YA KidLit ALERT!
Author Interview with Lauren Yero
and her debut 2023 YA
Under This Forgetful Sky
Hello Readers and Fellow Writers,
Today, we celebrate Lauren Yero and her YA book Under This Forgetful Sky, which has been out for just over one year. And she's been busy with travels and books signings - just check out her Instagram and X feed and you'll see what a busy author does.
Wow! I'm so glad she had time to work on her interview and give us an update on what life has been like as a traditionally published author.
Let's find out!
Hello, Lauren, and thanks for joining Teazurs blog!
What inspired you to write speculative, near-future stories that explore themes of resistance, adventure, and first love? How does your background in Environmental Literature inform your writing, particularly in crafting speculative narratives that interrogate societal structures?
Thank you so much for having me here on your blog, Angie!
As you mentioned, my debut novel Under This Forgetful Sky is a speculative coming-of-age novel that’s at once a story of adventure and star-crossed love, a quest narrative, a pandemic novel, and a call to resistance. It also fits within an emerging genre called “cli-fi” (i.e., climate-engaged literature). The story itself follows two teens from vastly different backgrounds on a journey across near-future Chile as they search for a cure for a mysterious virus. One of them needs the cure to save his father’s life; the other is working in secret for the very rebels that infected his father in the first place. On paper, they’re enemies—but, of course, it turns out to be much more complicated than that!
For me, stories are my way of grappling
with questions that
I don’t know how to answer.
I was raised in a politically conservative home and community, so college was the first time that I started learning in earnest about things like the climate crisis and how intertwined it is with so many aspects of our world. Ecocritic and philosopher Timothy Morton describes this experience in his book The Ecological Thought when he says that...
...once you see the ecological crisis for what it is—
the interconnectedness of it all—
you can’t unsee it.
You see it everywhere.
The big question I was grappling with as I started writing Under This Forgetful Sky was:
What do we owe to one another
in this increasingly interconnected world?
The wonderful thing about speculative fiction—any fiction, really—is that big questions like this one can be explored with nuance and contradiction, without didacticism but rather as part of a story with many complexities and many possible answers. The superpower of speculative fiction, in particular, is its ability to give readers new ways of seeing the world. It has the power to make visible the previously unseen connections within our own lives. One of my hopes with Under This Forgetful Sky is that by crafting a speculative story that asks readers to deeply interrogate certain injustices within the context of a fictional future world, readers will start to see similar connections and ask similar questions of the world around them.
And once you see the interconnectedness, it’s really hard to unsee it.
Your debut YA novel, "Under This Forgetful Sky," has been praised for its compelling narrative and world-building. What influenced the creation of the world in which the story is set?
In my early twenties, I took a freelance travel writing job in Chile. Before going to Chile, I didn’t know much about the complicated history between Chile and the U.S., and I knew next to nothing about Chile’s specific history of colonialism and imperialism—or about its ongoing history of resistance. But during my time in Chile, I found that many of the Chileans I met were eager to dive right into big philosophical and political topics like these. With each conversation, I felt the proverbial ground beneath me shifting, and I began the process of re-learning things I thought I’d understood.
When I came back from Chile, I had these conversations buzzing in my mind. And then, one day, soon after coming back to the U.S., I had a dream about the Chilean city of Valparaíso. The real city of Valparaíso is one of the most vibrant, open-hearted cities I’ve ever experienced—but in my dream, something about the city had turned dangerous. It was a city plagued with suspicion and fear. For days, the feeling of this dream-city stayed with me. So I wrote down everything I could remember about it. And then, I started asking questions of my dream. How did this dream city come to be this way?
The world of the story began to emerge from such questions. I realized that (of course) this altered Valparaíso didn’t exist in isolation. There were larger systems in place that kept the people of this imagined city living in a state of fear and suspicion. That’s when I started exploring the idea of other cities, walled-in cities, which extracted resources from the surrounding lands but kept themselves protected from the devastation outside their walls.
It wasn’t until asked myself,
“Who lives in this world?”
...that I realized I was creating a young adult novel, and that my two main characters would be from opposite sides of the walls. I realized that the most interesting line of questions about this world went something like this:
What would it be like to come of age in this dangerous, half-ruined city? What would it be like to grow up inside a city protected by walls, to have never seen the world outside? In either case, what would you risk to try to change things? What would it look like to imagine a different world?
Please share a bit about your journey from receiving your BA at Davidson College to becoming a published author.
Absolutely! I studied English at Davidson College, and I took quite a few creative writing workshops during my time there. I also wrote an honors thesis—a collection of strange (but not entirely speculative) linked short stories.
After college, I worked odd jobs for a few years before going back to school for an MA in Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada Reno, with a focus on postcolonial ecocriticism. I had a brief flirtation with the idea of a career in academia, but ended up returning to my first love, fiction. I wrote a creative thesis to cap my time at UNR, and this thesis ended up being the very first draft of Under This Forgetful Sky!
For years after completing this first draft, I would take out the manuscript and tinker with it. I had various rounds of beta readers and many, many rounds of revision. But I was also teaching and starting a family, so finding time to prioritize writing was a challenge.
During the summer of 2020, on a walk with my husband and one-year-old daughter, I told my husband I was giving up on the manuscript. It was a moment of exhaustion that I’m sure many people with little kids during the pandemic can relate to. But my husband pushed back, encouraging me to see what would happen if I just started sending it out.
So I did.
And within a few months, I had an agent.
Within a few more months, I signed a book deal. It happened so quickly—but it almost didn’t happen at all!
If you could go back to the newbie you, before you were published, what advice would you give yourself?
Be brave.
The title of your novel is quite evocative. Could you explain its significance and how it relates to the themes of the book?
Under This Forgetful Sky wasn’t actually the original title of the novel. My original title was The Vines in the Wall—which is a translation of a song lyric by Chilean folk musician Violeta Parra from her beautiful song “Volver a los diecisiete.” The song is about love as a transformative force, the only thing able to change what feels unchangeable. I indirectly quote the song in the novel itself, but for copyright reasons, I wasn’t able to use the lyrics in my title.
My editor and I had many emails back and forth discussing new title ideas. I came up with a list of about ten possibilities, then we narrowed it down before ultimately polling more broadly within the imprint, and Under This Forgetful Sky was the clear favorite.
What I really like about this title is that it brings in so many thematic elements of the novel. The novel opens with a parable of sorts about how the world of the book came to be the way it is. It tells the story of two cities—the City of the Sky and the City of the Sea. There had long been tensions between these two cities, as the story goes, but the two cities had always existed as part of a shared world.
To quote just a bit from this passage:
“But one day the Sky looked down upon the Sea and was afraid—afraid that the Sea would swallow his city and take what was his. So he said to his people: Gather stones and lay them across the horizon. Girdle the orb of the world to keep out the wildness of the Sea! The people of that shining city in the clouds were afraid. Oh, how they were afraid. So they gathered up stones.”
This opening parable provides the framing context for the novel, which is told primarily from the perspectives of two protagonists, a boy named Rumi and a girl named Paz, living on opposite sides of the walls. This parable is also a comment, obliquely, on the ways that, in the midst of the ongoing ecological crisis, there’s a sense that...
...those most responsible for
creating the crisis in the first place
are unwilling to assume that responsibility
and instead insist on protecting what’s “theirs.”
So, that’s where the “Sky” part of the title comes from.
The “Forgetful” part was inspired by a concept in Rob Nixon’s illuminating work of postcolonial ecocriticism, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, in which he describes the conflict between “the tenacity of corporeal memory and the corrosive power, over time and space, of corporate amnesia.” In other words, he says that human bodies don’t have the luxury of forgetting the violence, toxicity, and trauma that they experience over the course of a life; corporate bodies, on the other hand, can conveniently forget. Within the walled-in cities of my novel, it’s actually unpatriotic—even treasonously subversive—to talk about the world outside the walls.
Intentional forgetting is essential
to the functioning of these imperialist city-states.
The title of my novel, then, is implicitly asking—how will a person choose to live “under this forgetful sky”?
Are there any specific authors or works that have influenced your writing style or storytelling approach? And who are you reading right now?
Three writers who have been a foundational trinity for me are Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Ursula K. Le Guin. I love the interplay of philosophy, story, and language in each of their work, and I’ve always aspired to write within that space as well.
Some books that I’ve recently loved and that are inspiring me in my next project are The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton and Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy.
How do you think young readers, in particular, might respond to the themes and characters in your book?
Many young readers I’ve heard from so far have shared that Under This Forgetful Sky feels like a really hopeful book to them—which I think is very interesting. It’s definitely a book that doesn’t shy away from the darker realities that young people face as they look toward the future. I mean, the book imagines a world dramatically transformed by climate change, refugee crises, and a global pandemic far more devastating than COVID-19. One of the main characters—Rumi—struggles deeply with his mental health. The other main character, Paz, is so full of rage that she risks her life to join the rebels waging violent resistance against the walled-in cities.
But I’m honestly so happy to hear that young readers find this to be a hopeful book. I also find it to be hopeful. We live in such a strange, disorienting time. I think it makes sense that superhero movies are so popular right now. When the world feels existentially frightening, it’s comforting to imagine that superhuman beings are out there, fighting for us. But I think superhero stories can also do a disservice—especially to young people. If, as a young person, so many of the stories you experience show heroes single-handedly saving the world, where does that leave you—when you walk out into a world full of problems, but no superheroes to solve them?
I think instead that stories that engage real-world problems, in all their complexity, can be so powerful and galvanizing. Such stories can certainly be uncomfortable, but in the end, they do something that’s the opposite of superhero movies. Instead of leaving us with the feeling that someone else will solve the world’s problems—or that, in order to make a difference, we have to be somehow superhuman—they help us better understand our own agency, and our own responsibility, in the face of it all.
I think Under This Forgetful Sky is a book that offers a vision of radical hope that is distinct from optimism. The two main characters find meaning in their own lives through their connection to each other, and through continuing to question whether the world that’s been handed to them is the world they want to live in. (Spoiler alert: it’s not!)
Nobody in this novel has the power to change the whole world. But they have the power to make changes in their own lives, and to help bring about change in the lives of those around them. And these changes, though small, are meaningful. I think this is what feels hopeful to young readers.
What references do you use as a writer that help you become better at your craft? Books? Websites? Classes?
I really didn’t use any craft books as I wrote Under This Forgetful Sky—I just read tons and tons of fiction! Some exceptions include Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard, Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa, Six Memos for the Next Millenium by Italo Calvino, and The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera—but the guidance of these books was more abstract and philosophical rather than nuts-and-bolts practical.
As I’m working on my next project, I’ve found myself seeking out craft books a bit more. Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer has been a visual treat to dip into for inspiration—and I’ve also used it quite a bit when teaching. Steering the Craft by Ursula K Le Guin has some elegant exercises for POV and voice, and Story Genius by Lisa Cron has been a particularly insightful resource when seeking deeper insights into my characters.
How can my readers help you on this beautiful writing journey? Will you be at any upcoming book signings or conferences?
I am always thrilled when someone reads my book and then either tells a friend about it or writes a review! Malaprops Bookstore in Asheville has signed hardcover and paperback copies available.
I’ll also be on a panel at Malaprops on September 15th for the GSWP “Writers at Home” series. I’ll be reading a bit from Under This Forgetful Sky as well as talking with my fellow SFF authors about the role of sci-fi and fantasy as a vehicle for social change.
This is amazing, Lauren! You’re a very busy author, and I’m so glad you stopped by to share your encouragement and tips for writers at every stage of their journey. I’m excited that you’re bringing such poignant world issues into YA novels in a way that gives young people hope—no easy feat. For me, everything in this world and beyond is interconnected. I find it fascinating that many do not yet understand that, but with books like yours, more will begin to see. Not only are you writing about crucial issues we all need to learn about and understand, but you’re also using your voice to open up a dialogue with others.
Instagram: @laurenyero
X (Twitter): @lauren_yero
Goodreads: Lauren Yero
Website: Lauren Yero
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