San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Turns out, cli-fi novel by S.A. writer chillingly accurate
Years before the February winter storm paralyzed San Antonio, writer Marisol Cortez conjured a similar event for her novel “Luz at Midnight.”
The book references ever-rising heat during the summers in the city and increasingly intense winters, including one that was “the coldest on record — rolling blackouts blanketing the city during a winter storm that stalled over South Texas for several weeks, freezing the river hard enough to skate on for the first time in over 100 years.”
Seeing real life take that kind of turn was eerie, Cortez said.
“But then, when I sat down and thought about it more, I kind of realized that even though it seemed weird, I knew that everything in the book was based on stuff that had already happened,” she said. “That particular incident in the book is based on the freeze in February 2011. Everything in that part of the story is all based on stuff that is already happening and has been happening for a while.”
The book traces the romance between Citlali
Sanchez-O’Connor, a community activist engaged in a campaign against a new mining process, and Joel Champlain, a reporter for a weekly newspaper trying to get to the bottom of that process. The poetrylaced tale is told against the backdrop of climate change, making it a “cli-fi” novel.
FlowerSong Press pub
lished the book in December.
“I didn’t want to have an event that was going to be me reading,” Cortez said. “I was trying to think about, how can it be more varied and how can it give a sense of the book that also honors all of the people that supported me, stood behind me and made possible this public presentation of this work that for so long was just something I labored on privately?”
The novel is rooted in the real world. Cortez researched rolling blackouts and extreme weather, as well as fracking and the way the grid that powers most of Texas operates.
She drew on aspects of her own life for Citlali, including her climate activism. For Cortez, 41, that work includes Deceleration, an online journal about environmentalism and related social justice issues that she co-edits. It can be found at deceleration.news.
Cortez’s interest in activism was fired by the PGA Village controversy of the early 2000s, an ultimately abandoned effort to create a golf resort in the city. Among the issues that ultimately doomed the project were concerns about its potential impact on the Edwards Aquifer.
“That was kind of my introduction to environmental justice and politics in San Antonio,” she said. “And then I went away to school and studied a lot of stuff that was related to environmental justice issues, and then I came back to San Antonio.
While I was on the market for an academic job, I was working on organizing around environmental issues, which at the time, the big fight was about the South Texas nuclear project, so the environmental plot in the book is kind of a mashup of all of those different struggles.”
“Luz at Midnight” has been in the works for about a decade. It developed in fragments that Cortez eventually realized were all part of one rather than separate stories.
“With the first draft, I felt like I was being pulled by a horse,” she said. “The other image that comes to mind is that it kept showing up at the window, and I was trying to look like I wasn’t looking at it. I was worried that if I looked at it, if I let myself call it a book, it would stop coming.” Early in the process, she knew she wanted that painting by Casas to be the cover of the book after she spotted it in an exhibition. It depicts a stormy sky with low-hanging clouds over a grove of trees.
“I just had this immediate response to it — I thought, this is the visual version of this thing that I’m writing,” she said. “I didn’t know, at that point, if I was going to be able to finish the thing I was writing — I wasn’t sure what it was, I wasn’t calling it a novel — but I thought, if I ever finish it, I’m going to ask David if he would be willing to let me use it as a cover.
“And when I saw the title of the painting — it’s called ‘Question Everything’ — I felt like that’s in the spirit of the book, as well.”
Cortez started writing in high school, but at a certain point, she said, she lost confidence in her work and stopped trying to get it published. Instead, she would finish stories and set them aside.
“It’s been kind of a long and slow process to give myself permission to say, ‘I am a writer, and what I most want to do with my time on the planet is to write stuff and share it with the world,’ ” she said.
In addition to “Luz at Midnight,” she recently produced “I Call on the Earth,” a poetry chapbook she worked on with artist Leó Lee. Lee released it through her small press, Double Drop Press. The poems were inspired by interviews Cortez did with residents of the Mission Trails Mobile Home Park, whom the city relocated in 2014 to make way for an apartment complex.
Cortez co-founded Vecinos de Mission Trails, an advocacy group that documented the residents’ experiences and provided support for them.
With “Luz” out in the world, Cortez said, she is excited to turn her attention to new projects and focus more energy on Deceleration.
“I’m incredibly lucky; this is all stuff that I’ve dreamed of doing for a long time,” she said. “I feel like I’m finally figuring out how to do what I feel called to do, what I’ve always wanted to do, and only recently realized,
‘Oh, I should prioritize that.’ ”