Writing Hope into Climate Fiction with Julie Carrick Dalton

This is a machine-generated transcript. There will be errors. The audio file is the definitive record of the episode.

Lee Schneider (00:01.83)
Julie, welcome to the podcast. It's so nice to have you here.

Julie Carrick Dalton (00:07.319)
Yes, absolutely.

Julie Carrick Dalton (00:21.869)
Thank you for the invitation. I'm excited for our conversation.

Lee Schneider (00:25.974)
Now, nature is pretty much a character in your work. When reading The Last Beekeeper, I'm amazed at how deeply you feel nature. So this first question, though, is a bit large. But what is it about nature that makes you feature it so prominently in your books?

Julie Carrick Dalton (00:46.625)
Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about that too because I didn't start out thinking I want to be a nature writer. It's just how I wrote. I think it kind of goes back to my childhood. I was one of those kids that spent all my time playing in the woods, climbing trees, you know, damming up creeks in the yard. And I think that's how I processed the world from a really young age. You know, my grandparents had a farm in Western Maryland in Appalachia. I spent a lot of time there. And I think that was my first lens on the world. And that's how I think about it. I think I noticed a lot of things, you know, like textures, smells, sounds. And so when I tell a story, those are the emotional lens my characters take on because that's my lens.

Lee Schneider (01:26.19)
Definitely. It's a very rich environment in a literary way and also just helps me visualize where we are so thoroughly. Critics say your work is climate fiction. Do you first accept the category?

Julie Carrick Dalton (01:43.145)
I accept what anybody wants to call it. I never had heard the term climate fiction when I was writing my first novel, Waiting for the Night Song. And right after it was published or when it was in the pipeline, someone along the line said, you write climate fiction. And I was like, OK. I have mixed feelings about it. I think that it sounds a lot like science fiction to people. And so when people say climate fiction, a lot of people are visualizing apocalyptic works. You know, like, you know, post-apocalyptic climate ravaged landscapes and things like that. Which I love books like that. That's not what I write so I have a love-hate relationship with the term climate fiction because it is a category that's gaining momentum more people understand what it is and I think it's a very valid classification. I sometimes think it's more of a category under other genres like you can have climate fiction in mystery, you can have climate fiction in young adult or even in romance or thrillers or literary. So I like to think of it more as a subcategory, not a genre of its own, if that makes sense.

Lee Schneider (02:48.971)
Yeah, definitely. It seems, though, that it's an important time to be writing whatever we want to call it, climate fiction or writing in this genre or subgenre, because it seems to me one of the most important ways to get people to care about the earth and want to help and deal with climate, the climate catastrophe that's soon to be upon us or maybe already is. Have people really understand what we might lose and what we might gain. Does any of that resonate with you and would you use that in inspiring someone to write this kind of in this genre?

Julie Carrick Dalton (03:32.665)
Yeah, that 100% sounds exactly like the way I think. So when I wrote The Last Beekeeper and I turned in the first draft to my editor, she sent me back a note and she said, Julie, you write about bees the way some people write about or talk about puppies. And she's like, you need to understand, not everybody thinks bees are adorable or amazing or wants to hug a bee the way they want to hug a puppy. And so she's like, you need to understand that not everybody feels this way. So I took that on as a challenge. That was my goal with writing The Last Beekeeper was I wanted people to love bees. I wanted people to love them, to see them, to understand the impact they have on the world. I mean, if we lost all of our pollinators, you know, bees are just one of many pollinators, but if we lost them, you know, we would lose a third of the food on planet Earth.

That's a big reason to care about the bees, but beyond that, I mean, they're amazing creatures, just inherently in their own right. Like, they're amazing mathematicians, and the geometry of a honeycomb is so precise. They have amazing GPS skills built into their little bodies. They just have incredible qualities about them that I love. I'm a beekeeper, so to me, these things are really amazing to me. But I had to wrap my mind around that other people don't feel that way. So I wanted to create a character in this book, Sasha, who so loved bees that she almost felt like she had this almost mystical connection to bees, that she was one of them, or they understood her. So to give people a way to see the world through the eyes of someone who cared about the bees so much, not only because of the impact they'd have on our world, like if we lost a third of the food on the planet Earth, obviously, that would change everything from food security to economics and politics.

But I wanted my readers to love bees through Sasha's eyes just because she loved bees and to care about them as this integral part of nature that just deserved to exist in its own right. So that I think is maybe my mission in writing is to make people fall in love and to truly value these things. Because if you love something and you value it, you want to protect it, save it, and make sure it's there for the next generation.

Lee Schneider (05:41.473)
Hmm.

Lee Schneider (05:48.256)
I noted in your acknowledgments that you stood up for the adorability of bees. Got the last word in there on how adorable bees are. Well, you certainly feel it in the book. So this is a corollary question, but it's a bit of a balancing act, I think, in writing about a catastrophic future. This is 10 years.

Julie Carrick Dalton (05:53.848)
100%.

Julie Carrick Dalton (05:59.203)
They are.

Lee Schneider (06:15.469)
The book takes place 10 years past a catastrophic event. And yet there's hope. The characters have hope. The characters, they're more than just muddling through and they're more than just surviving. I wouldn't call this a survival story. And I've read other climate fiction books that are literally about people hanging on by their fingernails. This is not like that. This is about maybe coping and looking at a new reality. What's that balance like for you in writing it? I guess a dumb question would be, is it depressing? Is it edifying? What are you feeling as you're navigating this balance?

Julie Carrick Dalton (06:56.088)
I think a lot of it comes down to hope. I have a lot of hope and optimism for the world and I don't mean in a Pollyanna way that I think all of a sudden climate change is going to get better. I don't think that. But I have hope that we can live within it in some way. I think the reason I can have optimism and hope and the reason my characters do, I think, is I do not expect us to go backward. I don't expect us ever to be the way we were pre-industrialization, pre-fossil fuels. I do think that we have the possibility of protecting as much as we can going forward. And I think we have the capacity to make changes that could affect our future. If I didn't have any hope, I wouldn't have anything to fight for. But I think that hope can have a lot of different definitions. Like hope to me doesn't mean going back to the way it was. It doesn't even mean believing that things are going to stay the way they are now. It means loving what's left and protecting what is left and doing the best we can for our future and being willing to adapt, like understanding that things might not look the way in the future the way they are now, but that doesn't mean there's nothing left to love. Like I've used this example before, but I think a lot about like an example of a hummingbird feeder. There's a lot of people who love birds and are big bird watchers and put out a hummingbird feeder. My mother-in-law is big into her hummingbird feeder.

Lee Schneider (08:20.631)
Hmm.

Julie Carrick Dalton (08:23.53)
If every year you had 20 or 30 hummingbirds, they'd come to your feeder every year and you just love these hummingbirds and you're so excited when they show up every year, and then one year you put it up and only five hummingbirds come back. The climate's changed or their habitat has changed or for whatever reason. You have some choices. You could give up and not put up the feeder anymore. You could be full of rage and anger at all the things that have happened that caused the collapse of this hummingbird population, or you could love the heck out of the five hummingbirds that are left. You could do everything you can to protect those five hummingbirds instead of looking back and being paralyzed by grief for the hummingbirds you lost. You can focus your energy on what is left and what is good. And there is so much good left. Like those five hummingbirds are amazing, beautiful creatures. So I think it's a choice we have to make of like not getting absolutely there are things to grieve and things to be fearful of. I'm not ignoring them. But I don't, if we give into the paralysis of grief and fear and rage, we don't see those five hummingbirds that are still left and how amazing they are. And that's how I truly do think I walk through the world. Like I think I want to see all the good that's left and protect it. And I think it's a battle to fight against that tendency to lean into grief and rage.

Lee Schneider (09:43.598)
That gives me a clue to the answer to my next question was I was thinking about the word that came to mind in the characters was stoicism, but I think I'm revising that a bit. You, you're a beekeeper, you farm. I imagined you know what these characters would go through. I'm reading the book and saying, oh my God, what if there's no Wi-Fi? It put me, you know, in the beginning of the book, I was like, you know, I'm a tech guy. I live in a tech world and I love nature and we're hikers. And, you know, we this is something that's we're close to here in California. But at the same time, I was really examining where I was on that scale of grief, acceptance, even knowing what to do. These folks in the book, they occupy a very special place of They're not really preppers, although maybe the previous generations were preppers. They're kind of, it's more than coping. So maybe you could help me out here about like, what is their attitude and what would be a productive attitude for people to have if we're 10 years after a major climate event like this?

Julie Carrick Dalton (10:57.332)
Yeah, so in the book, four main characters in the book, Sasha is the main character and then she's these friends, Gino, Ian, and Hallie. And for the majority of the book in the adult timeline, they're squatting in this farmhouse and they have no running water. They don't have, you know, they're not hooked up to the grid. They don't have wifi. And for me, locating them in this kind of isolated place and they're also not like in the middle of the neighborhood. They're kind of in this remote area that I stripped away all those conveniences you talk about. I took away the Wi-Fi. I took all that away from them and that they have to kind of relearn how to live in the world because we don't know how to live in the world. If all those things were taken away from us, how would we, like, would you know how to get food? Would you know how to feed yourself or source water or, you know, all these things that we as humans are so disconnected from now? So I wanted to remove all those barriers and put them in this, that they have shelter in this house, but everything else they have to source on their own. And it was actually really fun for me to write this because the farmhouse in the book is my grandparents farmhouse. Like as I was writing it, I was walking through the rooms in their farmhouse on their property. And my grandparents farmhouse was in this little corner of Maryland and Appalachia out near West Virginia. And it never did have hot running water the whole time. They had an outhouse there until my father was 16. And even after they got a bathroom, it never had a shower or a bathtub. So my whole childhood, when I was at my grandparents, we had to heat water on a stove to fill a galvanized steel tub to take a bath. And we didn't have a telephone in the house. It was heated by a wood stove. And so a lot of things were already stripped away in that house in my memory. And so it was very easy to build on that. And my grandparents farmed. So I have a lot of knowledge and I also farmed, I have knowledge about plants and things you can preserve and how to, I'm a big, I like to cook and I like to grow and cook food that I grow. So I did have a lot of generational knowledge on how to do this. I don't think a lot of people do have that, the ability to forage food and find food in the woods or and fields to feed themselves in a crisis. So for me, it was really fun to inhabit these characters and let them loose in this wild space and kind of imagine like, would I, how would I survive? How would I feed myself? And that to me was like almost like a game. Like how would they get food? Where would they forage? How would they get water? How would they, it's kind of like a... It was almost like a survival game in my mind I was playing as I let them kind of live in. I didn't know how they were going to do it when I started the book. It was kind of this process of trial and error to see how they could survive.

Lee Schneider (13:53.038)
Do you think people need to recapture some of those skills? Is it going to be necessary?

Julie Carrick Dalton (14:00.728)
I think if I said I thought it was going to be necessary, that's implying I think there's going to be some big apocalyptic event. I think it would be wonderful if people were more connected to where their food came from. And you know, when you buy things in the grocery store, they're usually coming from thousands of miles away in another country. I think it would be nice to think more about how local our food was, how to grow your own food, and how hard it is to grow food and to sustain yourself and to appreciate how I mean, I know food prices are more expensive than they have been historically, but how relatively inexpensive it is to have such a wide variety of food. And that's not how the world has been. You know, for most of human history, to have access to all this food all year round, I think is important. I don't want to say I think everybody needs to go out and start, you know, living off the grid and learning how to farm. But I think we should at least have an awareness of where the food is coming from and how precious it is that we have running water that's potable.

Lee Schneider (14:53.931)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Julie Carrick Dalton (14:56.696)
You know, I just don't think we have an awareness of it because we all grew up in a world where we didn't have to think about it. We all grew up in the grocery store and with running water that had fluoride and everything in it that we didn't have to think about these things because it was provided for us. So, yeah, so I don't want to say I think it's going to be necessary in the near future, but it certainly wouldn't hurt.

Lee Schneider (15:18.177)
Yeah, I agree totally with that. I was walking my 13 year old son to school yesterday and we were talking about the book and I was talking about a catastrophic network failure and he interrupted me and said, that's not going to happen. This is his view, just out of interest, the 13 year old view. That's not going to happen because the people who control those networks are very wealthy. They make too much money off those networks and off the people who use those networks. So they're just not going to let that thing go down. And I tried to argue with him and we ran out of time before we made it to school. But, you know, that generation at least is very they just believe in that everything's going to still be here, even if things and he's a reader of Neil Shusterman and much dystopian fiction. So it's it's in his mind.

Julie Carrick Dalton (16:11.532)
Yeah, I mean food security is, you know, you don't think of food security as a direct link to technology. But you know, if we lost a third to half of the food and that would exacerbate all the inequalities that exist on earth and the ripple effect, that's what this book really is. It's imagining the ripple effect of the loss of our pollinators. First it's big agriculture, it's food security, it's economics, it's employment, then it's housing. It's politics, it's global politics, would countries go to war over food security? And those things, that would unhinge everything. If global food security went into crisis, the technology is at risk too, because all of this is sustained at some level by humans at some point, and we rely on our food and water supplies. So we are more vulnerable than we want to think we are. It's nice to think we can't be vulnerable, but we are.

Lee Schneider (17:08.119)
Yeah, well, definitely an example for me was a few years ago during the pandemic, everything closed here, but the restaurant across the street opened up and he sold the executive chef out of that restaurant, sold out of his pantry what he had. He opened like a impromptu store. And that made me realize, first of all, how generous and valuable that was, but also my dependency on supply chain issues and things I hadn't even thought about, like what if, no, there's, you can't go out, you can't go into a large big box store to buy stuff. So that really woke me up to that. I wanted to bring up a very real sub thread in the book, which is the way governments manipulate information about the environment that is to their benefit to manipulate or, or, you know, it's a power grab.

Julie Carrick Dalton (17:45.378)
Yeah

Lee Schneider (18:04.909)
That we're seeing that now we're seeing websites being shut down. We're seeing Efforts to stop, you know wind farms. We're seeing EVs shut down, you know, EV rebate program shut down. There's all this manipulation and a lot of misinformation Do you think novels can help or should we be doing things like putting up alternative websites, like some people are doing, capturing all the information from scientists and putting it up on a website. What should be done about this?

Julie Carrick Dalton (18:42.614)
All of it. I think that my job as a storyteller is to tell these stories. My hope is that when people read my work, that something in it's going to resonate. That they're going to see reflections or echoes of our real world in these books. Are you familiar with Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler? Okay, so if you remember, there's a character named Octavia in my book.

Lee Schneider (19:03.691)
Yes, sure.

Julie Carrick Dalton (19:08.248)
She is Octavia Butler. I didn't just name her after Octavia Butler, like she is. Yes, I actually just flung her into the future and plunked her down the book because she's a real inspiration to me. Now she wrote that book in 1993. The book is set in the years between 2025 and 2027. So we right now are the people that Octavia Butler was dreaming of. And she put us in this world where California is burning. We have this super conservative government that's I mean, I think she uses the line, make America great again, in the book. It was prescient. Now, maybe we should have listened to Octavia Butler back in 1993, right? So I think novelists have an eye towards the future. Jeff VanderMeer, the author who wrote Annihilation, among other things, he once said, I'm going to butcher the quote, but it was something to the effect of he thinks of his novels as laboratories for climate futures.

Lee Schneider (19:42.007)
She does.

Julie Carrick Dalton (20:07.648)
So what he's saying is that his novels are a laboratory where he gets to play out a scenario of what a future might look like. And that's what I think all novels do. You know, they play out a way the world might be and shows you all the intricacies, all the emotional, you know, impacts of decisions, societal impacts of, you know, decisions or indecision or misinformation. And then we get to see what it looks like. And do we like it? Like, is that the world we want to live into? And if it's not, what are we going to do about it?

Lee Schneider (20:33.602)
Mm-hmm.

Julie Carrick Dalton (20:37.868)
So that's my job as a storyteller is to tell these stories and maybe expose these possible climate futures to readers so they can see themselves. So how would they live in that future? And if they don't want to live into that future, what are they going to do about it now? I'm not the one that's going to be putting up these alternative websites because that's not an area of my expertise, but somebody that is their area of expertise. Somebody is a climatologist that has this information. There are people in every field, like you name it. There is something you can do. If you work in construction, you can speak up about the sustainability of the materials and the sourcing materials. If you work as a receptionist in the doctor's office, you can speak up about how you're using materials and water use or the distance of the things that you're purchasing for the office, how far they're traveling to get. There's a role. So when you say, should we be doing this or this? It's like we should be doing all of it.

Lee Schneider (21:24.663)
Hmm.

Julie Carrick Dalton (21:35.865)
And I think that people can look in their own sphere of influence of whatever it is like you're doing. Like you are sharing stories, spreading information, asking questions, and bringing insights into people's homes to listen to and to think about. That we all have a role in there and to look at what is your sphere of influence and how can you make an impact in that sphere. It doesn't mean not everybody has to be standing on the state house steps with a microphone. Not everybody needs to be a scientist and not everybody needs to be writing novels, but we all have a sphere of influence within whatever chosen career or community we're in and we can exercise our power there.

Lee Schneider (22:15.757)
Yeah, the framework of that gets me thinking. I think about the phrase nature always wins and how it really made me consider, OK, what are the solutions to this? And do they involve cooperating with nature, understanding what nature is and does, or do they involve technical, technological solutions that kind of bend nature. You know, I'm kind of answering my own question. A lot of the problem of human activity on Earth has been we've been beating up nature. We haven't been a very good partner to nature. And what your book got me thinking about is that, you know, nature is pretty powerful and there's there could be some let's call it whiplash maybe or a correction that doesn't create an environment that we humans think is so terrific. So how are we going to deal with that? And that's kind of an extra human way of thinking about the whole issue.

Julie Carrick Dalton (23:19.544)
Yeah, so you know Richard Powers, he wrote The Overstory, and Playground. There's an article, an interview with him in New York Times, I maybe two years ago, and the interviewer said something to him, like, you seem to have so much optimism and hope despite all this doom and gloom climate. He's like, oh, I have so much hope. The world's going, the Earth is going to be fine. I mean, we won't be here.

Lee Schneider (23:43.661)
Yeah, right.

Julie Carrick Dalton (23:45.901)
But Earth is gonna be fine, nature is gonna be fine. So it's like there's layers of what you, you know how I said earlier, it's how do you define hope? Is it hope for the planet? Is it hope for the humans on the Earth? Is it hope for individual humans? You know, there's different ways to frame hope, but I think it's, I have like, it depends on, like I think for planet Earth, Earth's gonna be fine. It's gonna purge us if it needs to, you know, and we won't be here. And it's gonna reclaim, there's a wonderful book that came out, I believe in maybe April by an author named Tim Weed and it's called The Afterlife Project and in it, it has some time travel elements that project what the Earth is going to look like in 10,000 years post-humans. And it's a really beautiful book, a really beautiful meditation on nature and our interaction with nature. But so I agree with Tim Weed's vision of the future and Richard Powers' Earth is going to be just fine without us. But I also would like to stick around. I would like my grandchildren to be around.

And so I have fear for future generations or I worry about the quality of life and how we're going to adapt. But then on a lower level, I have hope for like the human spirit to adapt and make good decisions. I think that technology to me, and again, I'm not an engineer, I'm not an entrepreneur, technology I don't think is what's gonna get us out of it. I think it's making decisions that are gonna, you know, that we're not making about, you know, fossil fuel use, about regulations, I don't think. It's great to make decisions on a personal level, to recycle, make small things. I think that's very powerful and it's important to see people doing it. But I think we need more institutional changes. We need more legislation, regulation, international agreements. That's how we're going to avoid these tipping points that we're heading towards. So I have macro level. I have hope for the planet. I have fear for future generations. And I have hope, again, for our where we are right now, that we still have the capacity to avert the worst. I do not think we're going to go back.

I don't hope for that. But I do think we still have time to make meaningful decisions if we can get our act together, that's the challenge in front of us, which is why I think that everybody needs to be looking at where they are in the world and their sphere of influence and what could they do to influence others, to speak up, to engage in conversations.

Lee Schneider (26:08.085)
When people say we have to save the planet, I often respond just as you said, well, the planet's are going to be fine. What about humans? Yeah, what about humans?

Julie Carrick Dalton (26:16.436)
It's going to be just fine. Yeah. And I think, you you asked about the technology and adapting thing. Like we do a lot of things I think are really counterproductive, but I understand on a human level why we do them. Do we want to give up on New Orleans and Florida? Like I don't want to say like your home's not worth saving. But then I look at it logically, I look at the maps and I look at the projections of sea level rising in communities in Florida. And I'm from Maryland, there are communities on the eastern shore of Maryland that I'm like, these aren't going to survive. And putting money and resources into barrier walls that are maybe going to last a decade or two, is that a good use of resources? And when we could be moving inland and thinking more logically about adapting to the future. On the other side of that, I very much understand the emotional history involved in like, how do we give up on an entire community? So I don't have the answer to that. Those are things that are really challenging if you live in a place like that. But I think it's counterproductive to put billions of dollars into technology that ultimately is going to fail at some point in the future. It's not going to survive. So I think technology can't be our savior. I think we need to be thinking about adaptability, you know, about choosing to live in places and in ways that are going to be in, you know, in harmony with the future nature, not the past nature, and they're not the same.

Lee Schneider (27:35.031)
Yeah.

Lee Schneider (27:46.03)
Yes, well put. My 13-year-old son, again, his plan is that he wants us to buy land in Greenland. That's his future plan. He keeps pestering me.

Julie Carrick Dalton (27:55.065)
There you go. I've heard there's some other people who want to buy land in Greenland, I've heard. Yeah, so I mean, that thinking makes sense. You know, move where there's water, where the climate's going to be temperate, where there's land where you're not threatened by sea levels. There's maps available online of different places, of the whole world actually, of how the climate's going to affect it, whether it's drought, desertification of the southwest parts of the country, flooding in Florida and the eastern seaboard, that you can see like, I Michigan's looking pretty good. I'm gonna buy some land in Michigan or Minnesota or find these places that look less vulnerable. Makes more sense to me than putting a house on stilts on the outer banks of North Carolina. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Lee Schneider (28:01.773)
May have company out there.

Lee Schneider (28:08.941)
Mm-hmm, sure.

Lee Schneider (28:37.228)
Mm-hmm.

Lee Schneider (28:44.929)
Definitely. Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, but it is a hard decision. You're right What can you tell us about your third novel The Forest Becomes Her which is coming out next year and you don't have to give any spoilers But what are we going to look forward to there?

Julie Carrick Dalton (29:01.91)
Yeah, so I'm really excited about this book. I love all my books, I love all my children. But I think this is like my book. I think this is the book that's most personal, most like intimately more of me in this book. And it's about a piece of land in Concord, Massachusetts, which is very, I live in Boston, Massachusetts, so it's not far away. It's historically the home of like Emerson, Thoreau, Louise May Alcott. You know, Revolutionary War started there. It's got a lot of history tied up and it's also a very progressive, liberal city that prides itself on conservation and environmental activism. So in this book, there's a piece of land in Concord, centuries old, old growth forest that's clear cut to build a housing development. And it's about three women, multi-generational, one's 13, one's in her 30s and one's in her mid 50s, that are living on this land that's been clear cut for this new housing development and that they all, different reasons, which I won't tell you, have an emotional attachment to this piece of land. And maybe or maybe not are being haunted by the forest, whether it's in their heads in a trauma reaction or whether it's real, you'll have to figure that out. But that they're drawn to this piece of land and to the grief that the land is experiencing. And it's really kind of a metaphor for what a community loses when a forest disappears, beyond just that the trees are pretty, but all the things that it holds together under the soil and emotionally for a community. And the reason I set it in Concord, Massachusetts is because Walden Woods is in Concord, Massachusetts, very beloved American forest. That's not the forest I cut down, but that Concord is a place that a lot of people would say that would never happen. That would never happen in Concord, Massachusetts. So I made it happen in Concord, Massachusetts, because if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. And so it's really about our attachment and our connection to the land we live on and what we lose as a society and a community when we lose a piece of nature. And I think you can extrapolate that to the whole world. But it's not like this microcosm of Concord, Massachusetts.

Lee Schneider (31:16.501)
So we'll look forward to that coming out next year. I'm curious. What does your workspace your writing space look?

Julie Carrick Dalton (31:22.84)
So I can bounce around. Right now I'm in, I live in an apartment in downtown Boston and so this, I'm in my son's bedroom and I write in his room when he's at college. So that wall behind us with all my bookshelves, that's actually a Murphy bed. That wall spins around and when my son comes home from college, this becomes his bedroom and then I'm at the kitchen counter. So I'm quite flexible, but I am very fortunate that we have a family home in New Hampshire and that's where I've you know, farmed and I have extensive gardens and I'm much more out in nature that we spend a lot of the summer in New Hampshire. And we have this little, I have a little tiny one room writing cabin in our yard and it was built out of an old barn that was torn down. And it's a really, it's just old wood. You can kind of feel it and smell it. And it's just one little room and it's surrounded by woods. And it's, that is where I feel most writerly, I guess. You know, I write at the desk that my grandfather built sitting in the chair that was my grandmother's when she was a school teacher. You know, it feels like a room full of history, not only in the furniture and the decorations in it, but in the wood of this old barn that I don't know anything about it, but there's history in the beams and the... So that to me is where I love to write most.

Lee Schneider (32:39.969)
Wonderful. This is my wide angle question. What do you think is the state of publishing and writing today?

Julie Carrick Dalton (32:49.654)
Wow, that's a loaded question. It is a really shifting landscape. Even in the, I've only been in the publishing world and I signed a contract for my first book in 2019. It came out in 2021. So I'm still relatively new to this. But even since I joined the industry, it's changed a lot. It seems like there are a lot of novels being published every year, but more of them are coming out from smaller and independent presses and self-publishing. There's just a lot of quiet noise and a lot of small books and publishers seem to be anointing the big books with all the advertising. You know, the Stephen Kings and, you know, Kristin Hannah and people that are household names are taking a larger share. And I don't mean that against them personally. Their books are great, which is why people want to buy them. But the publishing houses are in general often pushing the chosen children of the season and then the rest of the books have to kind of fight for the little bits and pieces. And I don't think it was always, I mean, it was to a degree all that ways, but I think it's getting a little bit more separation between the big books and all the other books that are kind of fighting. It's hard to be a mid-list author right now. But I also feel really lucky to be part of this world. I wouldn't trade this for anything. I love being an author. I'm a professor. I teach at Drexel University and I lecture at a lot of other universities, I travel and do a lot of public speaking and I wouldn't trade this for anything. As frustrating as it can be sometimes trying to market your work. I wish I could just write my work, sit in my little writing cabin, write it and then just email it and then just go back and start the next book. But I have to be a marketer. I have to be a publicist. I have to, you know, I actually really enjoy doing podcasts like this. But it's part of my job now is to get out there and market myself and tell people about my books which I wish that wasn't part of my job that I needed to market myself. That said, I feel very lucky. My new books coming out from St. Martin's Press and I'm really excited to be working with them. I have a really great team there. So, you know, I just write the very best book I can and try to step out into the world as best I can and represent the book and cross my fingers because there's always a lot of luck. You you do your best work and you try to be the best person you can, the best literary citizen in the world you can and then toss it out in the world and cross my fingers.

Lee Schneider (35:13.101)
Well, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thanks so much for doing this.

Julie Carrick Dalton (35:18.107)
Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure.