Nicole Walker and David Carlin in Conversation

Nicole Walker and David Carlin met in 2014 when he traveled from Melbourne to Flagstaff to help plan the 2015 NonfictioNOW conference. As they walked back and forth across Flagstaff, trying to find the perfect venue, they found they had a similar take on climate change. They both knew global warming was already happening—not something coming in the future. They also knew they were complicit and guilty, but also fascinated and in love with the science about it, and the science to help counteract it. In 2016, during the planet-changing election, Nicole flew to Melbourne to give a talk. There, David and Nicole thought about how else, beyond conference planning, they wanted to collaborate. They realized, to borrow Donna Hathaway’s phrase, to make sense of climate change, they had to “stay with the trouble.” They also realized the trouble was here to stay.

Walker and Carlin decided to write The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet(Rose Metal Press) about the trouble, how to stay with it, how to wrestle with this new truth, how to admit complicity but still find joy in the tiny things that make the planet worth writing about. They chose to write an abecedarian because they wanted to spill everything there was to know and feel and think about climate change into a book but realized that taking everything a letter at a time might be a good way to get a snapshot of the planet’s wonders and troubles without destroying a whole forest putting them to paper.

NICOLE WALKER: How do you think the book has evolved over time since its first inception?

DAVID CARLIN: Since the first draft?

NW: Since the first idea…

DC: When something turns out in a certain way you tend to think retrospectively that that’s how it was always going to turn out. You kind of erase all of the other possible worlds that the book could have grown up in. I remember we started with the idea that it was a “Survival Guide for Life After Normal.” It wasn’t going to be a straightforward Survival Guide—it was going to be an ironic version of a Survival Guide, but also deeply serious. That gave us something to hang onto.

I suppose one of the things that changed throughout the writing process was the sense of how we were talking to each other through it and how we were talking to the reader. We always worked it out as we went along. “Oh, let’s try this experiment.” I think it’s really important that we sat down together in the same room to write our first brief essays for “A,”...