Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.
Today: Sarena Ulibarri is the author of two novellas and a whole bunch of short stories, some of which have appeared in magazines such as DreamForge and Baubles From Bones, and anthologies such as Solar Flare and Biketopia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction in Extreme Futures. She put together several anthologies, including Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers and Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, which published optimistic climate futures by authors from all over the world. For many years, she was in charge of World Weaver Press, and she now works as a publicist for UNM Press. Find more at www.SarenaUlibarri.com.
Thanks so much, Serena, for joining me!
J. Scott Coatsworth: How would you describe your writing style/genre?
Serena Ulibarri: A lot of what I write can be classified as solarpunk. In a nutshell, this means science fiction about sustainability. Solarpunk is a multimedia movement that grapples with climate change and environmental justice, challenging creators and their audiences to envision ways that we might mend the damage and find a more harmonious balance between nature and technology.
JSC: Have you ever taken a trip to research a story? Tell me about it.
SU: My first book, Another Life, takes place in Death Valley, California. It’s a story about climate change, so choosing a place already known for such extreme temperatures allowed me to explore resiliency and adaptation in severe environments. It’s also a story about reincarnation, and so while I first considered setting it somewhere else in southern California, the name “Death Valley” just felt so apropos.
I did a ton of research about this region, but since I’d never been there, I felt I had to visit in order to write about it. When WorldCon was hosted in San Jose, California, I road-tripped there from where I live in New Mexico, and intentionally chose a route that let us go right through Death Valley. I didn’t get to spend as much time there as I wish I could have—but standing in that extreme heat and seeing that striking landscape in person definitely affected how I approached the setting in my revisions for Another Life.
JSC: What do you do when you get writer’s block?
SU: Usually the best thing to do when I get writers block is to read something really good. Even if it’s not in the same genre or topic, I’ll get inspired by some technique or line I read that will get me back into the groove. While writing this book, I often turned to works by Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, and N.K. Jemisin for inspiration.
Sometimes, too, I need to write several different versions of a scene to figure it out. There’s one scene near the end of Another Life that I had to write about five different versions of before it accomplished what I needed it to. If I’d let myself get stuck on figuring it out ahead of time, that writer’s block might have stopped the whole project in its tracks. Instead, I picked out several possibilities and tried each of them on in the dressing room before I settled on which one worked.
JSC: What do you do if you get a brilliant idea at a bad time?
SU: Is there ever a good time? The Notes app on my phone is full of fragments, ideas, phrases, and story notes that I think of when I’m away from my desk. I brain dump into that app no matter where I am, and then sort it out when I’m back in regular writing mode. I tend to think and write in a fairly non-linear fashion, so this helps me keep track of ideas.
JSC: Are you a full-time or part-time writer? How does that affect your writing?
SU: I’ve worked in the publishing industry for close to ten years, so I’m always involved with books and stories even if they’re not mine. I’ve been a freelancer and a small business owner, and now I work for a university press. It can be difficult to carve out space to focus on my own projects, but being a writer is a vital part of my identity and important to my mental health, so I always find time. I wrote a large part of Another Life during lunch breaks when that was all the writing time I could be guaranteed.
JSC: Are you a plotter or a pantser?
SU: A little of both! I usually have a rough outline, but once I start writing, the story might go in different directions than I plotted. Somewhere in the middle, I often realize that my original plan will no longer work and I sit down to re-outline what it has turned into. Usually, I at least know the end that I’m writing toward—it’s just the way we get there that often changes. I re-outlined Another Life at least three distinct times. In the last one, I cut out a whole bunch of extra plot lines and scenes that had been distracting the story from what it truly needed to be.
JSC: Do your books spring to life from a character first or an idea?
SU: Generally, an idea or a premise sparks the story and I fill in the characters and the world around that. For example, I started Another Life because I came up with a concept: what if there was scientific proof of reincarnation, and people could find out who they had been in a previous lifetime as easily as someone can get a DNA ancestry test? I wanted to explore the complexity of someone who had lived a terrible life being reborn into a life where they had done a lot of good. Those two characters evolved in contrast to each other, and in response to that concept.
JSC: How did you choose the topic for Another Life?
SU: I wrote the first draft in 2017, when I was first hearing a lot of comparisons between a certain US politician and a certain German dictator. Someone on one of my social media feeds pointed out that the one was born the same year the other allegedly died, so if you believe in reincarnation, they could literally be the same person. I was fascinated by this idea, and wondered what, if anything, might happen if we had some kind of scientific proof that this was so. I started thinking about it as a story, but it seemed too easy, for someone to go from being a villain in one lifetime to a villain in the next as well. What if it turned out the reincarnation of this terrible person was actually someone who had done a lot of good in this lifetime, someone who seemed to be the exact opposite? I immediately moved away from the original personalities that had sparked the idea, but the premise remained. Because I write solarpunk, I wanted to set this story in a sustainable future society. So I started to shape the desert city of Otra Vida, and then I asked myself the question, who in this place would have the most to lose if they were revealed to have a very negative past life history? That question shaped the character of Galacia. The person she’d been in her past life, Thomas Ramsey, then formed by imagining someone who was—on the surface anyway—the complete opposite of her.
JSC: What was the hardest part of writing it?
SU: The hardest part of writing Another Life was keeping a sense of hope. That’s the big challenge of solarpunk—it’s difficult to tell a compelling story about a better world without falling into naïve optimism or getting mired in doom and gloom. But a story isn’t really about a world, it’s about the people in it. I tried to keep a hopeful tone to the book by showing the community that Galacia helped to build, and how living in that community impacts the choices she and the other characters make when faced with difficult situations.
JSC: What’s your drink of choice?
SU: I’m a tea drinker, and I especially love a good matcha latte with a non-dairy milk. The local coffee shop where I do a lot of writing these days makes a great one.
JSC: What are you working on now, and what’s coming out next? Tell us about it!
SU: I’m deep in the fourth draft of a fantasy novel, which may or may not ever see the light of day. But what’s coming out next is the Spanish translation of Another Life! Otra Vida should appear from the Barcelona-based publisher Crononauta this spring, and it will give Spanish-language readers a chance to explore this futuristic city in Death Valley where a blood test can reveal past lives.
And now for Serena’s latest book: Another Life:
Finding out who you were in a previous life sounds like fun until you’re forced to grapple with the darkness of the past. Galacia Aguirre is Mediator of Otra Vida, a quasi-utopian city on the shores of a human-made lake in Death Valley. She resolves conflicts within their sustainable money-free society, and keeps the outside world from meddling in their affairs. When a scientific method of uncovering past lives emerges, Galacia learns she’s the reincarnation of Thomas Ramsey, leader of the Planet B movement, who eschewed fixing climate change in favor of colonizing another planet. Learning her reincarnation result shakes the foundations of Galacia’s identity and her position as Mediator, threatening to undermine the good she’s done in this lifetime. Fearing a backlash, she keeps the results secret while dealing with her political rival for Mediator, and outsiders who blame Otra Vida for bombings that Galacia is sure they had nothing to do with. But under the unforgiving sun of Death Valley, secrets have a way of coming to light.
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Excerpt
Cindy shook her head. “It’s so weird, those memories. They don’t feel like me.”
“Memories?” I looked up from my plate, probably too much horror on my face. “What memories?”
“I did a regression,” Cindy said.
Down the table, Alex leaned forward. “I thought there was full amnesia between lifetimes?”
“Usually,” Cindy said. “But mediums can, like, dig memories out.”
“Mediums?” I said, dread already pressing on my chest. “Where? At the Witching House?”
Cindy’s usual bubbly nature was easing back in, her hands flying to illustrate her words. “Exactly. I could see these images in my mind, of him and his family, I could hear his voice, and Nylah, she said…”
Cindy trailed off when I couldn’t hold back a grimace, dropping her hands into her lap. I should have known Nylah would be the first to jump on past life regression. She’d been my best friend for years, but we’d had a falling out. I missed and resented her in equal measure. It was one of the only conflicts I’d never been able to resolve, because it was mine.
“I don’t think any of it’s real,” Jackson declared.
“What?” Mikki said. “You think Diego’s jerking us around?”
Jackson shrugged. “I don’t know, but it sounds so far-fetched. I don’t see how it can possibly be anything other than a novelty. Like those ‘Which comic book character are you?’ quizzes we used to do on social media.”
“It could be part of a social experiment,” Alex said. “He could be up to something else entirely.” That got a murmur from across the table.
“Galacia, what do you think?” Bryan asked.
Every face on the balcony turned to me, even those farther down the table who hadn’t been a part of this conversation. I recognized my power in that moment—if I told them Diego’s research was fake, they would believe me. I could discredit him with the entire community. Then if he ever announced my supposed identity, it would come across as a vengeful smear. I sipped a drink, holding the liquid in my mouth to stall. The juice tasted sour on my tongue.
Otra Vida had been founded on the agreement that if everyone had free and equal access to food, housing, energy, and healthcare, then everyone would work together to maintain that community and be free to pursue whatever science or art or other passion they desired. Diego, the first child born in this community, had done exactly that, and had discovered something amazing. Something that could change what it meant to be human, what it meant to live and die in this world. And I was considering damaging his reputation because he’d told me something inconvenient about myself? I couldn’t do that. It bothered me that I had even given it this much thought. Misinformation had been Ramsey’s weapon. I wouldn’t make it mine as well.