PHOTO: Acclaimed author Nina Schuyler, winner of multiple literary awards, known for her evocative prose and groundbreaking explorations of language and climate fiction.
Crafting Fiction With Depth Vision And Beauty
Nina Schuyler discusses her climate fiction, the power of sentence craft, AI and emotional complexity, and how teaching and reading deeply continue to shape her bold literary journey.
Nina Schuyler writes with a gaze both precise and reverent, attentive to the language of the world and the world within language. Her body of work glimmers with intellectual depth and emotional resonance, whether she’s capturing the fragility of memory, the pulse of ecological unease, or the enduring ache of love. With each new book, she invites the reader to consider the sentence not just as a vessel for meaning but as a living, breathing artefact of beauty.
In In This Ravishing World, Schuyler steps into the vast and urgent terrain of climate fiction with a structure as intricate and interconnected as the ecosystems it reveres. Her refusal to collapse into despair — and instead offer a space for hope, protest, and awe — is a quiet act of resistance. Afterword, meanwhile, fuses romance and speculative fiction to explore what lingers in the wake of grief and how far one might go to keep love alive, even if it means bending the borders between the human and the artificial.
Throughout her fiction and her celebrated books on writing, Schuyler is drawn again and again to the sentence — its music, its rhythm, its power. This devotion is not only craft, but care; not only technique, but an ethic. Whether translating emotion or language itself, she listens closely for what lies just beneath the surface — and in doing so, brings it dazzlingly to light.
Your July 2024 collection In This Ravishing World intertwines climate fiction with interconnected characters — what inspired the kaleidoscopic structure and how did you balance hope and despair?
I remembered Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” which poses the question of whether the hero’s journey structure, with its metaphor of battle and conquest, has led to our current state: ecological collapse, with the natural world viewed as a resource for humans. That opened up my thinking about structure. I wanted to design a book that mirrored how we might address the climate crisis, which will take far more than a singular hero and viewing the other-than-human as something to conquer. With that, the characters began to proliferate and stories became interconnected.
I have a difficult time reading dystopian/post-apocalyptic climate fiction because for me, it feels like the worst possible future is unescapable. It’s tricky, though, balancing hope and truth, but I kept in mind the wise words of social critic Rebecca Solnit: the future is not yet written. In my book, Eleanor, who is in despair about the world, finds a way out of it. The activists are loud and lively, and Nature, who has a voice in my story, keeps turning to look at exquisite beauty, reminding us of what we have and what we can save.
In Afterword, Virginia brings her lover back as an AI voice — how did you approach exploring love, loss and surveillance through speculative elements?
The critical question for me was: why would Virginia devote her entire life to creating technology that allowed her to talk to her beloved, Haru? That question led to their rich and complicated relationship. She was 16 years old when she first met Haru, a math professor who offered to teach her advanced math. This was during the 1960s when women were routinely denied the opportunity to study advanced math because they’d be taking a spot from a promising male student. Haru opened the door to the life that she wholeheartedly wanted. To have him die so young was unbearable, and she had the drive, intelligence, and desire to turn the perishable into the imperishable.
The story thread of surveillance wove its way into the book when I began to wonder, when Haru was younger, what was he doing? Given his math proficiency, I imagined he would have been drafted to serve in the Second Sino-Japanese War in a military intelligence capacity.
Afterword is described as a “prescient sci fi/romance” — what research or personal interests informed your depiction of AI ethics and emotional intimacy?
In 2018, I went to an art exhibit at the De Young in San Francisco, “The Cult of the Machine,” and in one room, there was a video playing of Bina48, a robot, talking to the poet, Stephanie Dinkins. They were having the most natural, intimate, very human conversation.
As a lover of language, I stood there, spellbound, wanting to understand how a robot could sound so much like a human. How easy to forget that Dinkins was talking to a robot, and that seemed ethically interesting to me.
As a non-techie, I spent hours with experts in natural language processing, a subset of AI, learning how this technology works. I also downloaded an AI companion from Replika and talked with her for about three weeks. It was a very superficial relationship, if you can even call it that, and I knew I wanted to create something much deeper, more profound, and ethically complex.
The Translator combines language loss with Japanese culture — how did your own fascination with translation inform Hanne’s journey of self rediscovery abroad?
Growing up, I read a great deal of Russian literature in translation—Tolstoy, Pasternak, Dostoevsky—most of which I later learned from a New Yorker article had been mistranslated by Constance Garnett. An English woman, she learned Russian during a difficult pregnancy. According to the article, when she didn’t understand the original Russian, she’d improvise or cut it. I felt a little betrayed. I studied Spanish and then, in college, Japanese, so I understand the difficulty of translation, especially in capturing nuance in literature. For this book, I interviewed an American who translates Japanese literature, who said, ‘I accept a translation project if I relate to the main character.’ Well, I thought, what if I have Hanne think she relates and understands a character but doesn’t? That’s when the sparks begin to fly.
With How to Write Stunning Sentences and its journal companion, you delve into sentence craft — which techniques from noted writers most transformed your own prose?
I’m indebted to Virginia Woolf and her use of repetition. Her sense of rhythm—that’s a work in progress for me. James Baldwin’s use of parallelism has also twined its way into my writing. There are many others, and I’m forever grateful.
As a creative writing teacher at Stanford and Book Passage, how does teaching inform your pursuit of beautiful sentences and narrative innovation?
After a lecture, the students write, trying out the techniques. What emerges is often breathtaking. Such beauty! So inspiring! To teach is to reflect on the subject and then find the clearest words to articulate the ideas, with the deep desire to give knowledge to others. It’s a great honor. I love this process because I’m helping others and also clarifying things for myself.
Your newsletter highlights a “stunning sentence” weekly — how has curating these examples shaped your writing process and awareness of linguistic rhythm?
It’s made me fall madly in love with the sentence and all that it can do! I’m so much more aware that style is content; style is accuracy. The more you know about the sentence and style, the more you can close the gap between representation of reality, which is words, and the reality as we experience it.
Finally, what one piece of advice would you offer to aspiring authors aiming to write fiction with emotional depth, stylistic flair and thematic resonance?
Read voraciously and reflect and interrogate what you love. How does it work? Why does it work? Let it inspire you; let it light the coal of creativity.