Climate Fiction Book Talk: Open the Floodgates by Nina Schuyler

Join us for a conversation with Nina Schuyler in celebration of her new novel Open the Floodgates!

Nina will be joined by Rosanna Xia (California Against the Sea) to discuss how stories about the changing climate can help shape the stakes, generate empathy, and open a space for action. Rosanna's research is heavily grounded in specific examples of communities addressing rising sea levels. Nina will talk about the need for new voices, new ways to see the world, which led to her anthropomorphizing the River.

About the participants:

NIna Schuyler's collection, In This Ravishing World, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, the W.S. Porter Prize, the Prism Prize for Climate Literature, and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her novel, Afterword, was selected as one of San Francisco's One City One Book Program. She lives in Northern California.

Rosanna Xia's nonfiction book, California Against the Sea, won the PEN/E.O. Award for Literary Science Writing, the California Book Award, Golden Poppy Award Winner for Nonfiction, and was selected as a 2024 Great Read from Great Places by the Library of Congress. Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a documentary filmmaker of Out of Plain Sight. She lives in Los Angeles.

About the book:

We are in the midst of a profound legal shift: from New Zealand to India to Ecuador, real-world laws have granted personhood to rivers. With a mix of magic and pathos, Open the Floodgates imagines this new reality with a new configuration of the human and other-than-human relationship.

In an unnamed California town, the River is granted personhood and has the right–-and urgent need–-to argue in court for its existence. But powerful, well-funded enemies are determined to keep the River exactly as it is: gunk-filled, toxic, a convenient dumping ground for waste. The story moves like water, entering the minds of the town’s people, pigeons, deer, dogs, cats, the trees, the River’s home, and the River itself. When the River moves, the text winds its way along the page, mimicking water. When the River is ultimately jailed, the town faces a reckoning: what do we owe the River? And the River must answer in turn: what, if anything, does it owe humans?