It's Easier To Imagine The World Ending Than Imagining How To Live In It
An Interview with Lindy Biller
Even the title of Lindy Biller’s debut chapbook, Love at the End of the World (2023), points at the contrast embedded within–there is warmth, tenderness, and devotion in these stories; yet it is filtered through a lens of turmoil. Of storms brewing, climates changing, the world relieving itself of us to save itself. But even in the face of turmoil, there is a radiant tone to these stories–Lindy’s love for her characters, her child, the world she inhabits, and the people around her is pulsing through these stories. These stories, fantastical as they may be, are also deeply rooted in place and people–even when these people are birthing bee hives, launching to faraway planets, or simply vanishing altogether. Love at the End of the World is a collection about preparing for the worst in the world, but finding the best in the people still living in it.
Tucker Leighty-Philips: There is armageddon throughout these stories, but there is also a deep sense of care for the characters embroiled within it. This care sparked a number of questions within me–how do we protect those we love from collapse? How do we ensure a future for those beyond our own extinction? How do we love one another at world’s end? Can you talk a little about these stories, how you approached the interpersonal nature of preparing for armageddon?
Lindy Biller: I love that all of those questions came up as you were reading, because they were the same questions that were on my mind as I was writing. I’ve always loved the armageddon stories that focus on quiet moments and relationships against a backdrop of a bigger, sweeping disaster story. With this chapbook, I wanted to explore how people relate to each other and find meaning during moments of change and crisis. What does it look like to love each other and go on with day-to-day responsibilities when it feels like everything is collapsing around us? As I wrote these stories, I was obviously thinking of the climate crisis and its impact—endangered species, floods and wildfires—but also the smaller disasters that can feel like armageddon. Physical and emotional distance, abuse and loneliness, outgrowing or outliving each other, the way everything eventually comes to an end. Since becoming a mother, I’ve felt even more aware of time passing and the fragility of everything around me, which I think came up a lot in these stories. Hopefully, our children will have a future after we’re gone—and that raises the questions of how we can prepare them, and what kind of world we’re leaving them. I’ve had to really work on accepting that I can’t protect them from everything and we just have to go on living anyway. I wrote this book partly to process my own anxieties, and also, hopefully, to create something that feels honest and resonant enough that others can get immersed in the world and experience some kind of catharsis. I wanted to explore what it looks like to find meaning and love each other, even though we know it will all end—or maybe more accurately, because we know it will all end.
TLP: Do you feel like writing this collection offered that catharsis? Has it pioneered new anxieties?
LB: Looking back, I think the writing process did end up being very cathartic. It allowed me to explore my hopes and fears through so many lenses—being a woman, a parent, a daughter, a spouse, dealing with anxiety and loneliness, feeling ambitious and being in love, and also just wanting to hide away from everything. I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m drawn to fiction in particular, and I think it’s because it allows me to express something vulnerable, often something that scares me, while simultaneously gaining some distance and control over it. A story is something the writer can craft and manipulate. The writing can go wherever it wants, and the metaphors can be made real and tangible. I love the freedom of it. Thankfully, this collection didn’t spark any new anxieties, as far as I know! I actually think it lessened some of my fears, or at least made me feel less alone in them.
TLP: In the story “Haven,” you jump perspectives, ultimately landing into the POV of an oncoming storm, the heavy representation of the ongoing and impending climate crisis—it’s such a sharp, powerful rhetorical move. How did the idea come to you to embody the perspective of something so vast and imperceptible? What was the process like of writing that section?
LB: “Haven” was the second story I wrote, apart from the four previously published ones. I knew that “The Astronaut,” with its close focus on a mother-son relationship, would be the launching point, and I wanted the next story to pull the camera out a little and start building the world. As I was working on the first draft of “Haven,” I wasn’t sure who the characters would be or what they would do. I loved how each perspective added more detail and complexity to the others. But still, I felt like the camera needed to pull back even farther and allow the characters’ stories to be swept up in something larger. And then the storm POV seemed to jump in on its own. I was so happy when that shift happened. For my day job, I had been writing a learning game about a reporter covering a flood disaster. I’d done hours and hours of research about the flooding in Madison in 2018, the toxic blue-green algae in the lakes, and how the whole watershed is so connected. In that game, the flood felt like a character, but it didn’t literally get to have a voice. In “Haven,” as soon as the storm POV started, the voice was there and all those details from my research fell into place.
TLP: I’m so glad you mentioned your day job–I wanted to ask you about it. Can you talk a little about what you do, and how it impacts your writing?
LB: Yes! I think the two things that have affected my writing the most are becoming a parent, and my job as a video game writer. Right now, I’ve been so lucky to be able to take a writing sabbatical, thanks in part to this chapbook contest! But for several years, I’ve worked as a writer at a game design lab, making learning games for kids. I can’t even express how much it’s shaped my writing. The whole team cares so much about creating compelling stories and sparking wonder in kids. There’s no phoning it in. We’ve written games for vastly different audiences and in different formats, so I’ve had to sort of learn how to be a chameleon and do a little of everything. I think this accounts for why so many of the stories in the chapbook are so different from each other—though hopefully they fit together well. And my research for work shows up in my stories all the time. In the chapbook’s title story, “Love at the End of the World,” there’s a polar researcher who advises a game design studio on a VR game about penguins. That’s literally a game we made. Players get to put on VR headsets and waddle around as penguins. It’s so incredibly cute.
TLP: There is a biblical sheen coating these stories—they cover the vast expanse of beginnings and endings, they make allusions to stories from the Bible, they invoke Noah and raptures and burning bushes throughout. Can you talk about how religion or spirituality influences your work?
LB: I love how you describe that! It’s been interesting to realize how much I tend to reach for Biblical imagery. Part of it is just the fact that my family went to church when I was a little, and as I got older, I did more exploring about God and spirituality, so those images are still fresh in my mind. On a deeper level, I love stories that bring together the sacred and the mundane, or even the profane. I don’t believe the two are separate. They play off each other and inhabit the same space. I love how the imagery of the mythological and the divine can give ordinary moments a sense of being momentous, of having Biblical proportions. I also love stories that retell or recontextualize myths in a way that subverts the reader’s expectations, and I try to do that in my own work. “Hivesong” and “This Was Never Ours” are probably the most obvious examples. In “Hivesong,” I started with the idea of a strange, inexplicable pregnancy that ends up being honeybees. As I wrote it, the story began to parallel Mary’s seemingly impossible pregnancy in the Bible—and then the story went a step further and became about the hopes and expectations that others were projecting onto her, her sense of disconnect from all of that, her tenderness, and her desire to find her own way forward.
TLP: There is also a thread of powerlessness—the butterfly who wishes to be a railroad train, or human, or something beyond butterfly; the woman pregnant with a beehive, subject to tabloids and navel-gazing; the wife joining her husband on a re-creation of Noah’s Ark, waiting for the dove to return with miraculous news. There is also our own powerlessness in the face of extinction (albeit, likely caused by our inability to wield our own power to thwart it when we had the chance). Can you talk a little about how power and powerlessness operates in your work?
LB: I appreciate you pointing that out, because I don’t think I’ve consciously recognized this, but it’s clearly a recurring theme! A lot of these stories are about confronting our lack of power and control over what’s happening around us, while also negotiating power in small, meaningful ways—even if it’s only in our thoughts, or our fantasies. I’ve talked about this with a good friend, whose biggest anxiety trigger tends to be end-of-the-world scenarios. She realized that the big end-of-the-world fears can become so prevalent because it’s easier to imagine the world ending than to imagine how to live in it. That resonated so deeply with me. So much is out of our control, and it can be difficult to bear. But we’re still getting the kids ready for school, making medical decisions, trying to be good to the people around us, and deciding what to make for dinner, yet again. Sometimes, end-of-the-world fantasies can hinder us and lead to a sense of powerlessness. But at the same time, we need to process what’s happening around us and grieve what has already been lost. My hope is that these stories make space for both.
TLP: I was very pleased to see this was a story cycle—that there are connective threads between each story, bridging them together to tell a larger, stranger story of an apocalypse, a series of armageddons. When you started writing this collection, did you know they’d be linked? What was your initial process for bridging them together?
LB: Thank you so much, Tucker! The interconnected nature of the stories made them so much fun to write. Four of the thirteen stories were already written and published separately before I decided to link them together into a larger collection. I realized I’d been drawn toward writing quiet, slightly surreal disaster stories, and a lot of them shared similar themes. I knew that “The Astronaut” would be the launching point, because the mother-son dynamic in that piece is so close to my heart. I wanted the collection to end with “Warm Milk,” because it returns to the mother-son dynamic, and also, for me, has a cathartic final image that felt like the right note to end on. Once I had the first and last story, and two pieces that would fit somewhere in the middle—"Extinction Event” and “Hivesong”—I started looking for details that could expand into their own stories. “The Astronaut” introduced a family that I wanted to develop further, which led to “Haven,” “Things I Know About My Mother,” and “Love at the End of the World.” In “Haven,” the Armenian grandmother mentions that Noah’s Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, which made space for the Noah’s Ark retelling. Pollinators and pollination come up often, which made space for the stories about the butterfly, honey bees, and Leili’s job pollinating flowers. It was a joy to choose a detail and see where it would lead, while also trying to fit everything into a strange, cohesive world.
TLP: In spite of all the disaster, is there hope embedded in these stories?
LB: Yes—at least, there is for me. I feel like it’s human nature to look for hope, even in times of disaster. It’s not always apparent or easy, and I don’t mean to minimize feelings of loss or sorrow. But I think hope and fear can exist as two sides of the same coin. Often, when I’m anxious, it’s because I care, I haven’t given up, which means I also have something to lose. In my own life, I’m trying to focus more on hope and not give as much mental space to my fear. Both are still there, but when I allow myself to hope, I’m more likely to be able to act and make decisions and, ultimately, to keep moving forward.