The novelist David Foster Wallace once said, “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with author Chuck Collins about his debut novel which centers on Big Oil and climate change. We talk about how he has channeled a life of privilege into a quest to raise awareness about wealth inequality, discuss what it was like to co-author with Bill Gates, Sr. a book advocating for taxing the rich, and explore the unique manner in which fiction reveals truth.

00:02 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

00:31 Chuck Collins (CC) - You know, I do think we need images, we need visions of what it begins to look like to get our act together.

00:42 Narrator - The novelist David Foster Wallace once said, “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with author Chuck Collins about his debut novel which centers on Big Oil and climate change. We talk about how he has channeled a life of privilege into a quest to raise awareness about wealth inequality, discuss what it was like to co-author with Bill Gates, Sr. a book advocating for taxing the rich, and explore the unique manner in which fiction reveals truth.

01:23 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Chuck Collins. Chuck is the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits inequality.org, and he's also an author and his debut novel is entitled “Altar to an Erupting Sun.” Chuck, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

01:45 Chuck Collins (CC) - Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

01:48 Alex Wise (AW) - Why don't you first tell us what motivated you to take a break from a lot of these more real-world issues? You're a prolific writer in the non-fiction world and you cover a lot of inequality issues. What inspired you to dip your toe into the fiction waters here with “Altar to an Erupting Sun?”

 

02:12 Chuck Collins (CC) - I have written a number of other books and I look back on some of the earlier ones and I sort of feel bad about what I inflicted upon my readers because they're they're kind of boring and what I enjoy reading and what I often delve into his story, whether it's good nonfiction, narrative or fiction I found fiction is kind of an entry point, a gateway into a topic, and so in this case I was interested in exploring sort of how is it we face this impossible news of sort of the ecological crisis we're living through, and how does a community face it? And what's a vision for how we might turn the corner toward survivability. And that that seemed to lend itself to fiction. So, and I just had this story and some characters kind of knocking on my inner door. So I felt a desire to write it as a as a fictional story which gave me a lot of freedom to envision the possibilities for the future.

03:14 Alex Wise (AW) - So you have an interesting back story and they always say that you're supposed to write what you know, and this seems to have an autobiographical bent to it “Altar to an Erupting Sun.” Why don't you give us a little bit of the back story of Chuck Collins?

03:31 CC - Well, you're right. You can only really write what you know. And I have drawn on my life experiences. But there's quite a bit I sort of had to research and develop that that I didn't live through, but that the experience of my main character, Rae Kelleher, was one of being formed. By social movements that she was part of, she also grew up in the Midwest. I grew up in the West, she grew up working class. I grew up privileged, but that, that's a difference. But she was very early on, involved in the clamshell lines, which was a movement to try to keep a nuclear power plant from being built in New England. She was involved in going to Central America in the 1980s, like a lot of thousands of people,