Lily Brooks-Dalton Interview: The Light Pirate

Lily Brooks-Dalton, author of The Light Pirate which has been selected as our Vermont Reads book for 2025, shares reflections on writing the book, the different sides to the question “should I stay or should I go?” in the wake of a climate crisis, and the importance of finding a balance between hope and gloom when writing about big problems. She spoke with Vermont Humanities staff member Miciah Bay Gault.

Miciah Bay Gault,Vermont Humanities: The Light Pirate offers insights about community versus isolation, about deep connection to land, about the perils of not paying attention—to name just a few. I’m curious which ideas were there from the beginning, and which ideas emerged out of the writing?

Lily Brooks-Dalton: The idea that I started with was imminence—of an individual disaster, but also of a drastically changing landscape. And from there, confronting the question of whether to stay or go in the face of climate peril, and the complexities that live inside that choice.

It’s easy to use hindsight or geographical distance to judge someone who stays in the path of a natural disaster, but it’s so much more nuanced in the moment. And that’s something that I wanted to unfold, to really understand in both directions. As I started engaging with that idea, and as I got to know my characters, the rest of the book grew from that initial seed.

VH: I notice how entirely you get into the minds of Kirby, Wanda, Frida, Phyllis, and Lucas. Will you talk about your strategies for achieving that deep interiority?

LBD: That’s a big compliment, so thank you. As much as the book is about Wanda, witnessing the range of coping mechanisms that are evident in all of those characters felt integral to understanding who she is. Wanda is very much a product to her ecosystem (as we all are), and to me that means the landscape she  grew up in but also the people that surround her, so it felt very natural to pivot into these other characters as a way to see Wanda more fully. None of us exist in isolation, and so moving back and forth between these other points of view felt like a way to make that point.

So much of the mechanics of writing are a mystery to me, if I’m being honest. It’s mostly intuition, and trusting what feels right and what feels wrong. You’re asking about the strategy for achieving interiority, which is a great question, but my answer is pretty wishy-washy—I just really cared about all of them. Loving your characters, even the shitty ones, is how they come alive. In my experience, anyway.

VH: I was stopped in my tracks by one line at the very end of The Light Pirate, describing the special powers of the children of a community: “They do not call these gifts magic and they do not call them science. They call them what they are: change.” Without giving anything away to readers who haven’t yet finished reading, will you talk about the overlapping roles of science, magic, and change in the book?

LBD: It’s really interesting to see how much readers gravitated toward that line and I think one other, a little earlier on, which also puts magic and science in the same sentence. This blending of fiction and nonfiction, science and magic, realism and speculative, etc, is something that shows up in my work a lot, I think, and is something that is constantly on my mind. For me, there is no hard boundary that separates the real and the unreal. Not everyone will agree with that obviously, but that’s fine.

My stock quip is that I write speculative nonfiction. In one way that’s a dark piece of climate change humor, but in another, it’s a nod to the fact that I tend to work along the borders of realism. I do a lot of research and my work is usually grounded in a great deal of fact, but I don’t think I’d be interested if there wasn’t a little extra elbow room for the inexplicable. The modern perception of what’s real and what’s not real doesn’t line up at all with what it was a hundred years ago. Or a thousand. So how will that perception have changed in the future?

VH: We understand you have a connection to Vermont. Tell us about that! And do you think your Vermont upbringing/experience influenced the writing or story arc of The Light Pirate in any way? If so, how?

LBD: I spent the first seventeen years of my life in Halifax, Vermont, so yes, Vermont is mine and I am hers. The VT connection has faded over the years as all my family moved away and my reasons to go back have dwindled, but I’ll never not be a Vermonter.

I do think that growing up in such a rural place instilled a great big curiosity in me about the natural world, which is at the core of this story. Obviously the climate depicted in TLP is quite different, but that experience of being a lonely kid spending all my time outside poking around in the dirt definitely marked me as a writer, and I think that shows up in all of my work.

VH: How difficult it must be to write about climate disaster without relying on fear and dread for the emotional content of the book! The Light Pirate doesn’t shrink from the scary stuff, but it also offers a profound sense of hope for the future. Was that challenging, or is hope integral to who you are as a writer?

LBD: Oh man, I don’t know how to answer this. It was challenging, for sure. There’s a real psychological toll to spending years fleshing out the worst possible version of the future. But I’ve always been interested in the dark, literally and figuratively, and so I guess it makes sense that I would wind up leaning into these big civilization-sized problems in my books.

I think both halves of this equation are integral to what I’m interested in as a writer—the doom and the glimmer of hope, woven together. They have to go together, or it doesn’t work. It’s a question of balance. How much of one, versus how much of the other? How much gloom can the reader handle before they turn away? How much gloom can the writer handle? It’s a seesaw.

VH: At the end of The Light Pirate I couldn’t help but think of another recent book, North Woods by Daniel Mason, which celebrated a timescale that values change, adaptability, land and an ongoing-ness of flora and fauna over one species’ success. What books do you feel that The Light Pirate is in conversation with?

LBD: I loved North Woods, that’s a very flattering comparison. I mean Octavia Butler always comes to mind, not as a comp, I wouldn’t be that bold, but as someone whose work I think about a lot. This is a hard question, I feel like I’m not the right person to judge—but I like your answer. Let’s stick with Daniel Mason.

VH: Because the story is set in coastal Florida—and perhaps because of some of the more magical elements that you weave into it—it might be tempting for readers in Vermont to see this as a fantasy that doesn’t describe the sort of changes that may come to a mountainous state like Vermont in the coming decades. How might you respond if people question the relevance of this story for Vermonters?

LBD: Well, I would remind them that Vermont unfortunately has its own saga with flooding and with climate disasters. And there are a lot of places that seemed quite safe at one point—I’m thinking of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains in particular right now, often thought of as a climate haven—only to fall victim to some truly devastating weather events. The ecosystem of TLP is different than Vermont, sure, but the capacity for enormous environmental change is present everywhere. And I think we’re seeing that unfold in real time now, year by year.

VH: We hope that over 75 Vermont communities will read the Light Pirate over the next year and plan events and activities around the book. Are you aware of what libraries, schools, and community organizations in other states might have done to expand their study of the book?

LBD: It’s been interesting to see The Light Pirate become part of conversations alongside climate change activism. I think storytelling is a really important and at times unsung piece of policy-making, and so hearing that the book has at times inspired people or communities to move beyond wringing their hands or hoping it won’t happen in their lifetime is very moving. I was on a panel last year where I heard someone say that “culture eats policy for breakfast.” And I think that’s very true. More often than not, culture comes first and politics follow. So seeing my work become a small part of this cultural conversation around climate change is a great honor and something I take very seriously.