The following interview is an insightful view into Martin’s process while writing The Last Fire Season, a memoir about her experiences during the wildfires in the Fall of 2020 in Sonoma County, California. 

Julie Hornberger (JH): What made you want to tell this story?  

Manjula Martin (MM): It’s a memoir, so, it happened. But for me, the two main reasons to write the book [were that] these were questions I was trying to answer for myself about, how to live in this moment of climate change, and how to exist within the chaos that is happening right now in the world.  So, it was very much [that] I wanted to delve deeper into that for myself. But also, I was questioning the larger narrative around both climate change and natural disasters. You know, when there are fires, there are a lot of headlines, and it’s like, California is on fire. And then there’s nothing after that week. And so, there’s this sort of extreme, almost sensationalistic disaster narrative that I feel feeds into some untruths about what we’re experiencing in climate change. Sort of this idea of, it’s either an apocalypse or it’s a redemptive heroic story. And most people’s reality is somewhere in between those things. Practically speaking, you know, I was intending to publish a novel when I started this book. 

JH: Yeah. You mentioned that in the book. Was it about climate change or was it about something else? 

MM: It was about an earthquake, another California experience. But then the events of the book happened, and I talked to my agent. I got a new agent to represent that novel. And then we were talking, and she asked, what else are you working on? And I said I thought I might want to write an essay about the fire season. This was probably in, like, early 2021. So, five or six months after the events of the book. She said that sounds really cool. Do you think that could be a book?  And I went back, and I thought about it. And, I had heard, but never experienced that feeling that some writers talk about of working on one project and then suddenly realizing that a different project felt more urgent. And feeling more driven to finish the new project than the ongoing project, and I felt that. I was like, oh, damn. It actually should be a book, and I need to write it. 

JH: At one point in the book, you, discuss, pretty early on, about a culture’s obligation to the climate crisis and, in turn, a writer’s obligation. So, what would you say is a writer’s obligation to tell these stories? And why is that important?   

MM: I quote Amitav Ghosh in that section. His books are interesting. He’s written more about climate culture since that book that I quote, because that was in, 2016, I think. But I think that all people who make culture have an obligation to engage with, you know, the world, and engage with what is happening with humanity and with the culture. There was a meme that I saw going around. It said, Sure, I could write dystopian fiction, or I could just pay attention. 

Both laugh. 

JH: That’s funny.

MM: That kind of encapsulates it. You know? The act of writing is an act of paying close attention, and involved in that attention is our responsibility to engage with what’s happening in the world, and you can do that at a very personal level. You can do that at a fictional or less direct level. But, ultimately, I think that’s what all writing is doing, good writing. I also think right now, the world is having a hard time in a way that’s not new but is unique. It’s not new for the world to have a hard time, but events we’re all experiencing right now, you know, politically, geopolitically, environmentally, culturally are pretty intense. And I think that as a person who consumes culture. As a reader, I haven’t really found works that engage with that in a way that you know, that I connect with, so if it happens. It’s an ongoing challenge. 

JH: The story takes place over four months from August to November of 2020. And you write about experiences that take place in the future as well and you prefaced those scenes with the phrase: “a future memory,” and I was just wondering how you came up with that kind of way of handling time. And why did you do it that way?  

MM: That’s one of my favorite sort of structural things that I ended up working with in the book. I mean, part of it is just, you know, memoir is, literally, it’s the word memory. And I’m really interested in ideas about what we perceive to be a fixed truth and how that can change as circumstances change and as our understanding of history and of context and of ourselves changes.  So I was playing a little bit with the idea of everything’s happening now. It’s actually just a memory that hasn’t happened yet as a memory. But, also, I think, particularly when talking about some of the histories that I’m talking about in the book, like the history of colonialism and genocide, which is linked to the wildfire crisis. You know, it’s important to sort of question what you take as fact and what you take as history. And for me, that’s something that I’m trying to do in a few different ways in the book and having a sense of playing with events of time, I think, is part of that. The events of climate change aren’t really happening on a human lifespan scale. They’re happening in different time scales. For me, the future memories were a way of really trying to let that trickle into my own life and my own story. Honestly, it also just started out as a practical, formal trick almost. This narrative that took place over four months. And then I did all this research for the book and interview people and realized that I didn’t really have a way to work in what I learned after 2020. 

That was it started out as kind of like, oh, how do I structurally do this? Especially because I had set the main narrative in this, like, very firm, it’s almost fairy tale, like, past tense. I didn’t want to interrupt the sense of story in that way.  And so that’s how those sections started, and they kind of evolved to have a little bit of a greater meaning for me at least. 

JH: During those four months in 2020, you were living in a heightened state of anxiety over the possibility of a wildfire burning your house down along with the anxiety of this constant pain that you’re having through a medical accident. All the while there was a pandemic and the Black Lives Matter social justice reckoning. The question arises, why didn’t you leave? Can you kind of explain maybe a little bit more about why you didn’t leave? 

MM: That has become a very common question that people who don’t live here ask. I think anyone who lives anywhere where extreme weather events have happened, other people ask them that question. You can’t run away from climate change. It’s literally the whole planet.  And I also think that not everyone has the luxury of deciding whether or not to leave. You know, climate migration is poised to be, like, the biggest thing happening in the next however many, 50 years, hundred years. I think there’s a certain hubris to thinking that you can be exempted from that and that you can dodge what’s happening. Obviously, I am a person who has certain privileges, so I can, in many ways. Like, at this moment, I could leave if I wanted to. For me, also, there’s a more personal responsibility there. I feel like when you are a person who loves a place, you have a responsibility to it. It’s not just like, oh, I love this place. Oh, now it’s difficult. I’m going to leave. You know? And when you’re talking about climate change, there are very real ways that you can try and embody that responsibility, whether that’s psychologically, emotionally, or with action. And it’s an interesting challenge to figure out how to do that.  An ongoing challenge. 

JH: That goes along with my next question, you draw a parallel between your body and the body of this place where you live? So why was that important for you to do, you know, make that connection?   

MM: Well, I think sort of a larger theme that I’m investigating in the book is the very obvious truth that humans are not separate from the natural world. And many centuries of often messed up ways of thinking have led us to that sense that, we’re humans and then there’s nature. And so for me, bringing the body narrative into it was a very real way, both in myself and in my writing to make that connection to understand I actually do live in an animal body, and I am subject to the same crises as my environment is subject to. There’s also a larger connection there that I’m interested in exploring, which is the idea of larger systemic harms that have a direct effect on people’s individual lives. Climate change is an obvious one of those. For me, my experience with the for-profit medical system was one of those and is for a lot of people. And so for me, there’s that connection too. It’s easy to think about, there’s a giant system that needs to be changed.  And it’s a different thing to think about it when it is literally hurting you. There’s more urgency there. And I think, for me, that was a strong way in which that happened in my life.  You know, women’s bodies have always been mixed up in the discussion around nature and extraction. And I did get to write a little bit of that history in the book. Just a taste of it. There are entire fields of study about it. The feminization of nature. I think, when I was going through the experience of pain, I had this sort of feeling that, like, oh, it’s just an accident. It’s like a random thing that happened to me, a fluke. You know? But learning to connect it with larger systemic harms and with histories of the relationship between women’s bodies and natural bodies and extraction and exploitation was a very illuminating experience for me. I guess I’ll just say also there’s the connective piece for me both craft-wise and experience-wise to the garden in the book. You know, as I was gardening after my surgeries again, it’s paying attention. It’s active attention, gardening. You do something at a very small scale, and then you wait and see what happens. And there are these sort of struggles that I have in the narrative about intervention, how much to intervene, that have parallels in various ways to larger things. But for me, once I figured out that the garden was a place where literally, my body was physically connecting with my environment.   

JH: Mhmm. It made you feel better.  

MM: Yeah. And even when it didn’t make me feel better. It was a relationship. You know? And to me, that became the key both craft-wise, both structure-wise and, thematically.  

JH: You talked in the book about corporations being responsible for your medical issues as well as the wildfires. And their motivation, which is capitalism. What more would you want to say about that?   

MM: I’m just making the point, in the book, those two things are not unrelated. Like, spoiler alert. It’s capitalism. It’s colonialist capitalism. In some ways, it’s a very simple point in other ways I think that it really hasn’t sunk in for a lot of people. 

JH: But it’s also daunting when you think of it, it’s a corporation. How can people go against a corporation? 

MM: There’s some cool examples that I encountered in researching the book of people who are sort of taking their own action to go in a different way, whether it’s, you know, the people who have the sort of, like, communal living situation in the hills that got burned. Or current day Indigenous activists who are working with fire and successfully working to reintroduce fire to the land. There actually are some amazing examples of people fighting that fight, and that was very important for me to include in the book.  

JH: That was interesting. I never knew the land could be managed with fire. 

MM: It’s mind-blowing! 

JH: And it wasn’t being managed with fire or anything, really. Right?  

MM: Yeah. And fire doesn’t have to be this monster that is epic and destructive. Humans have worked with fire throughout our whole existence and fire has different ways of manifesting. An example of the mistreatment of the land by not practicing fire and then resulting in worse fire is kind of narrative gold in my opinion. It’s a very literal example. This is caused by extraction and colonialism. As a Californian, I know a lot of these histories. I was taught a lot of the basic histories. I’m in my 40s, so, I wasn’t unaware of the history of genocide in this area or in the entire nation. But understanding how capitalist colonialism has directly hurt everybody, including me, a white settler person. It hurts everybody, even those who benefit from it in other ways. It was important to me to talk about in the book. 

JH: You mentioned different nature writers, one of them was John Muir. While reading the book, I was wondering if you’re going to mention him because he is considered the father of the national parks. But, as you write, he was a colonist himself and racist. Can you talk more about the history of nature writing in terms of this book and, in terms of eco-literature now? 

MM: That’s a great question. I grew up reading a lot of these dead-guy nature writers. Something that has been interesting in promoting the book and talking about the book with audiences over the past month has been that sometimes people get very sensitive about my criticizing certain writers from the past or certain attitudes of other nature writers. I understand that sensitivity because, as I say in the book, like, I’m really glad that Yosemite exists. That was great. It’s okay to have complexity in those relationships. There have been things about conservation that have been positive and has given us spaces that probably wouldn’t exist in the same form anymore. But also the motivations for those things and the history of those things is deeply rooted again in who is able to think about nature and who is able to escape into nature and all these questions of access and privilege and harm, really, disenfranchisement of many types of people from the land, including the people who have always lived there, indigenous people. So to me, I don’t have a problem with knowing that Gary Snyder is one of my favorite poets and also has been accused of being appropriative. 

JH: Right. You did mention that in the book, too. 

MM: That’s actually the one that people are most mad about because Gary Snyder is really awesome in many ways. He’s a Buddhist priest and, like, he does walk the walk in many ways. But when you’re talking about, you know, a poem that he wrote using the phrase turtle island, which is an indigenous phrase, like, it is absolutely relevant to mention that prominent indigenous authors have had a problem with that. Following in the footsteps of what I’ll call problematic nature writers, is to me just another example of, something I talk about in the book which is understanding the past harms and the past misdeeds involved in my story doesn’t actually invalidate my experience of either nature writing or nature itself. It makes it richer. It’s more real. I’m actually in a relationship thinking about these issues instead of just embodying some sort of fantasy. The cool thing is that is starting to change. There are people investigating these histories and people writing about nature who are coming from different places than the traditional white male place and having different views. I’m very excited by that. I actually think there is kind of a feeling of a new movement in nature writing. I think that’s great. I’m excited by it. 

JH: What do you hope readers will take away from The Last Fire Season, and what impact do you hope the book will have on readers?   

MM: I hope that people who live in fire places find some resonance in it of their experience. And I hope those who don’t come to a greater understanding of what’s going on and also an understanding of the fact that it actually affects everyone, not just people who live in California. First of all, as y’all back east have experienced, smoke travels and second of all fire crisis is just a local manifestation of what’s happening everywhere, which is these extreme weather events that are caused by climate change. And exacerbates current inequality, and injustices.  

I will also say, because I know you’re a writer, just to be a little bit contrary, I was talking to a friend about that very question, like, the idea of, what should I say? What did I want the lesson of this book to be because that’s something that comes up when doing promotional interviews. We were talking about how, actually, it’s not really my place to say that. I have my own thoughts and ideas about what I would like that to be, but the truth of creating a work of literature is that, you know, you create it and then it does what it does. I actually find it interesting to see some of the reactions that I’m getting, some of which are expected, some of which are unexpected. One thing I think that’s been really powerful for me is the more intimate physical storyline, the personal health storyline has actually been something that people have talked to me about a lot at events. People come up to me afterwards. They say, oh, I’m so glad that’s in the book. You know? And I really sort of related to that or something like that happened to me, and I never thought about it that way before. You know? But that’s not something that wasn’t emphasized in the marketing materials. It’s very much a nature book and a climate change book, you know. But to me, that’s actually the heart of the book is that connection to the personal, and it’s been really kind of wonderful to see that people are feeling that too.  

JH: I mean, to me, the personal story is the driving force of the book. 

MM: So, yeah! That’s why it was a memoir. I could have easily written a great reported book about fire in California. But that’s not the book I chose to write for many reasons.  

JH: Thank you for doing this interview with me. I really appreciate it. 

MM: Yeah, I hope it was interesting and gratifying for your own work. I’m glad you’re writing about this stuff. I think we’re in a place where this happens more and more and people are starting to make those connections, and I think that can only be good. 

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Manjula Martin is author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History. She is coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, which won the 2020 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Martin edited the anthology  Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, and she was managing editor of the National Magazine Award–winning literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story. She lives in western Sonoma County, California.