incipient words, and immediate words

First things first: Stim: An Autism Anthology pre-orders are going out now! I’m really excited to be a part of this one; the piece I contributed, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at [You]”, was only my second ever piece to be accepted for publication, and to see it in such illustrious company is awesome.

Stim will be in bookshops in April, if you didn’t get in on this when the preorder campaign was running. Go pick up a copy from your local indie book zone!

Second: I have not one, but two poems soon to be published! The first will be available in Lucent Dreaming issue 7; the second will be appearing in SAND issue 21. This is absolute madness, from my point of view, as I am much more a prose writer than I am a poet — but it is the best kind of absolute madness, and it makes it that much more of an honour to see my work out in the world.

False advertising.

I wrote both poems right after I came back from LA. One of them, “(baby don’t hurt me)”, is about precarious queer joy in unfamiliar spaces. The other, “Entreaty to the rattlesnake population of Griffith Park,” is dedicated to whoever put up a sign at the Griffith Observatory that read CAUTION: RATTLESNAKES, causing me to experience a disappointment antithetical to self-preservation when no dangerous snake-type creatures actually tried to gnaw on my flesh. On the other hand, the author is dead, so they can be about other things if you want, I guess?

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Obviously it’s a weird time right now. I’m still in the process of reacting; at intervals I catch myself desperately wanting to cry, only to find that I can’t make it happen. I’m anxious, despite my relative security. I hate the uncertainty of the immediate future with my whole life, and I wish I trusted any authority to have our best interests at heart.

With what little platform I have, I’ll say: stay home if you can. Be kind to the people working at the supermarket and the pharmacy. Recognise who is doing the work here, on the ground, in front of you, and do not forget them when normalcy threatens again. Recognise also how easily so many everyday, institutional cruelties have been waved away. Remember how unnecessary they are right now, and how unnecessary they’ve kind of always been. This moment is going to force change on us in so many ways, and on multiple levels, I hate it, but I am hoping it will draw us together in ways that will last. I am hoping we will learn how to be better.

I’m on holiday from work this week, and will be working from home as of Monday. Next week, I’m going to begin work on the next round of edits to Last Testament, and plan out a new idea which will inevitably be shaped by the experience of a global pandemic. I’m going to think about how to support my people, many of whom are struggling right now. I’m going to find a routine and keep to it, and keep moving forward however I can. Next week. But for right now, I am giving myself room. I hope you can do the same for yourself, too.

introducing CATASTERISM

I wrote a text-based mental breakdown simulator game! Obviously!

You are Merope, a PhD candidate at the University of Atlas. It’s Tuesday. Before the day is over you need to pick up a shift at work; survive a meeting with your thesis advisor; and have a difficult conversation with your dearest friend in the world. Your task is simple: get through the goddamn day.

Oh, and be careful of the river.

CATASTERISM is written and coded by me, Waverly. It features logo art by Crumb and music by Merraine (both of whom are mind-blowingly talented), and it is free to download and play. You can get it HERE. Enjoy!

the surface of our warm lonely planet

Rugby Cement Works, on the way out of town.

I realised that I’ve become a climate writer by mistake.

My short story, “The Last Good Time to be Alive,” appeared in Reckoning 4 this week (check her out, I hear she’s pretty good). I’ve described it as a short story about internet girlfriends in a flood in the future, though it actually emerged from an idea I had for a larger project: it was still set in the near future, but the flood was incidental, and the heart of the concept was Marlo’s ‘cancellation’ by her audience online. I’m sort of relieved I didn’t end up writing that iteration, not least because I worry that it would have been contentious in a way that diverted attention from what I wanted to say.

I got distracted from the cancellation idea, because I thought too hard about what the future might look like. For a writer looking at near futures, trying to keep it terrestrial, there is no way to think about the future without taking into account the present — and at present, we are in a state of emergency. Extrapolate from there and the conflict the narrative requires is already baked in. The weather’s broken. The sea is creeping further and further inland. God only knows what the political landscape will look like, as the climate crisis displaces more and more of the global south, and the higher ground becomes a precious, lifesaving commodity.

“The Last Good Time to be Alive” does not try to encompass the world at large, because I’m a comparatively sheltered white person, and I know better than to overreach. It’s set in my hometown, Rugby; you wouldn’t know it, but it’s secretly set in my parents’ house, on a sharp street corner at the foot of a small hill. There really was a brook at the back of our house, running parallel to the garden, and it really would threaten to burst its banks after rain.

The town centre on market day.

Rugby is a singularly unremarkable place. It’s a boarding school with a tired industrial town grafted on; it’s a rail freight terminal with a dead and joyless heart. I left as soon as I could. I think of it all the time, because the world is changing and Rugby is changing with it. I’ve seen it cited as a place for working Londoners to retreat to, with its direct line to Euston and its desperately low cost of housing. I drove back with my dad for a school friend’s wedding, and he pointed out all the new warehouses hunched at the edge of town.

Zuri, the protagonist of the short story, lives an isolated, increasingly dangerous life in Rugby. She’s offered the chance to leave. Despite everything, it’s harder than anyone expects for her to take it.

Home is difficult and complicated, but it never leaves you behind. You mourn, and you move forward. I wanted to write a story about that — about home, but about that duality, as well. About the living and the grieving and the growing that our world demands of us all.

Arkady Martine, who guest-edited Reckoning 4, has written with characteristic power about withstanding the temptation of apocalyptic despair:

“I reject it because the apocalyptic is itself a form of denial. It is a place to hide within. It is also a kind of violence, inflicted on us—sometimes unintentionally, sometimes quite deliberately by agents—whether they are fossil fuel companies or simply people who cannot imagine a future different from the one which gives them some power and some control—to push us away from the work.”

I don’t always know how to reject it. Mired in my early teens, I was horrified at what I read in the news about global warming, the greenhouse effect, holes in the ozone layer. My dad would drive us up the motorway to visit family further north, and I would look at the sky, anxious that our car would be the one to exhale that fatal, tipping-point breath of carbon fumes. I couldn’t cope. The terrible scale of the world and the damage done overpowered me in every quiet moment. I had to shove it to the back of my mind just to get through the day without panicking.

We used to get our hair cut here.

I’m older now, and the world is more complicated than one car journey or one apocalyptic instant. I have to balance the pull toward hopelessness with the need to keep being, and with the need to cling to what joy there is to be found.

A friend of mine, like Marlo, makes videos on the internet. I borrowed the title of my story from him, though I haven’t told him yet (if you’re reading this: surprise, bitch). We weren’t talking about the climate, exactly; we were talking about how strange it was to be able to listen to the same song together, at the same time, continents apart. “This is absolutely the best time to be alive,” he said, “and probably the last good time to be alive.” I don’t know to what extent I agree, but at the time it resonated hard. We live in the future, and it is climate catastrophe burning down California and driving indigenous communities off the melting ice of their homes, but it is also listening to an album you love with strangers on the internet. It’s forging a connection you didn’t expect to forge, in a place where you didn’t expect to be. It’s internet girlfriends in a flood in the future, holding space for one another in the midst of a devouring storm.

I became a climate writer by mistake, but not by accident. We know what’s happening. We’ve known for a while. I am trying to live with that knowledge, and to respond to it the only way I know how; I am gathering the things I will take with me into the future, fear enough to keep me moving forward, joy enough to see me through the dark. If this is the last good time to be alive, then I want to approach it with purpose. I hope you enjoy the story, and I hope you at least feel prepared as we face down 2020.