Chapter One I. At dawn, Mom says not to wake the others, but I don’t think anyone’s sleeping. We crouch beneath the low tarp shelter that’s tied to a fence post with the wire of someone’s earbuds. It is…
I was already pathologically afraid of earthquakes when in 2016, I found myself thirty kilometers from the epicenter of that year’s deadliest one. The most devastating quake in living memory in the coastal Ecuadorian province of Manabí. With my son, eight years old at the time, I had been backpacking, volunteering on farms, and working on my low-residency MFA program. I had spent years at that point paralyzed with acute, dissociative panic over the imminent “big one” in the Cascadia region. Many days, I recall feeling shut in by the heavy gray sky, menaced by the silence beneath sounds, worrying sometimes that the brick building where my then toddler went to daycare would collapse in a strong tremor, and other times, that the creep of my pervasive sense of unreality would prevail.
Immediately after I was thrown to the dirt by violent lateral shaking, before the movement even stopped, a thought took shape in my mind: None of the fear protected me at all. I could have gone about my life, enjoying it, giving all of myself to everything I dreamed of achieving, and concerning the impact of an earthquake, the outcome would have been the same.
So that is the genesis of my manuscript. Everything I’ve ever written has been a collage, as I struggle with world building and invention. I’m more of a scavenger, collecting things that are ugly, strange, extraneous, or unwanted. I make clippings from the pages of my life and rearrange them according to patterns of emotional resonance that reveal a different story.
As I was writing this book, I realized that earthquakes stand in for a vulnerability in my psyche that resists articulation. I fear the fundamental qualities of the world around me will lapse under extraordinary circumstances, and reveal themselves to be nothing more than assumptions I made about safety. It’s not actually earthquakes I fear; it’s that. When that happens, you lose your footing, the world is broken, and you can’t recognize landmarks by which you have navigated. Infrastructure that’s generally invisible to its beneficiaries becomes central, when you are confronted with its absence. Collective agreements are reshuffled, and the people who you truly love become resplendent in your eyes, bathed in the dew of the present moment.
Or, the people you happen to be with in the moment take on a sheen of destined fellowship, which fades in weeks and months like the effect of a potent drug. Both of these things can happen.
The book is an attempt to deal with two aspects of this fear: micro and macro. The micro is trust in interpersonal relationships. The reader watches Mom through Espe’s eyes. I wanted to tell the story by feel, using the earthy, sensuous details Espe observes about Mom to convey how much she wants to be close to her. Mom’s job is to keep Espe safe, and she doesn’t. So resourceful Espe must build a life without a ground.
The macro—and this is a good message to leave you with—is community, or society. Mom and her friends have aspirations to be prepared when the ground shifts, to rebuild a world that’s liberatory instead of authoritarian. But they’re not prepared. I wanted to create characters that could play out some critiques I have of the American left, which sees itself as exceptional, has a short memory, and is disastrously failing to recognize the stakes of the moment we’re in. I hoped to use the machinery of fiction to reach readers with my critiques, because we are on the brink of losing for good. We should not let fear hold us back from pooling our unique gifts.
None of our fear will protect us at all.
TAYLOR LEATRICE WERNER earned an MFA in fiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She has taught creative writing at the Taos Charter School, the DreamTree Project, and the Bellingham Alternative Library. She has words in NAILED Magazine, Sad Girl Diaries, and Labor Notes. Taylor works as a union electrician in Cascadia, where she lives with her son and their one-of-a-kind dog, Gritty, who strongly opposes fascism.
