, because I'd just been to California. So the reading, the reading is, like a really big part of how I of how I write, and I think that this, you know, when I teach, when I teach writing, I'm generally trying to teach people how to read as writers, because every, every kind of lesson I've ever learned, and any, any kind of writing advice that I have is like you read, read widely and like read, you sort of have to change the way you read. When you want to be writing as well. You have to kind of be a bit like an engineer looking at a bridge, like you can appreciate the bridge, but you also want to be thinking about, how did that bridge get made? And so that is often what I am doing before I start writing something, I'm trying to think of like ways that things can get made.

Madeleine: For this particular book, I had gone, I'd been interested in the Southwest for ages. I knew at some point that I wanted to write about the Colorado River, but I didn't know what that would amount to, I thought maybe it would be an article that would be like, a few 1000 words long. And I did these trips in one in 2018 and one in 2019 which I took really, really copious notes on. So it was traveling through Southern California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona, which are the states where Eloise and Lewis travel in “Elegy, Southwest,”

and I had no idea what I would do with these notes. I just had them, and that's the other thing that I'm often doing. I take a lot of notes, and I don't necessarily know what I will do with any of them. And it took me about three, two or three years, to finally, sort of wake up one day and realize, like, oh, I actually have an idea for something that I could use those notes for. And first it was a short story, and then it, then I sort of set it aside for six months, and then suddenly I had an idea for a structure. And the structure came from reading. So I had reread this novel called Rings of Saturn by W.J. Sebold, which I had read before, and I hadn't really retained much of a memory of it, but I had noticed that so many of the writers I loved cited this book as an influence, and I thought like I should probably go back and reread it. And one of the things that I loved about it was, it's just a book about a man walking through Suffolk in England, but it's also, in many ways, a climate change novel, and it's never talked about as a climate change novel, but he is so aware of climate change and the human impact of the environment, holding animal like non human and human suffering at the same level. And it was, it was sort of like a revelation to me, to come back to this book after a decade and be, realize that this was actually a really good model for a book about climate change basically like a man walks and thinks.

Madeleine: And so I was thinking a lot about the road trip narrative, I think particularly because I did start writing this book during the pandemic. So I was locked down for a lot of the time that I was writing the first draft, I couldn't move and I started to see. Think about the way that I could maybe borrow that structure. So “Elegy, Southwest” is divided into 10 chapters, because when I had no idea how to write this, I looked at rings of Saturn and I thought, well, that's divided into 10. So I'll just, I'll I'll group ideas under subheadings, and I'll tell myself that this, these are the physical places that they're going to they're going to be in each in each chapter, and I'll just follow this 10 chapter, this 10 chapter thing that I borrowed fully from rings of Saturn, and the book doesn't that's sort of where the similarities end, I guess. But that was a really, really huge part of writing the book, and the actual sort of writing process sort of happened in fits and starts. And I don't think I actually admitted that I was writing a novel until very late in the first draft process I would get, I was afraid I'd spook myself out of, spooked myself out of it didn't, didn't really know what it would be, but the first draft probably took about 18 months, and I finished it in the summer of 2022 left it for a while, and then those next drafts happened, that I was getting through them much more, much more quickly and figuring out sort of changes that I needed to make so that it probably took me another year until it was finished, and that process of like going back and redrafting, I read aloud when I'm writing, so I I've, I have read elegy southwest allowed from cover to cover, you know, 18 times or something, just to make sure that the sentences sound good, that they sound right, that there's nothing clunky about it. I want it to be like a pleasant experience. I want it to and I want it to feel really spoken, like somebody is somebody speaking. You know that when I, when I talked about that intimacy of like reaching across to somebody, I wanted it to feel but to have the intimacy of somebody speaking to you quite close, next to your ear.

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Kim: And that’s it for this week. Thank you to Madeleine for her time and work, and go check out “Elegy, Southwest” at your local bookstore.

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You’ve been listening to Climate Decoded. Climated Decoded is produced by Chantal Cough-Schulze, Lara Heledd Davies-Jones, Isabel Baudish, Greg Davies-Jones, Jens Wendel-Hansen, Jamie Stark, Alex Teske, and me, Kim Kenny.

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