Novelist and former Huffington Post climate reporter Sarah S. Grossman joins Fiction/Non/Fiction co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about the Los Angeles wildfires. Grossman, who lives in Los Angeles and whose 2024 novel A Fire So Wild centers on a wildfire in Northern California, discusses how communities are coming together to support each other in the wake of the devastation. She reflects on the damage to the historically Black neighborhood of Altadena; the fact that people are differently affected by climate change, even as wealth cannot completely shield anyone; the factors that contributed to the wildfires; and what it is like to prepare to evacuate, or, alternatively, to offer shelter to others. Grossman reads from A Fire So Wild.
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This podcast is produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.
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From the episode:
Whitney Terrell: Wasn’t it also difficult to get out of the Palisades in the same situation where people were on narrow roads? That traffic issue is not a small thing when you’re dealing with a fire.
Sarah S. Grossman: No, it’s a very intense, very big problem. We saw some of that in the Palisades, yes, which has a few roads that lead out to what is then PCH, which is the main Pacific Coastal Highway, which also saw a ton of houses burn upward toward Malibu. You could see people fleeing, videotaping as they were in their car with the flames coming down toward them. You don’t have another option to get out of these places. You’re in your car, and people left their cars in the road when they saw that the flames were coming. These are very difficult circumstances to know whether it’s safe to leave your house, when to leave, how to leave, and once you’re fleeing, whether it’s smarter to stay in your car as the flames are approaching, on the off chance that the road clears and you can get out or to flee on foot. What ends up happening is that people who flee on foot leave their cars, which then block other people from leaving. So yeah, these are really dangerous, harrowing and deadly circumstances.
WT: And in an earlier scene, a lot of the characters who were introduced in the beginning of the book are all gathered at a party that this character, Abigail, who’s mentioned in your reading, is having to raise money for affordable housing, but in a very rich house.And you have all the different classes of people in the party, which speaks to this idea that no one’s going to escape this; being wealthy is not going to be protection from this. But what’s interesting is they’ve been seeing smoke, they’re aware that there’s some fire going on, and they are really slow to react, because in some ways this has become normalized, is that what you were aiming for in that scene?
SSG: Yeah, a couple things happen when a fire is approaching your area. One of the things that has happened here, that I saw a lot up in Northern California and lived through myself as a resident, is that there is a steady normalcy to fire season. You get used to there being fires nearby, but not close enough for you to evacuate, that you’re keeping a watchful eye on. There’s smoke in the air. Is it so much smoke that you’re putting on a mask? Do you have to get an air purifier? There’s a constant air of risk without knowing whether you’re doing quite enough you have a go bag. Is it with you in your car every time you leave the house? Maybe not. You start to become casual around these things, in a way that then can be really detrimental when these fires do get close to your home and your neighborhood. I experienced some of that myself here in Venice, I live alone and have a dog, and it is not necessarily easy for me to go with a 60 pound pit bull to stay with other friends. And I was making those kinds of calculations, if the evacuation line gets up to the 10, then maybe I’ll go to my friends, and just lock my dog in one of their rooms, and if it gets further out, then actually maybe my home is maybe a haven for someone else to come to. You’re making these calculations, basically staying up all night trying to see what the progression of the fire is, both out your window and on—
WT: That’s the other thing. What happens if it progresses while you’re sleeping? It can just come!
SSG: You don’t sleep much, yeah.
VVG: So Whitney is mentioning this party. From the point of view of structure, narratively speaking, it’s a really good setup for a very organic unfolding of these clashing sets of politics. Abigail is throwing the party, in a virtue-signally, but also heartfelt way. She is trying to do some good in a limited space. One of the servers at the party, Willow, meets Abigail, thinks she’s getting invited to the party, and instead is invited to work at the party. There’s a divorced couple that’s at the party, and they’re aggressively fighting with each other about their class differences and responses to climate change. And it’s their daughter who is Mar, and Mar has a friend, Lena, who talks to her about how indigenous practices include these controlled burns to prevent wildfires. You managed to get all of that in there, and it is all very character based and—
WT: It’s also very California-y.
VVG: Craft wise, it seems like a lot of very smart choices that also fit with this particular setting. Can you talk a little bit about how this evolved for you through drafts. Were there characters that you were like, “I haven’t represented this set of politics, so I’m going to introduce this character,” anything like that that you can give us some insight into?
SSG: Yeah, of course. I had the privilege of living in The Bay for a while, and I was living in Berkeley when I wrote this book. And so a lot of these characters are born of the communities that I was lucky enough to be part of. And there were specific walks of life that I wanted to make sure to include based on the reporting I had done over years in California on fires and including how in California, you’re not looking at just the climate crisis in a vacuum, but you’re looking at a climate crisis that is on top of an affordable housing crisis. And so I wanted to make sure to include everyone who’s going to be impacted by this. So it is not only the wealthy family who live in the nice house up in the hills, it is also this couple, one of whom is living in affordable housing in the flats, and it is the folks who are unhoused who are living out of their van and who are parked near the party when this happened. And each of the characters is based on folks that I had spoken to in my coverage after the fires in Santa Rosa, Paradise, and in some of my coverage around the housing crisis, and just trying to weave together what our reality is, which is we’re all in community with one another.
Here in Venice, I have the great privilege of volunteering at a safe place for youth, and a lot of the young people who are unhoused who come in for services there. I see them around the neighborhood, and we say, hey, and we’re all part of one another’s lives in this way, and they were very differently impacted than I was by these fires, meaning when they are sleeping rough, they are exposed to the smoke in a way that I’m not when I’m able to shut the windows and doors in my house. These are all things that I thought were important to tell if you’re going to be telling a story of a wildfire impacting a community in California today.
WT: That would be great if perhaps people could learn from these situations that we are, in fact, all in this together. My concern is that the wealthy are going to learn the lesson that we need our own private fire service, like some guy on Twitter was famously asking for, and we’re just going to save ourselves. We don’t care about the rest of y’all.
SSG: Yeah, the wealthy are going to do what they’re going to do, what we need to do is respond to them as constituents with the government, who hopefully can tax the wealthy to then redistribute some of those funds to support the rest of society. And what we saw out of here in LA with these fires was a huge mutual aid effort. I mean quite literally, Mutual Aid LA, who have been working on the ground for years in mutual aid efforts with community fridges and other ways of providing resources to the unhoused, got together like this to put together volunteer efforts to match folks who had things to donate to other folks who were evacuated and needed things and have set set up a whole spreadsheet in which you could donate to Go Fund Mes of folks out in Altadena who need support for their recovery. You could figure out a place that was having volunteer efforts on Sunday afternoon if you had time to give but no resources. This has been a huge ground up grassroots effort to show up for one another, and that’s what we need. And what continues to happen, regardless of what the wealthy are going to do in response to this, is communities are showing up for one another who are most vulnerable.
Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle.
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Sarah S. Grossman
A Fire So Wild • The Antidote To Climate Dread | HuffPost Impact | The Huffington Post | Aug 25, 2021 • More Americans Than Ever Understand Climate Change Is Real And Harmful | HuffPost Impact | The Huffington Post | Nov 18, 2021 • Nearly 30% Of Americans Aren’t Worried ‘At All’ About The Deadly Climate Crisis | The Huffington Post | April 19, 2022
Others:
What happened on Friday, Jan. 17 Crews improved containment of the fires; some residents allowed to return | Los Angeles Times • L.A. fires upend hard-won stability for the area’s homeless population | The Washington Post • Mutual Aid LA Network (@mutualaidla) • Displaced Black Families GoFundMe Directory • Safe Place for Youth • How Wildfires Came for City Streets | The New York Times • Over 170,000 People Under Evacuation In LA County Wildfires | Inkl • New wildfire concerns in Los Angeles: Strong winds could return next week. | USA Today
