Photograph by Katherine Wolkoff / Trunk Archive
words by willow defebaugh
In her tempestuous cli-fi novel The Light Pirate, Lily Brooks-Dalton illuminates a world in transition, struggling to adapt to a future not far off on the horizon—and the possibilities it might hold.
“Florida was returning to herself.”
So writes Lily Brooks-Dalton in The Light Pirate, a novel that feels less like climate fiction and more like a study of the world we are beginning to see emerge. Set in Florida, the story follows a girl called Wanda, named after the ruinous hurricane during which she was born. Through four sections—power, water, light, and time—we watch Wanda and those close to her attempt to adapt to an environment that is evolving in front of their very eyes, with more frequent and devastating weather disasters.
But as Florida rewilds itself, so does Wanda. She learns the language of survival, to speak swamp and storm. She navigates the wilds of womanhood and family, interdependence and otherness. And in the dark, murky waters of an increasingly unknown landscape, she manages to find the light. Or rather, it finds her—in the form of a mysterious bioluminescence that won’t leave her alone.
Both devastating and hopeful, timely and imaginative, The Light Pirate illuminates the destruction that change can bring—as well as the possibility that glimmers amidst everything we don’t know. It stands as a testament to the power of fiction to transform how we think about the world we live in at a time when the stakes couldn’t be higher. Here, Brooks-Dalton talks to Atmos about her fascination with the sunshine state, how we respond to catastrophe, and the magic of evolution.
Editor’s Note: The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity, and contains spoilers.
Willow Defebaugh
Your novel The Light Pirate tells the story of one woman’s life set against the backdrop of a changing Florida. Why were you moved to tell this particular story?
Lily Brooks-Dalton
My parents live in Florida. And I didn’t grow up there, but it’s been my home for my whole adult life. It’s been this place that I’ve been coming back to again and again, and have had mixed feelings about. I’ve been on a journey with understanding how much there is to love about it and being curious about my own bias towards it. Thinking about it in the context of politics and culture, but also ecology, and these incredible, natural characteristics of Florida that are really unique to it. There was something about the land in particular that was really engaging for me.
I had that in mind, but I was also spending some more time there at two different writing residencies in 2016. One was at the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, and then one was at The Studios of Key West in Key West. So, I was really locked into the rhythm of Floridian seasons and elements. And it was hurricane season. There was a lot of drama wrapped up in storm-watching, and preparing for these storms that were approaching, trying to guess where they were going to hit, what path they were going to take. I was thinking a lot about that, and the inherent drama in the geography of this place.
Willow
This is a story about climate change. And there is an emphasis on the actual climate, but it’s also so much a story about change. You paint such a vivid picture of what the actual transition of a heating world looks like, and these really practical questions like: at what point does the government give up on an entire state? At what point do the lights get turned off? I’m curious, what was your process in researching or imagining this transitional future? And I want to put an asterisk with the word future because it’s obviously happening in many parts of the world already.
Lily
That’s a really important theme to tease out of the book. It reminds me of Octavia Butler, who said it perfectly: “The only lasting truth is change.” For me, I was particularly interested in depicting the kind of change that is really hard for us to see. I opened the book with this high drama of a hurricane, and tried to pace it like a thriller to pull you in. This is rapid change. And then the book moves into these later sections that are more gradual. My intention with that was to mirror these different organizing elements of the book, which go from power, to water, to light, to time—but also to pose this question of: are you still paying attention when the frequency, the rapidity of change shifts? Can we still watch as the sea level rises ever so gradually?
In a lot of cli-fi that I’ve read, there really is stark before and after like, It was one way in the beginning, and then something catastrophic happened. And now it is another way. And whether that spans decades, or centuries, or really is just as simple as one storm that hits on one day, it’s that split between before and after. I found myself being really interested in the in-between.
That is another theme of the book that feels really important to me: expanding and exploring the idea of being in between one reality and the next, and exploring that space, and its messiness. There’s such drama in depicting a flooded city where everyone is traveling in boats. But what about when there’s one inch of water that’s just there all the time, and the subtle changes that go with that? It’s like, Okay, so I guess everyone has to wear rain boots now. Or I guess we all have to put sandbags up against our doors. We’re not being forced to completely change the way that we’re living, but we’re being forced to adjust in these smaller ways. That was a piece of this idea of change that I wanted to explore with the book.
Willow
In the story, there’s the body of water that keeps getting more full with each storm until it eventually overflows. As a reader, we’re gripped by these storms that are coming in, and obviously the one at the beginning is so powerful. But what’s more important or alarming is what’s happening in the background. And this is often lost in the climate conversation. People only pay attention when there’s a disaster. That’s the real danger, and that’s really the question that we’re tasked with is how do we keep people engaged in the in-between? Because that’s where we are.
Lily
Absolutely. It’s stunning how quickly the news cycle moves on from absolute catastrophe. Within a day, we’ve moved on and we’re no longer thinking about the recovery of these places. Whether it’s worth rebuilding, whether this will just continue to happen. There’s so many questions wrapped up in these massive disasters that often go unconsidered.
Willow
One of the quotes that I had bookmarked while reading was, “They do not call these gifts magic and they do not call them science. They call them what they are: change.” And within the story, you see the characters who are embracing change versus resisting it. You have Wanda and Phyllis who adapt to Florida as it shifts. But then you have Wanda’s brother and father, who are linemen, clinging to these remnants of civilization by literally trying to keep the lights on.
Lily
I really wanted to be painting portraits of all the ways that I can imagine relating to this reality, rather than prescribing, This is the way to think about it. Because none of them are fully right. We’re all just here doing our best. And I think the diversity of those reactions is in itself important. That in and of itself is so overwhelming, how to do that; how to parse these different approaches into a cohesive, synthesized solution that we can collectively as a civilization get on board with. Even just as individuals, how we can honor so many different approaches to this problem.
“What if the end of the world as we know it included the opportunity to build the world that we need? What if it’s both?”
Willow
There’s such a temptation for us to label and identify this as “the right path.” When there’s just such few things in life, or nature, or anything else that are actually that simple and black and white. And I appreciate how you characterize it as the diversity of responses or paths that different people take. Because you have different feelings while you’re reading the book. At certain points, you’re like, Wanda, go! What are you doing? Why are you staying here? But then at other points, you see the beauty of her decision to stay. And so it takes all of these different possible approaches, and it does strip it of a sense of what is the correct thing to do, and what is the incorrect thing to do.
Lily
I think there has to be a measure of flexibility in terms of what the right answer is and when. Because the right path is not always the right path. There are moments in Wanda’s story where the severity of isolation that she resorts to is wise. And there are moments in her story when the severity of isolation is unwise. It really comes down to discernment. Choosing the reaction that suits the moment.
Willow
I love how the characters’ different relationships to light reflects how they’re navigating change. You have Wanda’s brother and her dad who are keeping the lights on in this very mechanical way, versus Wanda interacting with the bioluminescence of the swamp. I’m just curious, where did this theme of light for the story come from?
Lily
I have a family member who’s a lineman, and so that was really inspiring to me to be able to talk to them about their work, and about finding such value and belonging in that work. I think that light is a pivotal part of being a Floridian. It’s the sunshine state. And it also suffers the destruction of these hurricanes again and again. Lines are always being knocked out in Florida.
I think in a lot of other parts of the country, if you start talking about linemen, people might not know what you’re referring to, what that profession is. But in Florida everyone knows what a lineman is because they are so familiar with seeing those trucks on their street and knowing, Okay, we’re going to get power back soon. So, there’s the polarity of this state that is so battered by weather like this, and yet is so revered for its sunny beaches and carefree vacation places. There’s something about that tension that I thought was both symbolically really engaging, and also literally fascinating in the mechanics of it.
Willow
In terms of who stays in Florida as it changes and who goes, I couldn’t help but notice how gender fits in. It’s the men in Wanda’s life who ultimately do leave and choose civilization, and then it’s Wanda and Phyllis who stay, and reintegrate with the landscape there. I’m curious, was that a very conscious decision you made? Is it something that emerged organically while you were writing?
Lily
I think a little of both. It definitely emerged organically. But I was also really conscious about wanting this book to be about women. In the latter portions of the book, I wanted to steer away from this idea of a hetero family unit and the idea of lineage being only a matter of blood, a matter of genetics.
So, I knew that I wanted the relationships at the end to be based on a clear understanding of what it means to be related; what it means to pass something on. That was something that I was really cognizant of from the beginning. And I think the rest just flowed from that decision of knowing that I wanted to end up in a place that was not reliant on the sort of family structures and genealogical ideas that much of our society is based on.
Willow
Like in how, towards the end of the book, you see Wanda’s gift of communicating with the bioluminescence get transferred—not by blood, you just see it shift from one person to the next.
Lily
So much of our culture is based on inheritance via bloodline. That’s really the structure that we’re all placed within. And there’s something really broken about the rigidity of that. Not that one shouldn’t pass things on to their children if one chooses to have children. But what if you don’t choose to have children? I’m interested in other ways that we pass things on and other structures for giving what we’ve learned, and what we’ve earned, and what we’ve accumulated to another generation.
Willow
That theme of queerness was so powerful. Because there has historically been an exorcism of queer people from nature, and just the ways biology and things are weaponized against people. And I think we’re in this moment where we’re seeing more stories that center nature or climate with queer characters, like The Last of Us.
One of my favorite lines in the book was, “Florida was returning to herself.” Reading that line it just felt like this beautiful parallel of Wanda finding her queerness, but then also Florida finding herself, and this sort of rewilding that to me is actually such a huge part of queerness.
Lily
I love that. Because I’ve always been really cognizant of this idea of Wanda maturing and growing up alongside this landscape, which is also changing and going through a coming of age in a different way. But I hadn’t really pulled in that theme of queerness, which is such an important part of the book, and placed it in that context. I think that’s really beautiful.
Willow
Speaking to the cli-fi element of the book, we see characters demonstrating these evolutionary traits and gifts. But obviously it also holds so much despair. And it introduces this question of how much we actually might not know about what the future holds and what might be in store for our species. That’s really the power that fiction has in reaching people about this subject.
Lily
The question that this book is posing, the question that I’m curious about is, what if the worst did happen? What if this crisis is as terrible and full of grief as we fear it will be? What if we lived through that, and what if there was also hope inside of that? What if the end of the world as we know it included the opportunity to build the world that we need? What if it’s both? What if it’s deeply traumatizing and disruptive, and what if there is also something brighter, something luminous, that can go hand in hand with that?
I don’t have an answer. But that is the question that the book is interested in, and the question that I am interested in, too. There is so much that feels like it’s going terribly wrong in this world right now, from every direction. But especially this fundamental underlying issue of the ground that we stand on, the air that we breathe, the sunlight that feeds us. It feels as if there’s this enormous reckoning that is unfolding and also on its way simultaneously. It’s both here and impending at the same time. We’re all living on this cliff’s edge of being in fear, and wondering what to do, how to stop it, how to pull back from the edge. The question that I am interested in is, what is at the bottom of this cliff?
Willow
One of the things that really drew me to the book was knowing that bioluminescence was a part of it because I’ve always been really drawn to it as a phenomenon. That’s why it’s such a perfect depiction in the story. You have the darkness of the unknown—what’s at the bottom of the cliff, as you were saying. And then it also leaves room for the possibility that there might be these little lights within that darkness. And that’s everything. Change is terrifying and it’s overwhelming because you don’t know what it’s going to turn into. But also within change, there is possibility.
Lily
Absolutely. And the beautiful thing about bioluminescence is that it is a chemical phenomenon, a chemical reaction that has evolved again and again, in totally disparate environments. That has occurred in the jungle, in the sea, in the fields of fireflies. It has popped up in all these places in this world, independent of each other. And there is something truly magic about that, and full of promise to me. Nature is arresting in the power of what it can do.
