Ep. 8: Loneliness, Connection, and Resilience, In Conversation with Writer and Activist Jamie Liu (2024)

This was Jamie's first publication and she really hit it out of the park, but she's also deeply involved in climate work as a climate resilience planner and a climate activism volunteer with the Sunrise Movement. Hello Jamie, welcome to the pod.

Jamie Liu
Hey Susan, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Susan Kaye Quinn
Oh, I'm excited to have you. I want to start us off by having you read an excerpt from your story. And then we can dig into why it works and how your activism ties into what you're doing with your fiction. So the story, To Labor for the Hive, is about a beekeeper who finds a new sense of purpose and community after helping to develop a warning system for floods.

And just a little context for our listeners, this part of the story is told through text exchanges, which is easier to represent on paper than in audio. So Jamie and I will each take a part to read, but we'll have Jamie take the lead to start.

Susan Kaye Quinn
That's the end of the snippet. And it just gives you a little taste of some of the interesting format and the context for the story where our character is coming in through this text exchange and doing this work that she's not even really sure about. But the story is delightful on so many levels and I just devoured it.

One of the reasons it works so well, in my opinion, is that it's showcasing an integrated approach to solving climate issues at many levels. It's not just showcasing a nature-based solution, the bees, that will prevent flooding. It's also showing resilience hubs as a way to mitigate the impact of that flooding. It's highlighting systems of care that reach out to the lonely and bring them in, so they're less in danger, but also so that they can help build the community stronger.

I was just listening the other day to Amitav Ghosh, the author of The Great Derangement speak, and he commented on how people in India were surviving some of these extraordinary heat waves we've been having here in the hottest year in a hundred thousand years, better than people in say France. And it was because the people in India have tighter social connection networks.

They've got folks checking in on them, especially the elderly who are the most vulnerable. But in France, the elderly were more likely to be living and dying alone. So your story is brilliant because it brings all these elements together. And I think that must be informed by some of the work that you've been doing. So tell us a bit about what a climate resilience consultant does, because that sounds very cool, I want to hear more about resilience hubs, and also what kind of work you're doing with the Sunrise Movement in New York City.

Jamie Liu
Sure thing. So as a climate resilience consultant, I help clients prepare for climate change impacts. So clients like that usually includes state, local, federal governments, or service providers like utilities and transit agencies. My team usually helps them understand their climate vulnerability to hazards like flooding and extreme heat. So like, for example, if you have this railroad near a river and we're expecting more river flooding in the future because of more extreme precipitation. What can you do to protect your infrastructure? And we also help them come up with adaptation strategies to address any hazards. Most of my work is generally infrastructure based, but sometimes we do think about populations and communities, you know, people, we care about climate impacts of people!

Along that line, resilience hubs are one of my favorite strategies. I came across them in my work and I love how they address not just climate but also community building. I feel like they have such potential to give power back to people, have them sort of shape their own hubs and communities in a way that's really tailored for their needs. And there's also such a big focus on mutual aid and solidarity rather than charity, rather than you know relying on government with more resources to sort of just give to them. I think resilience hubs can really be built around people giving power back to themselves and just like shaping the community that they want to see, which is really exciting.

Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, you're shaping that not just when there's an emergency either, having that third space. So when you say resilience hub, I think third space, and I'm not sure that we're necessarily talking about the same thing, but that's what immediately leaps to my mind. For example, in Pittsburgh where I live, there is a brewery that has this really huge open, almost an industrial building that they open on the off hours to be a community center in a community that doesn't really have a community center. They have game nights and they have pickleball and they have all kinds of stuff, and they've got a food truck out front. People just come to this place and hang out on the regular. It's free, they have picnic tables, you can just come and sit and hang out with your friends, you don't have to pay anything. So that's what I think of as third spaces. So how are resilience hubs like that or in addition to that or different from that?

Jamie Liu
Yeah, definitely. I do think resilience hubs have to be like third spaces to start because otherwise people won't really use them. I know that Los Angeles, which is where I'm from, during heat waves, they had tested trying to open different cooling centers, which were spaces with air conditioning that people could go to if they didn't have like air conditioning in their own homes. And I think there were a few studies that found that these cooling centers weren't really being used because no one would go to them on a normal basis. People were like, Why would I leave my house to go to this building? There's nothing to do there. So I think having a space, having a resilience hub start out as a third space is really important. You know, having people already know how to get there, that there's stuff to do. They know that they go there. They'll see people that they know. And then to become a resilience hub, you add elements like air conditioning, like backup power, those things that will help in a disaster. And now, people already go to this place because it's just already part of their routine. And now that it is a resilience hub, they know they can rely on it when they face a climate disaster.

Susan Kaye Quinn
Now you're making me think about whether this particular resilience hub in Pittsburgh has had that thought about being a resilience hub. You know, have they done the kind of planning that they would have to do to also serve that function? And I don't know how I would find that out. I guess I could find who to talk to. But in your experience is this something that people are really starting to do? Is there a lot of this going on? Is there leadership? Are you the kind of person, a consultant, that would come in and help people do that?

Jamie Liu
I would love to do more work on resilience hubs. I haven't done as much yet, but I think I've started to dip my toe into a little bit of it. I think I know that there's a lot in Baltimore. I believe that like US Urban Sustainability Directors Network is leading a lot of work there. And I do see more popping up around the country. So I do think it is starting to gain a lot more traction and I hope to see a lot more of that.

And I think when you mentioned the brewery, that also made me think, there's not just climate resilience, you know, there's also other types of resilience. Like for example, I don't know, I'm thinking of like an earthquake or something, or like a public health emergency, such as COVID. Not that we would want people to gather in a place if there's a pandemic going around, but I do think third spaces could still sort of serve that, like just a place to distribute emergency supplies or help out with other types of disasters. So maybe, yeah, if the brewery wasn't doing climate resilience, maybe they could be doing other types of resilience too.

Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, no, that's a really good point.

So also tell me a bit more about your work with the Sunrise Movement in New York City. Listeners probably are familiar already, but Sunrise is a youth-led movement. It's worldwide. I'm sure you can tell me better about it. Why don't you do that? Why don't you give us a little introduction to Sunrise and then tell me what you're actually doing in New York City with it.

Jamie Liu
Yeah, I think, I think it's mostly national. I know the big goal is to win a Green New Deal for the US and that looks like green climate related jobs, like well paying union jobs across the country. And that that's sort of the overall goal of Sunrise. There's chapters all over the country. And a lot of them are developing local campaigns to work towards that Green New Deal goal. So for example, in New York, we are working on a Green New Deal for public spaces campaign. And I think we're still trying to iron out what that looks like. But from looking at initial visionings, it's things like climate resilient spaces. I think there's actually a lot of it that's built around ideas similar to resilience hubs, wanting a place that's safe for people to gather during disasters, wanting to provide climate-related jobs, having more climate-related education. I'm really excited about that campaign. My role specifically in Sunrise New York, I am the outreach and onboarding lead. So I help out with bringing new people into the movement, basically working on trying to help people understand like what's your stake in the climate movement? Where can you help out? Just trying to like really build that sense of community activism. It's exciting. My day job involves a lot of research and data analysis, and I feel a little starved of talking to people and engaging with community sometimes, so that's why I decided to take on this role and it's been really rewarding.

Susan Kaye Quinn
Oh, that sounds amazing. And it's a perfect segue into the next topic that I wanted to talk about, which is loneliness and how community building… you can see it from a viewpoint of resilience, but it's also from the viewpoint of a very human need for connection and combating that loneliness that is a huge part of our modern life. It's also one of the major themes in your work.

This is one of the problems that connection and community is the answer to, not just climate. And then of course, connection leads to resilience. So I'm glad to see your story tackle this so directly. I think that's actually part of the power of the story, because it has that emotional resonance to it. Loneliness is something I don't think we talk about anywhere near enough in general, and specifically in climate fiction, because I think it's so integrated with what the solutions are. There's a lot of talk about community building in climate spaces, but not a lot of honest discussion about why we're so isolated to begin with and how you go about unraveling that and building more resilient networks of people.

What do you think is driving a lot of the loneliness and disconnection that we're experiencing? And specifically, I'm talking about America now because that's where we both live, but you're Taiwanese-American and your story is set in China. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on not just what's causing the disconnection here, but everywhere, and what kinds of solutions are out there that you'd like to see more in fiction and in real life.

Jamie Liu
I actually, I don't know too much about like the loneliness in China part, but I'm sure they're facing a lot of the same issues as us. As for like Asian Americans, I know that being marginalized can definitely exacerbate loneliness. For example, it's why I would probably have a hard time living anywhere that doesn't have a significant Asian American community. I feel very lucky to have been born in the San Gabriel Valley, which has a really large concentration of Asian Americans and Los Angeles. And also to be able to live in New York now, just to have those communities nearby and still be in touch with my culture.

As for what I think is driving loneliness, I think, there's so much. There's so much behind it. A lot of it is racism and classism, xenophobia that makes people turn on their neighbors. I think capitalism definitely makes survival harder day by day, while also at the same time making people prioritize accumulation of material wealth. As Americans, we're really taught that this is sort of the goal that we should be striving for. And then that makes us all see each other as competitors and spend any extra time we have on building up ourselves and our often nuclear family-centered circles rather than trying to really connect with our surrounding community. I think those are two big ones. I think social media definitely plays a part too, especially for younger people. It's sort of like feigning connection, although most of the time it's actually doing the opposite.

Susan Kaye Quinn
I feel like that's a real double-edged sword because there's a lot of people that I would never have connected with, without social media, but at the same time, I see the impacts and it's just so easy to slide into, especially if you're a very younger person who doesn't have the tools to necessarily combat that. But I mean, really across all age spectrums. Some of the folks that have the hardest time with social media are people who are older, because this is new technology to them and they don't really understand the dangers. So it's, I agree with all of what you're saying about the many, many facets. And I think we were talking about third spaces, like you have to have time to go to the third space, right? You have to have a weekend or an evening that you can go out of your house and you're not just struggling to feed your kids and get to school and get to work and, you know, then collapsing at the end of the day and all you want to do is watch Netflix because, my God, you're so exhausted. We don't leave a lot of room for people to do community building.

I think you embody that. When we first met back in 2022at the GRIST Looking Forward Book Club—which is great, if people are looking for great community building and all you can do is get online one time a month, that's a great place to start—but you said you were just starting to focus on hopeful storytelling and that you were at that time a pessimist and that your job as a climate resilience consultant, helping people prepare for the impacts of the climate crisis was necessarily focused on mitigating the damages. But when you reached out to me looking for more information on how to write more helpful stories, you were like modeling that exact thing. We have to like reach out and seek out the things that we want to improve our lives. And you obviously did that fantastically well and wrote this wonderful story.

My question, for you personally, is how has reading and writing hopeful climate fiction impacted you or changed how you approach things in your work, your activism, your personal life? You're so actively trying to do that, or at least over the time that I've known you, that's been something been an obvious goal for you. And it feels like there has to be some resonance going on. So I'd love to hear more about that.

Jamie Liu
I think one big way is it's made me really think more about the power behind collective effort and collective activism. I think especially growing up in the US, individualism is prized a lot and you're told to be a superhero and you know, you have to save the world all by yourself. I think reading more climate fiction has helped me see myself as like a small part of a huge community. Like sure, like everything I do might be small, but it still matters. And it's building up with every other thing that others are doing into this much bigger effort. From one perspective, someone might look at that and feel like, well, if everything I do is small, then why should I try? But I think from another perspective, you really have to believe in people and in humanity. And I think climate fiction really helps build that faith in people, which has crumbled so much just through our other narratives.

There's also just a lot of play in being able to use storytelling to imagine what you want. I feel like that is such a great tool and we should get everyone to see like the bright futures that lie in their own ideas and that we can work together to build it and don't need like some super educated person in power to give it to us.

Susan Kaye Quinn
Yeah, absolutely. And I love what you're saying there about play and connection being such an integral part of that. It's almost like we're starved as human beings for playfulness and connection and belief. It's easy to believe that people are terrible when you don't actually interact with people. So the more you're separated and siloed and in your own little homes or tiny little constrained lives, it's a lot easier to believe that everybody else is terrible. You know, maybe not the three people that you know, but everybody else is terrible and would do terrible things. But the more folks that you have connection with and the more time you have to just be joyful and play… I absolutely adore that idea of the public art zine where it's like, Well, if I had money, this is what I would do, because one of the most powerful things about art is people seeing the idea of it. Of course, it would be even cooler to have it physically manifested in the world. But if you can't do that, then manifesting it in a different way, I think that's just wonderfully creative and a way to get the same effect in some ways out there. So I love that.

Jamie Liu
Yeah, definitely.

Susan Kaye Quinn
I was thinking about how this interview that you did at the Climate Fiction Writers League is really connected to this idea of how we break open and think about things in a different way. I will definitely link to that interview in the show notes, but I'm going to quote you on this because it's just such a great lens to approach writing in this space.

So I wanna read all those stories.

Tell me a little bit about what that world with more just societal norms looks like and what would you like to see more of or less of? And I want to specifically hear about what you're working on next, but we'll save that for the end of the podcast. So right now I'm talking generalities like more communal living, more queer relationships being supported and valued, less Hero's Journey. Are we talking structural storytelling tropes or world-building tropes? When you were writing that quote, what were you envisioning?

Jamie Liu
When I started writing climate and hopeful fiction, I definitely did find a challenge because as a writer, I'm so focused on like what causes the conflict. But then I realized how many interesting, refreshing stories I can explore by trying to imagine something alternative. So I think, yeah, all the things you mentioned. I'm really into found family as a theme and just as a thing, a relationship model that I would love to share more in real life. Like in your story, Seven Sisters, I love that sort of dynamic of people coming together, not necessarily being related by blood, either by circ*mstance, like finding each other or intentionally seeking each other out. I think that there are a lot of stories about maybe more toxic codependent romantic relationships, and they are, they're definitely entertaining. But when that's all we absorb, we start to absorb these standards of what we have about our own relationships. So I really love found family or chosen family as a theme.

I think in general, we do live in a world where romantic partnership is sort of seen as the ideal cure to loneliness. If you just get into a relationship, you'll be better. But that's certainly not the case. And I also think it's not the only alternative to being alone. There's this idea that you're either in a relationship or you live by yourself in a house and you don't see anyone. But there's so many different things. You can live with multiple people. You can raise children in a village. I don't want my own kids, but I would love to help take care of my friends' kids. I wanna be the fun aunt who hangs out with them and talks to them when they don't want to talk to their parents about something, and can keep a secret or something. I would definitely love that. As for other components, definitely fewer stories about some special chosen ones who have a superpower to save the world. We definitely do see a lot of that. I’d love to see more about the power of collective action. I'm still figuring out how to write those kinds of stories. And then on a more structural level, I'm not really sure if this counts as structural, but I'm really interested in seeing what happens after the fall of a kingdom. I think we see a lot of dystopian stories where the rebellion wins, and that's great, and I think still a first step that in real life we have to reach. But I'm really curious about what comes after. How do you rebuild the towns and cities, et cetera, to meet the future that you want to see? I'd be really fascinated to see someone write that.

Susan Kaye Quinn
I feel like we have all these stories that we've seen a million times that are reinforcing these norms, these tropes, like what you're talking about. And it's not that those are terrible stories or that we have to get rid of them or anything like that. It's just we need a broader range of stories. And I think as a storyteller, definitely, if you're looking for what's fresh, new and exciting to write, it's not going to be necessarily those same tropes that we've been exploring.

I like the idea of what you were saying about looking at alternative family structures. I do a lot of that with my own stories. And part of it is driven, for me, it’s connected to… I think that's just where we will go as a society. We've got some segments of the society are aging, there's fewer children being born, the sort of dynamics are changing and we have to have room for that. There's one great real life example I'm always carrying around in my mind. In London, it's hugely, the cost of housing is insane and yet they've got colleges in town. So what they did is they started a program where some of the older pensioners who were living alone, who were vulnerable, had a flat, but didn't have a lot of extra money. They would pair them up with college students who needed a place to live. It wasn't just a renter-rentee kind of relationship. The expectation is that you would come in there and you'd kind of care for each other. It was taking what we already have, where you could just rent out a flat and we have a certain relationship of landlord and renter, and it's intentionally saying, no, that's not the relationship. We're entering into a caretaking relationship that is supposed to help both of you. Even though it's like physically, literally the same transaction of I'm coming to live in your house and paying you money to do it, or maybe they're getting a discount on the rent or something like that. We don't have to accept that as the only alternative. We could proactively say, no, this is a different model. We have a different objective here. And if you're going to sign up for this, you should know that this is what it's about. And I really like that. I really like that redefinition of something that's practical, meets people's needs, but it's just a shift in mindset. And I feel like that's what we do as storytellers is shift mindsets, including our own.

Jamie Liu
Yeah, I think I heard about that model that you're talking about as well. I do like it a lot. Part of it is still transactional, the sort of super logistical part, but it's also trying to take the transaction out of the relationship by really focusing on the relationship itself between the older tenant and the college student. And especially because I don't think a lot of younger people would interact often with older people who are not their relatives. So it's definitely building on a relationship that doesn't get as much attention, which I think is great.

Susan Kaye Quinn
I think is a foundation for, you know, so many different things. I'm now on the older end of that spectrum. I'm not a grandma, but I guess I theoretically theoretically could be. The kind of needs you have as a young person versus the kind of needs you have as an older person, they're different, but they're compatible. I love when my kids come home and we have a different kind of energy that we bring to the relationship. I think renegotiating those relationships, whether it's between people, between people and nature, between people and technology, those are really big themes in climate fiction. You actually touch on that in your story, to get back to the story. The idea of repairing our relationships with nature. And I think that and repairing nature's relationships with each other have to go hand in hand. As I've said a lot of times on the pod, finding sustainable ways to live means renegotiating those relationships because they're pretty broken right now and they're all interconnected. And we see that in your story.

Tell me more about some specific ways that you think we can repair or renegotiate our relationship with nature. Because I feel like that is actually a really big one that we're going to struggle with.

Jamie Liu
I live in New York, so this is something I think about a lot because I think being in a city, you definitely don't see yourself as surrounded by nature as much even within parks. We do have a lot of green space here, but I think it's like we don't see it as nature or wild, even though there is a lot of biodiversity wilderness even within the parks. Especially as a transplant to New York, I want to know more about like the plants and practices around me. What types of foods are in season? What's the natural landscape of the place? I've tried beekeeping lessons. I've done oyster farm tours around the area. I attempted to learn about maple sugaring last weekend actually, but it didn't really work out because of for weather reasons. But I think those kinds of education should be more available to everyone, especially people who live in urban areas. If we learn more about the effort that goes into things like our food, we would be a lot more conscious of what nature has to provide. And we would better understand how ecosystems are interconnected. If I go to the supermarket, food is there. If I turn on the tap, like water comes out. I wouldn't know I was in a drought. That's probably more relevant in California. But I think capitalism has really turned nature into exploitable products that we can buy. And then our connection to what the Earth can bring is sort of severed there. Just having more of that education and hands-on experience working with nature in gardens or for volunteer restoration projects can really help us get in touch more with the world around us again, especially in cities having that sort of a green space can boost mental health and have so many climate resilience benefits. I would love to see more focus on really trying to bring nature back, like education wise, especially to big cities like New York or LA.

Susan Kaye Quinn
I think that connection to food that you mentioned is so key. I have several organizations here in Pittsburgh that I support that are focused on urban gardens and developing the knowledge because, as my pathetic attempts to grow, you know, tomatoes in a pot on my deck will tell you, there's a lot of knowledge that goes into growing something well. So these organizations are focused on building urban gardens in areas that often are food deserts. These people are in food deserts because they're in the city. They're in the middle of the city, and they often are in areas of poverty. And so this more immediate connection to the land, I'm like literally working with the ground to grow things that I'm going to eat, there's an intimacy there that I think really starts to settle into the brain and makes you really think, Oh, this is all connected and maybe we don't want pollution spewing into the air nearby and that sort of thing. I hadn't really thought of that as a way to connect to nature. I just was thinking of it more in terms of resilience and people just like need to eat. If we're going to have precarity in the world, it would be really great to have more of that kind of resilience. So I like that connection with food being an entree point.

I'm not super familiar with New York City, but I would think you must have farmers markets and other ways to access local people who are growing food, not too far outside of the city or even like indoor vertical gardens, things that are actually located in the city, maybe not in New York City, maybe the prices are too high for real estate, I don't know. Maybe you can tell me a little bit, since you do live in the city, what's the situation there?

Jamie Liu
We do have a lot of farmers markets. I feel like I've encountered more than I did when I was in LA, even though LA, what I imagine is there's so many farms in California. So there's definitely a lot of big farmers market culture there. But yeah, I have encountered a lot of markets in New York. There's also a lot of community gardens and I think a big culture surrounding community gardens. There's one not too far from me that I hope to visit when…I think it has to open when the weather's warmer. But I know the Lower East Side in New York especially has a lot of community gardens, and there's a history there of these vacant lots, like nothing. It was just concrete, basically. And a few decades ago, there were guerrilla gardeners who would go in and sort of just break it up and put soil there and start planting and turn it into a garden with no… a city wasn't involved. They would have been fine to just leave them as vacant lots, but the community is there we're like, No, we want like green space. We want to be able to grow food. So I think there's definitely a culture of trying to bring that more into New York, which I think is really great.

Susan Kaye Quinn
That's such a key part of it too. Everybody lives in a certain spot on the planet. And wherever you are, there is stuff there that you can do to bring in an urban garden or build a pollinator garden or put a pot of tomatoes on your deck. There's something everyone can do everywhere. I like the idea that people are just spontaneously doing that. They're like, Hey, we don't really like having this broken concrete vacant lot. Let's do something there. One thing that climate fiction does a great job of is providing those kinds of ideas like, Hey, this is a thing that people do. You could do it too. Think about your local area. And so I love seeing more of that in climate fiction.

Alright, I think we're getting close to the end and I wanted to wind it up with my rapid round of three questions. What hopeful climate fiction have you read recently that you would recommend?

Jamie Liu
So the first thing that comes to mind, and I briefly mentioned this one to you too, but it's called Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 - 2072. It's a long title, by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O'Brien. It's pretty short, it's maybe novella size. It's fiction, but it's not written like a traditional novel, it's written like a series of interviews, because it is an oral history. And it basically describes in the future there has been sort of like a global insurrection and these communes have popped up all over the world. And this book describes the New York commune in particular. And they talk about things like what does the future of the family look like? What does future housing look like? What does farming look like? What does healthcare look like?

It's just a really great futurist and hopeful story because the world hasn't fallen apart. It does touch upon climate a bit. I feel like it's a more general look of the future. But there's definitely, they respond to the effects of climate change and they talk about rewilding and restoration and what does that look like? Like in the future, we still care about nature and restoring things and that's important.

Susan Kaye Quinn
That's so great. And that definitely is on my list. I've had it there since you told me about it. And I was like, this sounds very cool and kind of looks at different ways of structure and storytelling too. So I was going to look at it from that perspective as well as the actual story itself. So that's a great recommendation.

Jamie Liu
It looking like a series of interviews makes it feel a bit more real, like, Oh, this is something that actually happened because it sounds like you're interviewing real people. So I think that definitely has power.

Susan Kaye Quinn
It does, and I think having that grounding is really important. It's one of the things that I liked about your story as well, that it has a lot of the nice science in there that makes it feel very realistic. Like hey, this is a cool thing. I wonder if this is something we could do in reality sometime in the future.

So my next question, what do you do to stay grounded and hopeful in our precarious and fast-changing world?

Jamie Liu
Community is a big one for me. I'm in Sunrise. I do a lot of work with them. Being able to go to these meetings and see all these different people who are similarly concerned about climate change and want to do something about it. That's very hopeful to me, like to know that people care and want to carry out actions for it. But I guess in general, also just going to any community art events and meeting people who are still creating and expressing the futures that they want to see. Also having gatherings with friends, especially when I get to craft or cook together, just sort of these cozy activities where we're creating something. And knowing that we can really take care of ourselves and each other, that we don't have to endlessly consume what society gives us. We can make our own things and really take care of ourselves.

Susan Kaye Quinn
I love that.

Jamie Liu
Yeah, I've been trying to do a lot of community oriented things right now. I'm helping run a climate writers group in New York, which has been really fun. It's interesting. I was like, this is too niche of a thing, but people are there and doing it.

Susan Kaye Quinn
Tell me more about that because I remember you were looking for one and this is like two years ago now. So this is a relatively recent thing. Did you start the group or are you just running the group or tell me more about how the group works.

Jamie Liu
There's a group called Climate Cafe. Well, I think climate cafes are sort of like a national thing. But in New York, they had a meetup that was specifically for creatives who were like integrated climate themes into their work. And one of the subgroups within that was writers. And so, the Climate Cafe brought us together, but we've been really like trying to run these regular meetings where someone will submit a story and the rest of us will read it and give feedback. It's definitely a writers group, but I think it also has that unique edge of how do we think this story can help address the climate crisis or how do we think it will… it's not just focused on craft. There's that perspective. We all care about climate change. How can we write things that help fight it.

Susan Kaye Quinn
Exactly. Now see I want one of these in Pittsburgh now because I'd never heard of climate cafes before and I'm super intrigued. So I will be checking that out for sure.

All right. What's, what's next for you? Are you writing more short fiction? Are you planning a novel? What are you working on now? Where's it going?

Jamie Liu
So I'm trying a collaborative thing this year, which will be interesting to see how it goes, but I'm working with Sixth Festival, which is a group in New York, it's like the intersection of climate change and theater basically. So we are trying to write a climate play that I think will come out near the end of the year. So I'm excited to work on that and see how it goes. I've never worked on a play before. So it'll be a new challenge for me, for sure. Like really focusing on that sort of dialogue and expressing story through character movements on stage. And then as for personal projects, I'm a very unfocused writer. I constantly shift from project to project. So it's a little hard to say exactly what I'm working on, but I am working on some climate related things, like a few screenplay ideas. I'm working on a Twine game. Twine is sort of like an interactive fiction software, kind of a choose your own adventure thing. A year ago, I wrote a climate dating sim. And now I am writing a sequel to that, which is like a climate family sim. And that sort of builds on some of the things we were talking about earlier about like loneliness and alternate family models. And especially the thing you mentioned, an older person living with younger people. That was the theme I was really leaning into. And some other novel ideas. I don't really work too long on any one project, but I think these are the things I'm trying to focus on for this year. So we will see how it goes.

Susan Kaye Quinn
Oh my gosh, those sound amazing. All of that. I love it. And as one of the Sustainability Salons that I was in, they were talking about movement building and how the arts are such a key part of the movements because they draw people in. And you're just looking at all these different methods of drawing people in. I love that. I think it's fantastic.

Thank you so much for coming on the pod and talking with us today and sharing all of your work and your ideas. I can't wait to see more from you in the future, but thank you for being here.

Jamie Liu
Thank you for hosting me. I'm really excited to see all the other episodes you come out with. I just want to hear about other writers and what they're working on and continue to build this huge space we're creating.

Susan Kaye Quinn
Oh yeah, I'm excited about that too. That's the meta part of this pod is very much that to bring people together. I love that you had already listened to TK's pod before you came on. I love that. I want us all to be in conversation with one another. So thank you again for coming today.