Nina Schuyler’s new story collection In This Ravishing World (Regal House Publishing, 2024), which has received the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections, is stylistically innovative in ways that I continue to think about weeks after finishing it.
For one, the planet is a principal character and narrates part of every story in first-person. Schuyler has also transformed the subject of climate change—which for many of us is so overwhelming that it’s hard to think deeply about it for any length of time without descending into despair or fatalism—into a thrilling locus for her characters.
Schuyler has published several other books, among them the award-winning novels Afterword and The Translator and the craft book How to Write Stunning Sentences (a topic she continues to cover via her popular Substack newsletter, Stunning Sentences).
In This Ravishing World is an important book, and it was a special pleasure to be able to interview its author about its germination and eventual fruition. Our conversation was conducted via email.
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The Rumpus: Had you already cast the earth as a main character when you began writing this book, or did that come later?
Nina Schuyler: I began with Eleanor, a seventy-year-old environmental economist who is grief-stricken because, despite her many years trying to convince companies to internalize the externalized costs—polluting the air, the water, the soil—she and we find the magnificence of the earth collapsing. I wrote about fifty pages from her point of view and felt the spark die. There are times when the artifice of a story becomes too far from the truth, and this, I think, is why the desire to continue dissolved.
I was stuck. Days, weeks, a month went by. Then, after one of the many California wildfires, Governor Gavin Newsom said something like, “Well, Nature is talking.” That moved everything inside. And what would Nature say? What does it want to tell us? I began to imagine the voice of Nature, and in the early pages, Nature was so angry: all that has been lost and will be lost because of the Homo sapiens. What’s wrong with these creatures? I knew that wouldn’t work because Nature wants people to listen.
I told someone I was anthropomorphizing Nature, and he said, “Are you writing a children’s book?” Well, that threw me into the well of doubt until I listened to a YouTube talk by Ursula K. Le Guin, who basically said, “We’ve tried objectifying the nonhuman world, and look where it’s got us. Maybe we try to subjectify.”
Rumpus: One of the recurring themes in this book is that our anthropocentric way of seeing the world has led to its destruction; Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” paving the way to the subjugation of other life forms. The Old Testament’s “Man shall have dominion over all creatures” likewise has done the earth no favors. So many of these stories have animals—a zebra, a pit[bull] mix rescue—as important supporting characters. Do you find it more challenging to write them than human characters? My sense is that it’s second nature, no pun intended. Do you encourage your students to include animals as characters in their work?
Schuyler: I’m fascinated by the human–nonhuman relationship. I grew up in Washington state, in a household with three dogs, two cats, one bird, and a rabbit. We lived on a lake, and many of our afternoons were spent swimming, our black Lab, Terry, alongside us. Another dog spent long hours along the shore, fishing for minnows. They were our friends, our companions; it was a horizontal relationship. Now I live with two dogs, and they’re very much family members with distinct personalities and a full range of emotions. One of our dogs knows quite a few English words. I think these relationships throughout my life have helped me not objectify but search for sentience and grant them—rather than deny them—subjectivity.
I do think we’re in the midst of a profound paradigm shift. Though Charles Darwin wrote, “There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery,” most of the scientific community rejected that until now. It seems daily, I read about new scientific discoveries regarding animal intelligence and sentience. Through AI and recordings, we now know that bats are talking to each other. Elephants have names for each other, and there is growing consensus that bees are conscious. Human exceptionalism is being challenged, and with that, there’s a growing public outcry that it’s time to care for our fellow creatures.
In terms of teaching, I encourage my students to write whatever excites them, whatever lights that fire in them. If it happens to include or foreground the nonhuman, I’m all for it.
Rumpus: Each story is from the point of view of a different character, although Eleanor, the profoundly discouraged environmentalist mentioned above, is to some extent the focal character. In one way or another, the other POV characters are related to her, or their paths cross hers. Would you comment on your decision to tell a multivoiced story?
Schuyler: I teach an alternative plot class for Stanford Continuing Studies, and we explore other ways to tell a story beyond the traditional causation plot. The causation plot—we all know it because it’s in our bones and woven into our mythology—is a sequence of causally linked events that force the protagonist to deal with conflict, and ultimately, the protagonist transforms for the better. With this plot, there is a hyperfocus on the individual, which echoes and reinforces the Western mindset.
For the alternative plot class, I assign Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In this profound essay, she calls for stories other than the singular hero’s journey. She proposes a different shape to a story, a bag, a carrier bag, which, she suggests, was our first technology—a bag to carry berries and nuts and fish and rabbits. In the essay, there is a not-so-subtle judgment that the causation plot has run its course and, along the way, has done a lot of damage, “Man conquers earth, space, aliens, the future, etc… apocalypse, holocaust.”
When I wrote those early pages about Eleanor, I was in the causation plot model. It fizzled, and I eventually remembered I had all these other possible story structures, along with an image of a carrier bag. With a bag, you can easily fit a lot of people in it, and I really liked that image. It seemed the perfect structure for climate change, which is going to take a lot of people to solve it. The more I understand this book, the more I see it as writing fiction for social change. I’ve never done that before: create a book that seeks a concrete response from the reader beyond pleasure. I can hear Chekhov moaning, maybe even shouting, “The writer is like a judge to the jury! You’re obliged to submit the case fairly but let the jury decide,” which is something he wrote to a fellow writer. But with climate change, I find neutrality to be impossible. Sorry, Chekhov.
Rumpus: Although this book is described as a short story collection, it reads like a novel, in the vein of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kittredge and perhaps also Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, both of which I’ve heard readers describe as linked collections, novels, and story cycles. How did you ultimately decide on this book’s structure? Do you see it as a novel too?
Schuyler: Once I had this view of the story as a carrier bag, I think I stepped out of the dominant categories of novels and short stories. Eleanor is the main character in three stories, and two of these don’t end like a Chekhovian short story with closure and also an opening. Eleanor’s sections are wide open like a window letting in the breeze and letting out the stale air. When I finished, I considered whether I needed to close them somehow. But she’s one of the most grief-stricken characters, and she is waiting, hoping, and begging for something to come in through the wide opening and show her a way to keep going. In many ways, her sections are like chapters in a novel with unresolved conflicts that create propulsion.
Yet, other stories have more closure, like a Chekhovian-influenced short story. Then there is Nature’s first-person voice woven throughout, commenting, thinking, reflecting, and pleading. This voice aligns with the first-person omniscience, which was much more common in the nineteenth-century novel.
I like that the book doesn’t neatly fit into the standard categories because there is an implicit message that the old ways will not provide the way through this next step into the future. I highly recommend Amitav Ghosh’s book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. He says the modern form of the novel can’t accommodate improbable climate change events. I love what Rebecca Solnit says about the future: it has not yet been written. My strong sense is that the way it’s going to be written has to be different from the past.
Rumpus: Eleanor wins a major prize for her conservation work, but her personal view of her life’s work is that she has utterly failed. Were you thinking of Edward and Rachel Carson when you created her? Not that they were failures, but the pace of destruction of the natural world seems only to have accelerated since Carson and Abbey were alive.
Schuyler: I was thinking of my scientist friends, those in biology and ecology who know so much, who have a front-row seat to the worst of what’s happening to the planet. I don’t know how they do it. Every time I read about another collapse of the ecosystem or another species going extinct, I feel like someone punched me in the heart. The Prism Prize for Climate Literature judge who chose this book as the winner said the book spoke to her for many reasons, including as an older woman who, like Eleanor, is exhausted and discouraged after years of climate activism and writing.
My science friends kept telling me to write stories because facts don’t change behavior. They reminded me of the record Songs of the Humpback Whale. My mom used to play this record, usually in the summers, and these haunting, intimate songs floated through the rooms of our house. Whales singing! I learned the record became a multiplatinum hit and led to a global movement to stop industrial whaling. This record and that simple word “songs” collapsed the distance between people and whales, and that led people to care.
After one particularly bad environmental news event—I can’t remember which one—I fell into that paralyzing grief state, and my science friend said the only way forward was to act. So I started to write. By the way, that’s how those on the front lines keep going.
Rumpus: Eleanor’s son Ed is a ballet dancer, and her daughter Ava is a scientist, i.e., one is an artist and a dreamer, and the other a no-nonsense researcher. I loved that we had chapters from their POVs too. Their father/Eleanor’s husband, Arthur, is no longer alive. In previous drafts, did you write a story from his POV too? I was very curious about him.
Schuyler: Interestingly, I never tried to inhabit Arthur. I felt him and his presence in Eleanor’s life, as well as Ed’s and Ava’s. His voice and character come in through their memories. I know he is very nurturing and very mothering and psychologically astute. I think I wanted to complicate Eleanor’s grief. She’s deep in sorrow about the devastation of the earth, but there’s also the loss of her husband and best friend. I wanted to complexify her grief and not make it a neat line of causation to show the messiness of human motivation, which is a major theme of the book.
Rumpus: The book culminates in a tour de force of environmental activism and a kind of collective cri de coeur. It made me think of the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and her wide-ranging activism, especially in 2019 when she was very much in the public eye. Was she an inspiration for this book?
Schuyler: I think she’s part of an amalgamation, particularly her courage to stand up to incredibly entrenched forces—especially the fossil fuel industry—that are invested in the way things are and will fight to the end not to change them.
Another inspiration is my volunteer work for the nonprofit Children for Change. During his elementary school years, my son was a member. It’s student-run, with the children coming up with ideas for creating positive change and addressing climate change. We, the adults, help them. My god! The energy in that room! Here’s the value of youth and the ability to forge ahead without a sense of the immensity of forces working against you. Even if they sense the forces, which I think the Sunrise Movement does, you still fight like hell because it’s your future.
Rumpus: One of my favorite lines—there are so many!—is something Arthur says to Eleanor: “The measure of a good life is how well you care.” I see this as both a philosophy and a mandate. Eleanor is losing hope, but we see that changing toward the end. In This Ravishing World is a mitzvah, reminding us that we can change course. What should we do, today, this minute?
Schuyler: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes us human, and part of that thinking has involved taking philosophy classes, including Heidegger’s Being and Time. Heidegger posits that humans are not entities or beings but—the best I can put it, without resorting to his Germanic invented terminology—verbs. My professor summed it up like this: The human being is constituted by what matters to that being. Basically, what you choose to care about defines who you are. You are a being in the world, and what matters to you shapes the self.
All of this is to say that I hope the book encourages people to care about the planet and nonhuman beings and—this is the plea—to take action. Take individual action: recycle, eliminate or cut back on meat, limit or stop air travel. And take communal action by joining an environmental organization that’s doing good, effective work. Not only are you helping the earth, but it’s the best medicine for mental health.
Rumpus: You write a popular Substack newsletter, Stunning Sentences, which I’m guessing grew out of your 2018 book How to Write Stunning Sentences. How do you choose the stunning sentences you write about?
Schuyler: I read voraciously, and whenever I find a stunning sentence—a sentence that fills me with wide-eyed astonishment—I write it down. I’ve done this for years and years, all the way back to high school. I also have devoted, generous, passionate subscribers who send me sentences and recommend books that are stylistically interesting. One of the best things about writing this newsletter is finding this passionate group of sentence lovers. I feel like I’m at a huge banquet with good friends with the most delicious food.
Rumpus: If you don’t mind sharing a few words about it, what are you working on now?
Schuyler: I have a restless mind, so for each project, I set out to do something different from my previous projects. I’m writing about nature again, and it seems to be experimental-ish. And this time, I find myself in the world of magical realism, something I’ve never done before. I’m having so much fun!
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Author photograph by Bryan John Hendon
