I’m excited to be talking to you, because you’re also a writer, and I think it’s always interesting to talk with other writers. Could you tell us a little bit about your background?

Sure. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and I’ve lived many places since then. I spent some time in Mississippi, trying to start a Planned Parenthood, and failing miserably. And I did other political organizing, around the Kerry campaign and women's reproductive rights. But climate was definitely always in there, which began in college with starting the solar panel club on campus. I was just the idea person, it was the students after me who really took it to the next level. Now, the whole campus has solar panels. Eventually I got my MFA from Hunter College in New York City. I’d always admired writers like Grace Paley and others who are writers and activists, it's just one in the same to them. But I definitely had a period of complacency during the Obama years where I didn't quite know how to hold both roles in my head. I started my novel around that time.

 After New York, after my MFA, I took about four years on the road at writing residencies and fellowships like Ucross and VCCA, this vagabond existence as I finished the book. I was living in LA by the time it came out, and I started writing for TV a few years after that. During that time, I went to the Arctic on an artist’s residency – it was this 19th century-replica sailing vessel with thirty artists and writers, ten crew, and a couple of climate scientists. I think we disembarked right when Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement. The scientists on board presented the facts to us while we were kind of at Ground Zero, watching the glaciers calve behind them as they made their presentations, and it reignited my climate activism.