On a Small Press Book Getting a Second Life

& the increasing relevancy of climate-based fiction

It is rare that a small press book gets a second life. Actually, it’s rare that any book gets a second life.

I am overjoyed to announce that The Glass City, a collection of climate fiction that won the Press Americana Prize for Prose in 2017, was re-released by Press Americana (Hollywood Books International) with a new cover and a new foreword.

Before I discuss what it was like to go back and revise published work, I am including the new cover below and an extract from the foreword that the brilliant and acclaimed poet, Sheila Black, wrote.

The original 2017 cover depicts the Toledo, Ohio landscape. Toledo is also known as “The Glass City,” which is examined in the namesake story.

This is the revised cover. Buy it here *ALL 2023 ROYALTIES go to ONE TREE PLANTED.

From Sheila Black:

We are on the cusp of something unimaginable. That is how wrapping our minds around the planet in global warming often feels. Which is why, as Amitav Ghosh has famously noted, given the urgency of the crisis, it is astonishing how little of it has thus far entered our fictional worlds. In his work The Great Derangement, Ghosh reflects on why this is so. He argues that part of the problem is that the catastrophic and unpredictable nature of climate change seems to make a mockery of the kinds of structured plots and epiphanies and character arcs that serious fiction depends on. He explains that “in the era of global warming, nothing is really far away; there is no place where the orderly expectations of bourgeois life hold unchallenged sway. It is as though our earth had become a literary critic and were laughing at Flaubert, Chatterjee, and their like, mocking their mockery of the ‘prodigious happenings’ that occur so often in romances and epic poems...these are not ordinary times: the events that mark them are not easily accommodated in the deliberately prosaic world of serious prose fiction.”

Yet Ghosh also argues – for me, very movingly – that neither is science fiction nor magical realism entirely equipped to prepare or console or teach us how to live through this complicated time. He states, “But there is another reason why, from the writer’s point of view, it would serve no purpose to approach them in that way: because to treat them as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling – which is that they are actually happening on this earth, at this time.”

As I read Jen Knox’s stories in The Glass City, this phrase from Ghosh keeps knocking around my head: “actually happening on this earth, at this time.” The reason I keep repeating it under my breath is that Jen Knox has somehow managed to combine the serious attention to the real, the deep facticity of great prose fiction as we have known it, with precisely the science fiction or magical elements that our time – this remarkable and terrifying age of miracles – seems to demand.

…

Put simply, reading The Glass City allows me to grasp with a more whole self what I see unfolding with my own eyes. For example, here where I write this in San Antonio, we are experiencing a heatwave, with seventeen days over 100 degrees in the last month, the hottest June ever on record. When I go into my garden, only the sunflowers are hanging on without water; each day another plant shrivels up and just gives over. Yet the stories in this book are not about despair, they are about the moments, like feeling the water in the hose in my yard go from bathtub hot to cool again as it trickles over my hands. One of the stories is about the sisters who trust the knowledge, and the muscle memory they carry in their hands and fingertips:

“They folded dough and eyed wax paper lined with their homemade truffles, prepared to instruction. They baked cookies and scones, mixed batters, and blasted French pop music as customers, one by one, began to line up in anticipation. The smells of fresh breads and sweet creams, of chocolate eclairs and almond macarons, enveloped the sisters.”

There is not a story in this book that does not evoke its particular landscape with thrilling immediacy and intensity, so we understand a little more what it is to be here, to see and listen and feel what is “actually happening on this earth, at this time.”

Sheila Black is the author of All the Sleep in the World and Iron, Ardent

Thanks to Sheila. Also, as a writer distanced from my own work, I wanted to discuss questions I myself have about the text. Because I wrote this book as a different person.

The pre-2017 me wanted to better understand my own reaction to the implications of climate change through the lens of fantastical fiction.

While it was a delicious challenge to revise the book years after it was released, our perilous situation on this planet has become less like fiction and more like reportage. Meanwhile, the planet is resilient. As are humans—when we have to be. We can come up with solutions and will, no doubt.

Right?

If you are a writer and can rummage up old work, truly old work that a former version of yourself completed, you’ll see that in some sense we are more often than not mystically clear about the general direction things are headed. I returned to this work with a scalpel and a few sets of generous eyes who found the human error in the last edition. (It’s always there if we look hard enough.) But I also returned to it wondering how much of the magical elements might’ve been seeking a solution.

Perhaps climate change, or global weirding, is a larger call, more filled with magic and power than we can realize. Perhaps it’s a call that beckons us in a stern but loving voice that if we don’t move forward on our own, we’ll be pushed.

Back to my regular rantings next week. I’m writing something about quantifying and the unquantifiable and death.

In the meantime, check out the book. It’s very different than my lit-witch novel, WAU. Still magical and still odd, it is a collection of questions I had years ago. And while this former me was an entirely different writer, her questions remain.

In community,