A Minnesotan’s story collection is climate fiction but it captures increasingly familiar reality

When Ashley Shelby of St. Paul began working on her short story collection back in 2016, she thought she was writing weird fiction about the impacts of climate change.

She started by writing a fictional investment newsletter set in the future that steered buyers away from the housing market now that Florida homes were uninsurable. By the time her collection “Honeymoons in Temporary Locations” was published this year, the idea of flood insurance companies denying claims or withdrawing from Florida “started to feel like documentary,” says Shelby.

The collection is still undeniably in the “weird fiction” category in a way that feels both accessible and eerily possible. Short stories and a series of “found writings” (Craigslist ads written by climate refugees, for example), are set in a too-close-for-comfort future that’s impacted at every level by climate change.

A captain of a secretive voyage to relocate polar bears from the melting Arctic to the Antarctic learns that the bears not only know what is being done to them, but they have firm opinions about their future.

Two honeymooning “climate refugees of means” vie for acceptance to relocate in Duluth. The pharmaceutical industry creates a new diagnosis — and miracle drug — to “cure” the despair people feel from climate change.

Listen to excerpts from Bright’s conversation Shelby below.

Excerpted from “Honeymoons in Temporary Locations” by Ashley Shelby. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2024. Copyright 2024 by Ashley Shelby. Used with permission.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

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