Technology exists to make our lives easier and more convenient, or at least that was the common adage decades ago when AOL first appeared in our homes. Seemingly overnight, people were able to connect online with loved ones and strangers regardless of their geographic distance. Our fingertips quickly learned to create hearts with the less-than sign followed by the number three: <3 The internet gave us wings and allowed us to travel through time zones to be with anyone anywhere, so long as we both had a modem.
Questions of travel, technology, love, and sacrifice are at the heart of Anita Felicelli’s third book How We Know Our Time Travelers (Wtaw Press, 2025), a collection of speculative short stories. In these wildly imaginative tales, characters travel the world after a nuclear fallout, find meaning in creating art, and race against time and reality to be with the people they love. These stories feature droughts, rising tides, wildfires, and other calamities associated with our very real and rapidly accelerating climate crisis. But what happens when the holograms stop obeying, or a beloved is romanticized beyond recognition? Who or what is left to hold? Felicelli’s stories skew the line between illusion and reality.
Felicelli and I exchanged numerous emails about her collection, her love of language, and the beauty of our struggles on earth. This interview was conducted prior to the wildfire outbreaks that swept the Los Angeles area in January 2025.
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The Rumpus: Many of your stories take place on a beach. I’m thinking of “Until the Seas Rise,” “The Fogcatchers,” and the beach scene in the last story. I know you live in California, but talk to me about the role of beaches in this collection.
Anita Felicelli: I’m interested in the coast as a kind of threshold to entering what’s mysterious and uncontainable—ancient, vengeful in one mood and serene in another. For me, West Coast beaches, starting around Big Sur and traveling north through Newport in Oregon, are places where you can obtain total solitude and, with that, the deep and profound sense that the world is much larger than humans. But I think regardless of what part of the coast you land on, an atmosphere of limitlessness pervades. With the stories in this collection and the kinds of description I prefer, I was trying to access that sensation of limitlessness, the moodiness of the ocean, how it can go dark in a flash.
Many contemporary or academic American short stories eschew setting, along with animals. Instead, things or objects are used to evoke a tone in the story. For me, a refusal to engage nature speaks to how detached our society is from the power of what’s natural and interconnected, as opposed to what capitalism wants to hand us, which is more and more material stuff that makes us lonely and alienated. One of this book’s concerns is environment—specifically natural environment and climate change and our collective failures to protect what’s natural in favor of human-made structures.
Rumpus: Technology plays such a pivotal role in this collection. What did you learn from writing stories like “Keeping Score” and “Assembly Line?”
Felicelli: I did invent various technologies for this book—I’m thinking of technology in the broad sense of tools to carry out human intentions. Perhaps, in some sense, I was trying out their dramatic possibilities. Those stories were probably the most entertaining for me to write. As a child, I’d read speculative fiction in the vein of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” and I think “Keeping Score” and “Assembly Line” are two that move in that direction of atmospheric speculation, that ask questions about the worst-case scenario when humans use those tools.
“Assembly Line” now includes technology, but it began long ago as a story I wrote for a workshop in college. That story, “The Green Wall,” was about first love and obsession. I was interested in the difficulty that men I knew then had in moving on from their idealized first girlfriends, or to speak in more universal terms, how warped we can become when we keep burnishing a memory. The protagonist was a dancer in the comic ballet Coppélia, in which a doctor makes a life-sized doll with whom a villager falls in love. She discovers that her boyfriend is dating her because she can be made to look like his first love. “Assembly Line” and “The Glitch” look at what if people could make copies of what they loved. What if nobody had to deal with loss and grieving but could simply replace other people with their doppelgangers? Since I’d already explored a realist version of the story, with “Assembly Line” I felt freer to go deeper and zanier on the concept of a replicant and the Freudian uncanny—how would we know whether we are replicants—than I would have understood how to do with “The Green Wall” when I was twenty.
Similarly, “Keeping Score” allowed me to explore my distaste for quantification and metrics. Is there a more annoying word in literature than data (unless you are a Star Trek fan)? I find people’s desires for self-improvement—including my own—very funny. Things like: “Let’s see if we can intermittent fast our way into happiness.” Or, “Surely Cosmo’s five ways to please your man will make our sex lives better.” It happens that I invented a relationship-improvement technology, but really people have been trying to get some kind of concrete handle on their romantic lives and what makes a good relationship for far longer than apps have existed.
Rumpus: Do you plan to continue to delve into the role of technology in your future fiction? Which writers, filmmakers, or other artists do you think are portraying technology in interesting ways right now?
Felicelli: Since I live in the Bay Area, it’s likely I’ll keep writing about technology, particularly ones that seem entirely speculative elsewhere in the country but are already becoming a reality around me. That’s not because I love or hate technology but because those tools form the background material of my personal life. When realist writers eliminate or subdue technology, I tend to feel like they are creating a fantasy space. There is nothing wrong with fantasy spaces, but it’s incongruous to call something realistic that doesn’t bear a relationship to most people’s late capitalist realities of using tools to do pretty much everything, even things that can be better done or more lovingly done by hand.
My work tends to look at existential or ontological questions, and I think that technology and speculative fiction more generally allow for interesting and playful—even if darkly playful—explorations of questions like: “What do our lives mean? How do we stand in right relationship to other humans? Are humans separable from and masters of our environments or in some sense, are we subjects of the whims and laws of the environment and climate? How is our consciousness shaped by the invented tools we use to live our lives? Does it have to be a disaster?” And so on.
Some writers, filmmakers, and artists who are doing remarkable work related to or using technology are Kara Walker, Vauhini Vara, Benjamín Labatut, Studio Drift, and Kim Stanley Robinson. The sculptor Tim Hawkinson collaborated with Arion Press on an artist’s book of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in which he invented a tool to make a drip art monster. That sort of project, where a tool is invented from parts of other things and then used to make art—illustrations of a text—intrigues me. Charlie Kaufman’s [film] Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind circles themes of memory and technology—it’s my favorite movie of all time. I’m still very taken with Blade Runner and Her. But most of the films I’ve seen in the last few years that take on tech have been excruciatingly stilted and dull. I don’t know why that is. It’s entirely possible I’m not watching the right movies.
Rumpus: Aging is such an inescapable theme of the book. It feels like a third rail in many of these stories. Was there an urgency in you as you were drafting these stories?
Felicelli: I do have this feeling that time is not on my side and that living is a process of perpetually losing things, including oneself, and that can lead to a kind of hunger, maybe even a grabbiness, to record as much as one can before the end. There was an urgency with these stories, an intense need to get it all down. I know I’m onto something when I have a kind of urgency in first drafts. That sensation also makes me feel that I’m giving my all to the fiction and not only chiseling or whittling away at a big hunk of wood, which is, of course, what needs to happen, in the course of revision later on but isn’t the right mode for the first draft.
Rumpus: This book is so imaginative and deep. Would you be willing to share any bodily experiences you had, like dreams or déjà vu, that influenced your writing at this time?
Felicelli: I’m definitely somebody who likes to think about my dreams, and certainly trance-like states influenced this collection. For instance, while I’d already been thinking about elements of “Steam Tunnels” for years, the trajectory of the story took shape while I was floating in a sensory deprivation tank. Similarly, “Assembly Line” was influenced by the shape of those tanks—the kind of industrial eeriness of certain float spaces. “A Minor Disturbance” contains imagery and dread, similar to certain nightmares I’ve had repeatedly in which I’m moving through a dark enclosed space, whether a house or a maze, where it looks like I am alone but I can sense someone with me, even though I can’t see them.
Rumpus: Speaking of peculiar experiences, can we talk about the tooth in “The Night the Movers Came”? This is exactly the type of creepy detail I love in fiction. How did the tooth come to you?
Felicelli: In that story, I think the tooth came to me first, and everything else followed from that creepy detail. The tooth emerged in the course of a quasi-cut-up. I took some linear text I’d written—sometimes I write images divorced from any narrative or idea in my Notes App or on a piece of paper, and this text was a fragment of something from a notebook—[and] I hacked away at it randomly, and then rearranged the pieces, and wrote again with that rearrangement. The idea of a tooth projected onto a wall emerged from that. It was the first thing that existed in the story, the thing without which the story wouldn’t work for me, and then a woman sitting and waiting with her projector in a dim room, losing her mind, watching the tooth seemed to follow. Later I realized that it made more story sense for there to be no projector other than the woman’s mind.
Rumpus: Syntax is such a subtle but important aspect of these stories. This is perhaps most evident in the story, “Mother, My Monster,” where you play with spelling and echoes. Were you consciously playing with individual letters and sounds?
Felicelli: Yes, I’m language obsessed. Often people covet sentences that, as James Baldwin put it, are “clean as a bone.” Sometimes I love those sentences too. But what I’m fascinated by in my own writing is figuring out how to get language to produce an aesthetic experience in sync with what the story and its characters demand, and that can be fairly idiosyncratic. I play around with place words that have etymological roots in very different languages adjacent to one another, for instance, because I like that jangly discord—it’s more likely to stir things up, produce unusual feelings for a reader, in my opinion.
My fascination with language is more akin to a Wallace Stevens–type poetics of perception than Raymond Carver empiricist minimalism, if that makes sense. I love imagery and symbolism, things that might get torn down in a workshop, and sometimes I spend time in revision tweaking the syntax or playing with the sounds of sentences. That was especially true for “A Little Clay Boy” in which a woman tries to teach a sort of golem or Galatea, who she treats as her son, how to talk. In keeping with a spirit of the uncanny, I wanted his speech to be similar enough to ordinary speech to feel familiar, but not fully the same.
What makes me happiest is to mess around with words until what is left on the page is so suited to the material—and, also perhaps so shaped by the material—that I am no longer able to see myself or my fingerprints in it. When I get this sorted right, the story stops feeling like me—feels more like a ventriloquist throwing their voice through me—and when I read it after a few weeks away from it, I’m caught up enough to wonder what happens next.
Rumpus: Did the manuscript stories shift in the writing process? Did any not make the final cut? Or if they did all remain part of the collection, what surprised you most in the revisions?
Felicelli: The organization of the stories in the manuscript shifted during the writing and revision processes, but none of the stories I planned to include were cut. However, I did rewrite and add additional material to two of the stories, “The Moment” and “The Night the Movers Came” years after I’d written them and believed them to be done, and I was surprised how much stronger and more distinct they became as a result of working them over at a completely different point in my life and history.
Rumpus: How We Know Our Time Travelers is a speculative fiction/sci fi book focused on the glories and struggles on this earth. Did you ever consider setting a story on another planet? Or is that for the next book?
Felicelli: That’s an interesting question. I loved The Martian Chronicles growing up, and I do think that book influenced this one. I was also fascinated by The Dispossessed and Aurora. But I don’t read many stories or novels set on other planets—not for lack of interest, more the fact of so little time—and that probably means something. It’s dangerous for me to say I will never because another part of my mind immediately starts conjuring scenarios to defy that more certain part of myself who is speaking or typing. But none of these stories were going to be set on another planet, and anything of that sort would be much further down the road.
At present, I’m more interested in history—in what was once present and what we’ve since lost to time, in humans growing up in a different time and, hence, a different place—than in the worldbuilding or intricate conjuring process that I feel a story set on another planet would require. We have so many problems at every scale that my imagination is pretty well occupied with stories set on Earth.
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Author photograph by Amy Perl
