Q&A with Author Mike McClelland
Mike McClelland is a writer who recently contributed the short story “The Flotilla at Bird Island” to Take Us to a Better Place: Stories.
Mike McClelland’s short fiction collection, Gay Zoo Day, was released by Beautiful Dreamer Press in 2017, and other recent work has appeared in the Boston Review, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and Permafrost. He is a graduate of Allegheny College, the London School of Economics, and the MFA program at Georgia College, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. His short story “The Flotilla at Bird Island” recently appeared in Take Us to a Better Place: Stories, published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in collaboration with FoST’s sister company, Melcher Media. In it, two long-lost lovers from different backgrounds reconnect in a South ravaged by the effects of climate change, putting the disparities between their two worlds into sharp contrast — until one of them proposes a sci-fi solution that might allow them to forge ahead against the rising sea levels.
With this collection, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) approached 10 diverse writers with a specific prompt: to tell a story about a “Culture of Health,” where everyone has a fair and just opportunity to pursue as healthy a life as possible. Do you consider yourself to be a future-thinking writer, or was this a new way of approaching storytelling for you?
You know, it’s really interesting — especially because it’s been a little while since the beginning of the project — but I do now think of myself as a writer who really considers the future quite a bit. But when the project started, I’d only ever written one story that was set in the future. I was in a really weird kind of witchcraft mode at the time. But working on this story really got me thinking not just about the future, but the near future — just the variety of precipices that we are at and how they can play out in fiction. We’ve even seen some of the things that are in the book start to come to pass in the time since it’s been written. And so it was really powerful for me as a writer to consider that writing about the future doesn’t need to be this long view. It can actually be what’s right around the corner, and helping readers grapple with that is actually a really cool and important task.
“The Flotilla at Bird Island” is set in Atlanta in a not-to-distant future where climate change has ravaged both the environment and public health — creating even starker divides between the haves and the have-nots. At one point the two main characters pass through a less wealthy part of the city and see people waiting in long for vaccines — it’s hard not to compare it to what we’re seeing now during the COVID pandemic, with access to quality health care and testing being unevenly distributed. What made you specifically decide to tackle climate change and this idea of health equity in your story?
Well, learning about RWJF’s Culture of Health vision was really illuminating for me. Health equity wasn’t a concept I was overly familiar with. My mom is a public-school nurse and has her PhD in health education, so I knew some things about public health, but I didn’t have much of an understanding of the idea of health equity and what that actually means for people. I went to graduate school in England, and I’ve lived in a few other places with more socialized health care, and I always thought that you could have one or the other — socialized or privatized health care — and that was it.
But working on this project taught me that access to health care shouldn’t be political. And that enabled me to at least imagine a future where there is the possibility of healthy change outside of the political spectrum — it doesn’t have to be this stark divide. It also planted a seed in my imagination: What will it look like in the future, and what will our society look like? And how will those things butt up against each other? So, I really wanted to explore what our current trajectory might look like. And then what if there’s this other place where something different is happening?
Right. Your story proposes a sci-fi/protopean solution to forge ahead against rising sea levels and increasingly uninhabitable climate: self-supporting flotillas where everyone has the chance to live a full, healthy life with equal access to medicine, healthy food, exercise, and so on. Does this reflect the kind of future you’d like to see for the country? Are you hopeful that we can still reverse the tide of where we seem to be headed, given our current battles over access to health care?
When it comes to health care, especially looking at it right now, it’s very easy to get discouraged. I think the pandemic has also put it into stark contrast — the people who have easy access to health care and those who don’t. It’s been terrible, and there’s no way to gloss over it. But I do think that, in my generation, we’ve seen proactive change in a number of areas, and we’ve seen people living better lives. I’m hoping that what comes from this current tragedy is that we can approach a world more like the one in my story, where there is health equity. And I think that might be more of a possibility now that we’ve just seen how horribly it can go.
Research has shown that stories have the power to make us more empathetic and more likely to take action in our own lives. Are there techniques or themes that you employ in your writing to get people to connect to the story, to have some sort of empathy for the characters?
I love thinking about that, because so much of what I write about is shaped by the books I’ve read over the course of my life that have really stuck with me. And with this story, I was really adamant that it needed to be based around this friendship. There are elements of romance to it just because I, as a reader, have a teenage girl living in my heart who’s like, “There needs to be romantic propulsion to this story.” Wanting to be in love, especially with a long-lost friend or partner, is such a romantic, universal notion, and it does, I think, fit in with the idea of a future where things are okay. But I really wanted to base it around this idea of, if your best friend in the world asked you to do something that was completely insane, would you do it? What would that relationship have to look like for you to be on board with it? Because we all have those dreams, especially when we’re younger, of “What if someone showed up from a magical world and invited me to come with them?” Now, as an adult, if somebody did that, I’d be like, “No, get out of my yard!” But if it was my best friend and they said, “Believe this, come with me,” then I think I might.
Do you have any favorite stories in the collection?
Yes, of course! Since I’ve been writing a lot in this space lately, I’ve been using the other stories as inspiration. I love Karen Lord’s “The Plague Doctors,” and I’m also a die-hard fan of Yoon Ha Lee, so his story [“The Erasure Game”] was another favorite. And Calvin Baker, who I met when RWJF invited us to share our stories at TEDMED, is brilliant. At the beginning of the project, I actually wondered — particularly with The Hunger Games and the weird future it portrayed being hugely popular — if all of the stories would be in the same vein. So I was excited to see that they’re all very different and consider so many different themes. I really appreciate that.
Would you say, overall, that the collection has influenced the way you think about health and health equity — in your own life and also on a larger scale?
One hundred percent. Being involved with this collection really opened my eyes to a number of things. I didn’t realize how much I love considering these questions, and just how exhilarating it is as a writer to explore this space — and also just, even in a masochistic sense, to consider the future and all the things that can go wrong. We tend to get really cynical about the folks who are just living for right now and not paying attention to what’s going to happen to our children or our children’s children. Or what we’ve seen now — it doesn’t even have to be the next generation. It can all fall apart now. But there is a certain grace to be found in knowing that there are experts out there who are dedicated to finding ways to prevent that. I hadn’t realized how much wonderful research people are doing and continue to do to make the world better.
For me, it’s opened a door to start speaking out about it and to include it in my writing — especially now. It’s been really powerful for me as a writer, and it’s opened up so many creative possibilities that I wouldn’t have explored otherwise.
What have you been working on lately?
It’s been funny. I went in this weird direction after becoming a father where I wrote this really strange collection of witch stories. I don’t know what was on my mind — I was really tired for about three years! And so I have that collection that I’m currently refining, and then I just finished a novel that considers some of the same themes as “The Flotilla at Bird Island.” It’s about an essential relationship with two mismatched people and how they face things when the earth starts fighting back against humans.
It’s been cool for me to move into the space I’m in now where I’m writing with confidence. “Flotilla” was really a bridge for me to do that, because I think as a writer, you can’t write about something important unless your heart’s in it — at least that’s the case for me. But exploring this space and finding so much energy there, creatively, has been so fulfilling. Just thinking about health care through the lens of fiction really forced me to educate myself. And then at the same time, being in contact with the other writers in the collection and seeing how they approached the project really opened my mind as a reader too.
I’ll end with a question we like to ask all of our FoST friends: What do you think is the future of storytelling? Do you think books will always be with us?
I do. When I decided to pivot from working in marketing to writing books about 10 years ago, there was a moment when I asked myself, “What if this dries up and dies before I get the chance?” Thankfully that hasn’t happened. But as an enthusiast of all kinds of entertainment in general, I do think we have the capacity to enjoy it all. Recently I’ve gotten really into VR. I started it for meditation purposes, but now I’m also watching short films. There’s also a lot of immersive theater and things you can do through Zoom that I’m loving.
At the same time, I returned to reading fiction over the course of the pandemic. I mean, I’m always reading fiction, but I’m usually focused on short stories since that’s what I like to write — and also because I don’t usually have the time for novels. But I’ve been able to read more novels over the past several months now that there is more time. I’m especially loving books that update classic stories in new and interesting ways. A couple of recent favorites are The Ancestor by Danielle Trussoni and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. They’re both doing what we did with Take Us to a Better Place, in that they’re thinking about health care in the future, but they’re both doing so in these really Gothic kinds of settings. They’ve inspired me so much as an artist. They made me realize that being forward-thinking while also looking to the past is the gift we have as storytellers. We don’t have to pick a single lane.
If you’d like to read “The Flotilla at Bird Island” or any of the other stories featured in Take Us to a Better Place, you can visit rwjf.org/fiction to download the free e-book or audiobook, and well as an accompanying conversation guide.
