About Grace

I’ve been a time traveller three times over. As a legal scholar, I’ve travelled to the past, poring over internal fossil fuel industry documents and imagining the small group of people willing to trade the lives of so many for a little extra profit. As a queer, neurodivergent dreamer, I’ve travelled to the future, imagining all the joyful possibilities for our collective thriving. And as a person who lives with chronic pain, I’ve learned to find and cherish the space between heartbeats. To love the world and my dear ones so fiercely, to be so grateful for the feel of warm sun and a cool breeze, that time slows like honey dribbling from a spoon.

As any good lover of sci-fi knows, time travellers are often chasing something across time and space—leaping from the Pyramids of Giza to the battlefields of World War II to catch an alien species or a villainous scientist. I’ve been chasing one of the most dangerous things of all.

A story.

A poisonous story, rooted deep in our public imagination. It is a ravenous, many-headed beast, this story. It was born into this world in the mid-twentieth century, fed first by the fossil fuel industry and then reared by a complex web of corporate actors and allies. As it grows, it devours alternative possible futures, one after the other.

The terrible (and magical) thing about stories is that they can shape how we feel and how we act, sometimes even more so than objective reality. As social scientist Albert Bandura writes:

People’s beliefs in their collective efficacy influence the type of social future they seek to achieve, how much effort they put into it, and their endurance when collective efforts fail to produce quick results. The stronger they believe in their capabilities to effect social change the more actively they engage in collective efforts to alter national policies and practices. Those who are beset by a low sense of efficacy are quickly convinced of the futility of effort to reform their institutional systems. [Bandura, 1995]

If we feel helpless, we give up. If we feel powerful, we act. If we feel powerful as a collective, we act together. Our stories about the world become our world.

So join me in exposing and battling this many-headed beast of a story. It’s an expert at hiding and blending in, slithering across newspapers, TV shows, books, school curricula, and social media. It disguises the fossil fuel industry’s influence over our culture, our arts, even our very own thoughts. But its cries have a familiar cadence if you know what to listen for:

Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

Don’t listen to the science. Don’t trust the government. Don’t be political. Don’t vote. Don’t care. Don’t act. Don’t work together. Don’t blame us. Don’t hope.

Give up. Give up. Give up.

Voices have been rising to challenge this story and stories like it for decades, for centuries. I’m inspired everyday by the people on the front lines, disproportionately young people, Indigenous peoples, and racialized folks, who are putting their bodies and lives on the line to push the boundaries of our collective imagination and create space for us to build a more just and vibrant future.

With Rootbound, I’m setting free a new story into the world and joining the countless other voices battling the many-headed beast. In part it is my story. How I’ve sought to hold space for grief and joy. For anxiety and aliveness. For resistance and play, and even for a little magic. How a body that experienced near-total apocalypse has been healing in wild and new ways, day-by-day over more than a decade, surprising countless doctors with its resilience. My climate sorrow was once so overwhelming that I could barely function. But in taking action on climate justice, I’ve found the best, most empathic, most present humans imaginable. And I’ve discovered that leaning in to fight existential threats arm-in-arm with my besties is the most gloriously meaningful way to spend my brief time on this planet.

It’s a tiny, winged-thing, my story, like a hummingbird. I’ve filled it with so much love. Love for the people you’ll see me thank below. Love for dozens more unnamed. For the trees. And the creatures. And the blue, blue sky. For vegan strawberry rhubarb ripple ice cream and sleepy dog cuddles. Others too have feasted it with care, helping it take flight in a life of its own.

My little hummingbird of a story, fueled by love and independently published, is no match for the many-headed beast fueled by billions of dollars and decades of covert corporate influence.

And yet.

And yet…

-From Rootbound, Author’s Note

Books

Rootbound

Rootbound is a gripping young adult climate fantasy novel bursting with hope, heart, adventure, and mystery (think Greta Thunberg x Percy Jackson + heaps of swoony, slow burn romance).

After her beloved sister Aspen disappears during a climate protest, seventeen-year-old Mira Bracken refuses to accept that she's gone. Mira spends her days combing an uncaring world for any trace of Aspen, driven forward by a blistering pain in her limbs and the voice of her missing-probably-dead sister in her mind.

When a shocking act lands Mira in the hospital, a mysterious stranger insists that she's a "treetalker," a powerful one, and that an ancient evil is hunting her. She laughs it off, until the stranger adds one last thing-this underworld group has been kidnapping youth climate strikers.

Desperate to learn more, Mira throws her lot in with the mysterious stranger and the other treetalkers, who call themselves rootbound. Soon she's swept into a secret magical war that spans centuries, inching closer to discovering the fate of her sister.

Rootbound: Join the magic. Join the movement.