On the occasion of the reissue of her 2012 debut novel, Glaciers (Tin House), author Alexis M. Smith discusses climate change, war, and how we can (maybe) save the planet.

Glaciers is a stunning book. It is luminous, lifting, deeply interior to the point that reading it feels like one is climbing inside the story as it unfolds. It was a grand achievement as a novel, even more so perhaps for a debut novel. What was it like writing it?

Thank you—that was the experience I hoped readers would have. Writing has always been my space to think, a way to practice awareness and presence, and document that experience. As an undergrad, I studied poetry. I thought, at the time, that I would go on to grad school and become an academic, and that creative writing would be a passion project for summers and sabbaticals. Writing poetry counteracted the theory and analysis, I thought. But I ended up applying to a few MFA programs with a poetry portfolio and landed in the low-residency program at Goddard, where experimentation with forms and genres was encouraged. What started as a series of prose poems about my childhood in Alaska became a short novel about a young woman whose life was close—but not identical—to mine. Writing it was like documenting the archive of someone who took a parallel path, like walking side by side with a different version of myself.

Time is an important element in the novel, but its themes and questions are timeless. Now that it is out in a new edition, ready for a new audience, what do you hope readers will discover within it?

When Glaciers was first published, in 2012, climate anxiety wasn’t a common theme in fiction outside of dystopian sci-fi. Now it’s everywhere in our art and popular culture. In 2012, the U.S.’s wars in the [Muslim world] had been going on for a decade and would go on for another (at the time unfathomable) decade. Now we’re in the midst of another catastrophic conflict, while, simultaneously, the climate crisis ravages the lives of people of the Global South and continues to eat away at every domain of organism on the planet, from pole to pole. I think our broader cultural consciousness is just beginning to awaken to the connections between these endless wars and the climate crisis. Rereading Isabel’s grief over losing the landscapes and people she loves, I hope that readers see the connection I was trying to make then, though Isabel’s anxieties might come off as commonplace now. What’s troubling is that despair is perhaps more common these days, and giving in to despair is basically giving up. Isabel romanticizes a past that is irreparable and unrecoverable, but it’s in the spirit of honoring what we can still save of the present and the future.

What are your thoughts on the book being reissued?

I was a bookseller for most of my 20s, and now (after stints as an adjunct and in public radio), I’m bookselling again. I’ve seen so many debut novels come and go. The attention is so fleeting—even winning awards doesn’t do much to keep the public’s attention—and then everyone’s on to the next debut. Most will eventually fall out of print. I’m so grateful that Tin House—and readers and booksellers and librarians—have kept my little novella around for as long they have. It feels miraculous to hold the new edition in my hands.

The original cover of the novel featured a strapless dress made from photographs and pieces of text. The new cover has a hand superimposed on top of glacier mountains. What are your thoughts about both covers, and how do you think they present the novel?

The designers who worked on both editions of Glaciers created beautiful art objects. With the first edition, Diane Chonette (cover designer) and Jacob Vala ([page] designer), perfectly captured the way Isabel fetishizes books and other ephemera and constructs an identity out of collected stories. The French flaps and the deckled edges and all the white space on the page took my breath away—I couldn’t have imagined a lovelier book. Beth Steidle (both cover and interior of the reissue) managed to symbolically capture Isabel’s longing to reconstruct what’s lost with the subtlest of visual gestures. And I love that the new edition feels softer and more delicate somehow, like something already vintage.

In the new preface, Maris Kreizman (author, editor, and host of The Maris Review) writes, “How do we cling to what we care about when the world is quite literally coming apart in front of us?” How would you answer that question?

We each, according to our talents and abilities, need to work toward a future of mutual care and sustenance. Visualize a world in which resources are shared, not claimed by the powerful and privileged few. Like a library. Imagine the planet as a library of human and botanical and mineral and animal resources. What does it look like when we organize around sustaining the diversity of what the planet contains, valuing it for the abundant resource that it is, and sharing so that everyone has a chance to thrive? Then we ask ourselves what we have to offer that world, and begin by offering it in this one. One act at a time, in ever-widening circles of connection and care for each other, whether the “other” is a human neighbor or a honeybee or a caribou or a wetland or a cactus…. That is how we will hold onto the beauty, the goodness, the joy, the awesomeness of everything we love. Begin with what you care about. Don’t stand by silently watching the world come apart.

What authors and titles do you like to share with other readers?

A confounding question for a writer/bookseller/teacher! I’ll confine myself to a few books that I’ve read or reread in the last year that have informed my current writing: Selected Works of Audre Lorde; The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman; The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka; They by Kay Dick; The Wall by Marlen Haushofer; The Birdcatcher by Gayle Jones; After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz; Extra(ordinary) People by Joanna Russ.

What are you working on now?

Queer ecological praxis. And, very slowly, more novels.