Interview by Catherine Parnell
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOEANN HART, AUTHOR OF ARROYO CIRCLE (Green Writers Press)

In her latest novel, Arroyo Circle, JoeAnn Hart explores the climate crisis. What does it mean to address climate change and our complicity in today’s world and today’s political climate? Here, she discusses issues raised in her eco-fiction novel with writer and editor Catherine Parnell.

Parnell: I always wonder–how do you tell a story that makes climate change urgent? Or that makes science seem human? 

Hart: A climate change story is like any story, where urgency is created through the conflicts and struggles of the characters, with the added stressors of climate change. Wildfires, floods, and drought have a way of escalating urgency and making any situation worse. As in any story, characters have goals and desires, and these are more easily thwarted in the face of natural disasters. The characters need not recognize that their troubles are the consequences of human-caused climate change, but by the end of the story, the reader should. A reader might even reflect upon their own complicity. As for science, it’s made human when it’s given a human face. If a character is a scientist or has a deep interest in science, they can use that knowledge to solve or explain the many issues in the story brought on by climate change to the other characters, all of whom are in deep trouble. By tapping the emotions, technical information is transformed into practical knowledge for the reader as well. Science in fiction is best understood through the scrim of a character, not a dry recitation of facts plugged into the text. 

Parnell: Your book falls in the eco-fiction genre, populated by the likes of Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future) and Richard Powers (Playground). What would you say is the hallmark of good eco-fiction? Is it dire or hopeful? Or is it a shot across the bow?  

Hart: There is a difference between eco-fiction, which centers the changing climate in today’s world, and speculative fiction, which is set in a near future that is greatly changed by the dire consequences of climate change. Playground is eco-fiction and Ministry is speculative, and they are both excellent books, with interesting characters and plot. Arroyo Circle falls in the eco-fiction camp, since it is set in current times fraught with environmental disasters. Although I have written a small bit of dystopian fiction, which offers no hope, I believe in throwing the reader a lifeline with a promise that even though there is so much on Earth that is already lost (in the last half-century the planet has lost about 70% of its wildlife, and more than a million species are nearing extinction), much can still be saved if we fight for it. And in order to fight for it, we must love it first. Writers can help instill that love.

Parnell: If you could tell people one thing about the climate crisis what would it be? 

Hart: The climate crisis is not something looming in the future. It is here, and it’s just beginning. We are already suffering from the effects of a warming planet, with fires, floods, droughts creating suffering not just for humans, but for all living things. The scary thing is, even if we start to lower our carbon output today, climate operates on a time delay. The extreme weather we have now was triggered by carbon added to the atmosphere thirty years ago. So, we have to hunker down and make plans about what needs to happen right now to mitigate the damage, and then take preventative measures for the future.  

Parnell: You attended Bennington College’s MFA in Writing and studied with a host of writers. Who had the most profound influence on your work?

Hart: I studied with Lynn Freed, Doug Bauer, George Packer, and Lucy Grealy, along with the input from other workshop leaders, and then my final reader Susan Cheever. They all had an impact on my work, but I’d have to say that Lynn Freed’s words have stayed with me. That might be because she was my first instructor at Bennington, or it might be that she told us that if we see some bit of writing that we love, just steal it. I hear her voice every time I shamelessly lift a few words from another writer. 

Parnell: Beginning with your first book, Addled, it was clear the environment and our connection to it settled consciousness and was uppermost in your mind. How did you foster that focus during your time at Bennington?

Hart: I’ve been an environmental activist since high school, since the very first Earth Day in 1970. The protection of the natural world is a core value I have always carried with me, reflected, I hope, in everything I do or write about. Bennington helped to train my focus, especially with my reading life, and that helped make me a better writer. That door swings both ways. Being a better writer means better focus. 

Parnell: How were you interested in situating the novel inside the larger narrative arc focused on the unfolding climate crisis, especially where the narrative explores the effects of hoarding – perhaps that’s a metaphor for how we manage/mismanage the world’s resources?

Hart: Definitely. We are in the climate crisis because we are living in a story of accumulation, always striving for more. Hoarding, which I am a little too familiar with, always seems to me like late-stage capitalism. All the accumulated stuff is killing us and the planet, and we just can’t seem to stop. As Les says in Arroyo Circle, “Where an animal simply acts, a human first decides what it wants. But there’s no limit to what we want.”

Parnell: The book is a melange of characters. Talk a little bit about how you create characters and how you set them in motion.

Hart: It is hard to describe how a character appears in the imagination. For me, they seem to arrive fully formed to meet the moment. There is sometimes a real-life person that my characters are seeded from, but never modelled on. Characters have their own lives and can’t be forced into someone else’s. They can only be themselves. For instance, I started writing Arroyo Circle in 2017, right after my brother died. He was a homeless alcoholic for much of his life and, in my grief, I wanted to be around him for a while longer, and maybe even write myself into a perspective of what it was like to be him. One of my main characters, Les, is a homeless alcoholic, but he is also a shape-shifting former NOAA scientist, which my brother definitely was not. And yet, Les was a great comfort to me during the years of writing the novel. Other characters, like Shelley, evolved from a single anecdote I knew about someone who lived in Boulder. She put kitty litter in the trunk of her car, and someone reported to the police that she put a baby in the trunk. Shelley is not that person. Shelley is Shelley. Mimi in the novel is a hoarder, but she is not the hoarder I know. Knowing a hoarder gave me a great deal of knowledge about them. The rest of the characters appeared on an as-needed basis and evolved into their own persons when they stepped into their spots on the page. 

Parnell: Your publisher is Green Writers Press. I’m curious about your publishing history and the various presses you’ve worked with, especially since we’re in the heyday of small and independent presses.

Hart: Are we in the heyday? I worry that since the sudden closure earlier this year of SPD – the longtime distributor for many small and independent presses – some will not survive. But yes, I’m with Green Writers Press for Arroyo Circle and we are a very good match. They are a woman-owned publisher out of Vermont who aims to build awareness about the climate catastrophe. That’s me. My last book, Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, is a collection of short environmental and animal fiction. It won the 2022 Hudson Prize and was published by the contest’s sponsor Black Lawrence Press, another woman-owned press with strong values. The book before that was my crime memoir, Stamford ’76, A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s, which was picked up by the University of Iowa Press. You don’t think of academic presses publishing crime memoir, but they are branching out in all sorts of genre, trying to fill the gap that the Big Five are neglecting. The book before that, Float, a dark comedy about plastics in the ocean, was released by boutique-sized Ashland Creek Press which specializes in environmental and animal fiction. My first book was Addled, a novel about an invasion of Canada Geese at an upscale country club. It was published by Little, Brown. So I’ve been published by a big press, a variety of small presses, one through a contest, and an academic press. 

Parnell: How did you choose the cover for your book? Why a shopping cart?

Hart: I was lucky to be very involved in the cover design. Every press is different that way. I had no say with Little Brown or the University of Iowa Press, and substantial input at all the others. For Arroyo Circle, Green Writers Press did a number of mock-ups, some with hawks carrying baby carriers, others with moody wildfires, but I was drawn to the abandoned shopping cart in the creek. For one, the cart plays a critical part in the novel, and two, it is often used by the unsheltered to cart their things around or for storage. But most of all, the cart represents our obsession with shopping and with our over-reliance on material goods to make ourselves feel good or to attain status. On its side, in the creek, is where late-stage capitalism belongs. 

Parnell: Finally, as we close out this conversation, what’s the best writing advice you’ve received? And what would you tell emerging writers?

Hart: Read. Read a wide range of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Discuss what you’re reading with other readers. Ask what they’re reading. Words on the page make you think and can stimulate the imagination. Reading will improve your writing and might even motivate you to sit down and write. Besides, as Lynn Freed suggested, reading a great many books will make it easier to find amazing words and phrases to steal. 

JoeAnn Hart is the author of Arroyo Circle, a novel of reclamation in a time of loss, published by Green Writers Press. Other books include the prize-winning environmental fiction collection Highwire Act & Other Tales of Survival, the crime memoir Stamford ’76: A True Story of Murder, Corruption, Race, and Feminism in the 1970s, as well as Float, a dark comedy about plastics, and Addled, a social satire. Her short fiction and essays have been widely published, appearing in The Common, Slate.com, Orion, Terrain.org, and others. Through the power of fiction, she writes about the pervasive and widespread effects of the climate crisis on the natural world and the human psyche.

Catherine Parnell is an editor, educator, co-founder of MicroLit, and the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, reviews, and interviews in LEON Literary Review, Cutleaf, Funicular, Litro, Mud Season Review, Emerge, Orca, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines and journals.