INTRODUCING
HALE ST. ISLE
STANDARD TWEEP TATTLER QUESTIONS:
1) Where do you live?
Colorado, USA
2) What is the first thing you remember writing?
A poem as a teen about a girl in the dark at night.
3) Why do you write?
I have to. I’m always writing down notes and thoughts. If I didn’t write them down, I’d feel like I was limiting my personal development, because all of that information would be lost. I have too many ideas to keep track of in my memory alone.
4) Have you published any of your work?
I self-publish a lot. I currently have one 50-page book out, The Climate Anxiety Manifesto, and three 1-4 page essays out, which are going into a full book of shorts sometime next year. Right now, all I’m writing are essays on the environmental crisis. I follow the news on it and the key figures in the climate movement, and I participate in my own small way by writing essays on the subject. It concerns me very much, and it can only be described as doom and gloom that I feel when I consider society going under and most of the life on earth eradicated. I feel compelled to help in my own small way.
5) What are you currently writing?
I’m currently promoting a 50-page essay on climate anxiety, The Climate Anxiety Manifesto, and writing short 1-4 page essays on similar topics. It’s my chosen subject: climate change essays. Climate anxiety is difficult, because it presents us with the feeling that life doesn’t matter, everything is futile, because we’re headed for the end. It is quite similar in effect to the way the prospect of nuclear warfare made everyone feel in the 1980’s. Depressed. Scared. We feel gloomy. And we can’t do much about it but protest and become activists and fight against the abuse of the earth and species. The only thing you can do when you feel like life is made pointless by the destruction so prevalent everywhere is to fight against the causes of that destruction.
6) Are you currently querying?
No, I just stick to self-publishing.
7) Finish this sentence (three lines or less):
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT…
and the late night coffee was keeping me fueled for another writing session.
8) Which activities do you like to participate in, in the Twitter writing community (VSS365, etc.)?
I love Twitter. I find it very social and positive. I’m sure there are sides to it that are darker, but I keep a good group of people to talk to on there, and I’ve found the people to be polite and good-natured.
9) Do you have any formal training/education for writing?
None at all.
10) Do the people in your life know that you write?
Oh, yes. My mother is the first to read anything major I’m working on.
11) Tell me about the people in your life. Family? Pets?
Mother, brother, step-father. They’re all great people.
12) Where do you wish your writing to take you?
I would like to be a sort of weirdo who writes brilliantly and is somewhat of a recluse. I don’t want to have to do all those adulting things, like go out, do interviews on webcams, or that sort of thing. I’d love to be a person who lives pretty much hidden and only ventures out into the big wide world through writing books and the text in interviews like this one. I want to exist in words alone.
13) What did you expect when you joined the Twitter writing community? Did it turn out as expected?
Twitter has been great. Every time I’ve used it, I’ve had some wonderful conversations and friendships. It’s a wonderful community.
14) Where do you write?
I live in a small room with a huge desk right in the middle of the room. There are words scrawled in permanent ink across it. There are bookshelves sitting at the head of the desk, stuffed with books. It’s where I spend most of my time. I kick my feet up and sit with a laptop in my lap, and usually I’m writing, either a short or on Twitter.
15) How much time do you dedicate to writing, weekly?
Writing and self-promotion and reading take up all my time.
16) Do you have other talents?
Not really, no.
17) CHOOSE ONE:
I do not mind when other writers ask for advice.
I’d rather keep to myself!
A. I do not mind when other writers ask for advice. I love to help.
ABOUT HALE
I started reading about climate change last year, when I was doing research on random topics using google search and while recovering from a nicotine addiction I was in the process of quitting. I came across a lot of writing on climate change and eco-activism. The eco-activism touched a nerve in me, and I started reading everything about it that I could get my hands on. At the end of a few months of doing just that, I felt fairly motivated to do something of my own in the same vein, so I started writing about it. Now I have a short 50-page book out, The Climate Anxiety Manifesto. Climate anxiety is the sense of despair some of us get when we consider that the future of civilization might just be wiped out, that we are living in delicate times, that we really have to come together as a world right now, immediately, before life on earth is irreparably harmed. That's what climate anxiety is all about.
