Mary Annaïse Heglar is well known for her essays on climate change and social justice, but if you asked her childhood friends and family about her writing, they might tell you she was born to be a novelist. Hegler grew up in love with stories and eventually turned to the most important story of the present moment: the climate crisis.
In Heglar’s novel Troubled Waters (Harper Muse, 2024), a college-aged Corinne grapples with the grief of losing her brother to an oil tanker accident and anxiety over growing up in the era of global warming. Corinne’s family tries to understand her concerns while meditating on the civil rights struggles they grew up with. The novel weaves together stories of environmental disaster and Black resistance in an intergenerational tapestry with no easy answers.
I spoke with Heglar about her approach to gathering stories from family, her hopes for the climate fiction genre, and why she needed to let her book take a meandering path.
***
The Rumpus: How did you get into the issue of climate change? And then how did you come to this story in particular?
Mary Annaïse Heglar: I’ve always been a storyteller. Before I took on climate change in 2014, I was working at a social science research foundation. They did good work, but it felt like that work took forever to make a difference in the world. And climate change had always been in the back of my head as the scariest thing in the world. When I left that job, I decided I wanted to be working on the thing that scares me. I wanted to work on what I believed was the most important story of my lifetime. Later, in 2017, I realized I was experiencing climate grief. And I needed some sort of vehicle to process that grief. So I went back to the thing that I had always done in middle school, high school, and college: writing. Before then, I thought that I had effectively killed the writer inside of me. I thought she’d grown up, gotten a job, and stopped dreaming of silly things like writing novels. But in 2018, I started writing essays on Medium that I thought nobody would ever read. Turns out that it didn’t play out that way. I started publishing more essays, and from there I started podcasting and then got the idea for this book.
I don’t know if I can quite pinpoint the moment that I got the idea for it. A lot of people were telling me, “You need to write a book.” I wondered, “What book can I write? What do I need that much space to tell someone?” And I still don’t know that I need that much space to tell something. But I could think of things that it would take that much space to show. There’s a lot going on in Troubled Waters, but the main thing the novel illustrates is a generational rift between Black baby boomers and Black millennials. And there is this myth that climate change is the fault of previous generations, who were reckless and careless or even downright cruel. That doesn’t ring true for Black people. That sort of assumption about my elders and my ancestors was always just bewildering and outrageous to me. This is something I have alluded to in several of my essays, but I felt like I needed more room to really interrogate and dissect this problem.
Rumpus: A lot of this book centers around the college-aged Corinne, but you also dip into the perspectives of her uncle and grandmother. Did you intend to explore the older generation’s perspective in this book?
Heglar: Well, Corinne is the main character, but I wanted more wholeness. I wanted this cross-generational story to actually cross the generational borders through this family’s story. The book is about the Civil Rights generation and the climate change generation and the things that go unsaid between them. I believe what often goes unsaid is gratitude. This is a deeply personal family story for me. My aunt was a little girl who integrated the schools in Nashville, Tennessee. A lot of the book is based on true family history. And frankly, I had to fight to learn that history. It’s not easy for them to talk about it. You see the way that Cora [the grandmother] struggles to talk about it, even just to revisit it in her own head. There is this very deep trauma about her experience in the “white folks’ school.” A large part of the purpose was to revive that history and to explore it for myself. I believe that as a writer, your first audience is always yourself. You write a book to get over something. You read a book to get into it.
Rumpus: How else did you research and gather family stories to fill out some of these characters?
Heglar: I had some conversations with my aunt and with my mother, and they shared what they could. I had to supplement a lot of that with my own research. At first, it was a lot of Internet research. And then last summer, after I’d gotten the deal, I went to the archives in Nashville and did some hands-on research that was extremely illustrative. With my family, there was just so much lost because my aunt and my mother were children when this happened, so there was a lot that they didn’t know. And even the things that they knew, it seemed there were parts that they actively tried to forget or they couldn’t find the words for. So I had to dig deep.
From my trip to the archive, I was able to inform them of things they didn’t know. For example, my mother told me a story about hearing gunshots one night at the height of the tensions in 1957. The next thing she knew, she and her siblings were being carried out to a neighbor’s house. When she passed through the living room, she saw my grandfather and several other men from the neighborhood keeping watch with guns. When I was in the archives, I found an article in Redbook where my grandfather explained that someone had thrown rocks at the house next door, which belonged to another family that was participating in the desegregation movement. When I went to Nashville, I saw their old house. That area is preserved as a historic area, so everything’s the exact same as it was. Those houses were very close together, so it would have sounded like someone shot at the house. I was able to tell them, “This is what happened that night.” My family didn’t keep all of those news clippings. I had to go out and find them.
Rumpus: Any other family stories worth highlighting?
Heglar: There’s a story that my family always tells about my great-grandmother, Mama Ora, which, you will notice, rhymes with Cora. She used to make homebrew [homemade beer], and one day, she made a batch that she thought was bad, so she threw it out the back window, and a bunch of ducks came by and drank it. All the ducks got drunk and passed out, and Mama Ora was like, “Oh, no! Look at all these dead ducks. I’m not going to waste a dead duck. They’re not going to use these feathers.” So she plucked all their feathers. A little while later, she looked up, and there were a bunch of naked ducks walking around the backyard.
There are several of those stories floating around the book. They’re the stories that we pass down like medicine. It’s not difficult for me to get my mother, my aunt, their whole generation to talk to me about their childhood in this way. They just will tell these stories that are absolutely hilarious. Then they’ll gloss over the story about school desegregation and things that were more difficult. When I asked about those stories, it was like, “Go play with dolls.” Or, “Go watch a movie if you want to know what happened.” That’s mirrored in the novel. You will see, in one of the earlier chapters, Harold mentions how Cora always talked about her childhood dog named Dandy. My mother had a dog named Dandy. I feel like I know everything about that dog—everything. And I love those stories. I think they’re hilarious. I love it when my mother tells them over and over and over again. But I also wanted to know about my family’s part in the Civil Rights Movement. So I wanted to pay tribute to that practice of passing down family stories. I wanted Corinne to be able to tell Cora’s lighthearted childhood stories like she was there, just like I can tell my mother’s childhood stories, like the time a chicken stood on my aunt Jackie’s head. I laugh at that story like I was there. I was not even born.
Rumpus: Did you also have to do any research into climate change, or did you already have enough knowledge based on your experience?
Heglar: Oh, no, there are plenty of things that I researched, even things that I thought I knew. Like the 2011 Mississippi flood that opens the book. And the 1927 flood that Corinne is obsessed with. I had to research what the weather was like in those years in Oberlin and New Orleans and Port Gibson. What were winters like in Oberlin and summers in New Orleans? I went to college at Oberlin ten years before Corinne, and things have already changed. And I had to look into the different sorts of laws she would have had to confront regarding her protest. I had to research what the inside of a jail looks and feels and smells like. I had to re-research how oil was being transported in 2014 and why. And so many other things that I’m forgetting.
Rumpus: Was it hard to get back to writing fiction after a career in nonfiction?
Heglar: No. Fiction is where my love of writing started. I didn’t get inspired to write essays until college, when I got introduced to authors like James Baldwin, who showed me that you can be memoiristic and play with language. Before that, I thought I hated essay writing. Once I started to learn how to use those storytelling devices in nonfiction, I started to like it. I will say I’ve never published fiction. But if you met anybody who knew me in high school or college and you told them I was writing fiction, they would be like, “Oh, makes sense. True to form.”
Rumpus: What sort of fiction stories did you write when you were younger?
Heglar: I always wrote about Black people in Black spaces. When I was much younger and just starting to write, I would write about places that I didn’t have a lot of experience with. For example, for some reason, I was writing about Detroit a lot, or New York, because I was reading a lot of literature from the Great Migration or Harlem Renaissance. And then as I grew older, I was writing stories about places not dissimilar from this, about Alabama, about Mississippi, all places where I grew up.
Rumpus: You have three different book deals with three different publishers: a children’s book that was just published, Troubled Waters published in May, and a collection of essays out next year. How has your process differed in writing these?
Heglar: With the essay collection, I’m in the editor’s seat. It’s more like being a director than anything else. With the children’s book, I wrote the first draft in a day because a children’s book is basically a poem. I wrote it when I realized I was going to leave New York City and, therefore, leave my young nephew who lived there. I realized that I might not be around when he started asking hard questions, like about why the world is changing. The novel was out on submission at the time, and so I needed to do something to deal with my nerves.
Rumpus: How has the publication process differed?
Heglar: One way in which they were all similar is that my agent was just really a champ. In the early days, when I was in the process of choosing an agent, people wanted me to write nonfiction because that’s what would sell for someone like me with an essay background. But my agent was like, “We’re going to write the story that you want to write.” When I came to him with a children’s book, he had never been the agent for a children’s book before, but he was like, “Let’s try it.” He held my hand the whole way.
I probably would have noticed a lot more differences if it hadn’t been for his partnership and guidance, really. But they are very different to publish. I had no idea a children’s picture book took that long to produce. It makes a ton of sense when you think about it because of all the artwork, but at first, I couldn’t believe it wouldn’t publish until 2024. I couldn’t picture the world in 2024. We’re still here, though.
Rumpus: What was the most difficult part of writing Troubled Waters?
Heglar: The whole process felt like pouring my heart out, and that felt really vulnerable at different points, especially in the editing process. It’s a story that evolved kind of like a pot of gumbo, the way that I needed to let it sit and then come back to it and then re-edit it. I needed to go through different phases in my life. I moved twice while writing this novel: once from the South Bronx to Harlem, and then another time from Harlem to New Orleans. It was definitely humbling to move to New Orleans and be back in the South with Mississippi right there because I realized how many things I needed to change. Chief among them: I am horrendously, directionally challenged. There were so many times I had the wrong directions, like going “down” to Mississippi from New Orleans. That’s physically impossible. There are many similar things like that, too embarrassing for me to list in an interview. But the book took the path that it needed to take.
Rumpus: And what did you do when writing felt too difficult? Did you have a process for dealing with climate grief?
Heglar: I took a break from it. There was a period where I didn’t work on it at all. I had revisions that I needed to do, and I just didn’t do them for a year because I had hit a profound period of burnout. I wrote an essay about it in New York magazine last December, and that was very real. Keep in mind that as I was writing this, I was holding a full-time job, teaching a course, running a podcast, and writing essays. I went through a period where I couldn’t read straight because I was so horribly burnt out.
Writer’s block is really frustrating. It’s almost physically painful when you’re going through it, but when you come out of it, you realize how much you gained in that period where you thought you were doing absolutely nothing, how much was marinating inside of you. Once the fog cleared and I started to come out of it, I leaped back into the manuscript with so much joy. So many things that I had absorbed when I thought I was being lazy turned out to be incredibly useful.
Rumpus: Do you have any other fiction books in you?
Heglar: Troubled Waters sold in a two-book deal. This novel is about the Mississippi. Mississippi, I often say, is my heart, but Birmingham is my soul. So for the next one, I want to go back to Alabama, and I want to deal with, among other themes, what land means for Black people, and what returning to the land can mean for us, and what land ownership meant for Black people of a certain generation.
Rumpus: Do you hope to see more books tackling climate change in various ways? Do you have thoughts on the climate fiction genre?
Heglar: I think the climate fiction genre is more expansive than people realize. Even more than I want to see more books that explicitly tackle climate change, I want more recognition for the books that do so implicitly. I think Jesmyn Ward does an amazing job in her three novels: Salvage the Bones; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and Let Us Descend. All of those are tackling climate themes. Probably not as explicitly as I’m doing in Troubled Waters, but it’s there, and I think it’s very valuable. I would like to see more books that deal with it indirectly, even if they don’t say the words “climate change,” just acknowledging the types of storms and fires that we’re seeing in this world today. You don’t have to go into projections. You don’t have to go into data and charts. We don’t need to hit people over the head that hard. But I also think people are doing that, and because it’s not set in 2050 or it’s not attempting to solve climate change, then we say it’s not a climate story, but it often is.
***
Author photograph courtesy of Mary Annaïse Heglar
