Lancaster writer pens novel for teens about climate change
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Scott LaMar
Airdate: May 30th, 2023
Our guest on The Spark Tuesday says he writes weird stories.
Cliff Lewis’ debut novel is called We The Future and it’s about an asthmatic boy, Jonah, who is worried about his future as the climate is changing and is thrown a lifeline from Sunny, a girl visiting from the future. Along the way Jonah is tasked with recruiting 600 of his classmates to fight climate change.
Cliff Lewis talked about his inspiration for writing the book,”I had an experience a few years ago in my community that really changed my life and changed the lives of a lot of people in our town in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. There was a congressional campaign and my family volunteered to get involved, and we were using our house as a staging location and as a little bit of backup support. The campaign sent this crew of young climate activists from a group called the Sunrise Movement. They came to our house. They helped us run the operation. And it was meeting these young activists that completely reshaped my understanding of the crisis and what people can do about it. They worked with such incredible urgency like like not like a workaholic that can’t pull themselves away from their smartphone, but like like a first responder on their way to a four alarm fire. And it was that urgency that I saw in their eyes and the sense of community and camaraderie that they had all the while that really lit the spark that led to what is now this book called We The Future.”
Lewis said the book is geared middle-school aged kids,” I was listening to an interview actually with the author David Wallace-Wells, who wrote an excellent book called The Uninhabitable Earth, which is exploring worst case scenarios around the climate crisis. And in that interview, he said, We have so few stories. Even though climate crisis is arguably the defining historical event of this century, we have so few stories and so few examples of popular storytelling that really directly tackle this subject. We’ve got a lot of popular storytelling that tangentially addresses it or metaphorically addresses it, but what about stories that directly address it? And he was saying there is there’s a dearth of that. And as a writer myself and a creative person, it was like I felt this the calling come upon me in that moment and the spark of that idea sort of lit in that moment. And I thought, I can do this. I can write a story. And more specifically, yeah, I can write a story for young readers. That’s just something I’ve always had a passion to do, is to is to communicate with young people.”
Jonah is the main character in the story but Sunny, the girl from the future, has a big impact on Jonah and what he has to do to fight climate change,”He’s tried to strip his life of anything that grows his carbon footprint and he’s trying to basically tackle the climate crisis as a one kid army alone. And the big message that Sunny brings to Jonah at the opening of the story is only you can save the world, but you’ll never do it alone. And she encourages him to network out, to build connections, to organize, and then build those friendships. Because it’s not just about networking. Networking is when I say networking, it sounds very functional, very utilitarian. But what we’re really talking about when you’re organizing together with other people who are who are feeling the same passion that you are, who are facing the same fears that you are, that’s not just a network, that those are friendships, and some of those friendships can last a lifetime. So, Jonah, at the beginning of the story is a very lonely kid. And through this journey of organizing and friend building and advocating for a better future, he finds with the help of Sunny the friendships that he had so desperately needed when the story began.”
