Editor's Note: This two-part series on books for young people was created by teens in NEPM's Media Lab program with support from the NEPM newsroom.
Nicholas Day's book, "A World Without Summer," is a non-fiction story about the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia and its effect on the global climate.
Day, a Northampton resident, released this story on Sept. 9, following the success of his first book, "The Mona Lisa Vanishes."
Day shared his inspiration for the book during an interview with Davien Landrau from NEPM's Media Lab. He's a recent participant of NEPM's Media Lab summer cohort.
Davien Landrau, Media Lab: Thank you for joining us and coming here and answering a few of our questions. When writing "A World Without Summer," did you feel like there was a lack of awareness towards climate events and their impact?
Nicholas Day, author: One of the reasons I wanted to write this story is that I feel like we can be blinded by how much is going around us, constantly, all around us. For some reason, the fact that there's so much happening can make it easy to tune it out. And so sometimes, by looking back into the past a couple of hundred years ago, you can focus on an extraordinary story like this and then you can see your own present day a little bit more clearly. It's a story that many people don't know. Mount Tambora erupted a couple of hundred years ago at a time when news basically traveled very, very slowly. And for over a year, almost no one knew that Tambora had even erupted. It was this isolated event. And even today, it's a largely unknown eruption, despite the devastating consequences that it had.
And the other reason is that I loved the story of Mary Shelley and the creation of Frankenstein. How young she was, how alive she was to the world. And I wanted to tell that story alongside the story of a global climate shock that people might not have heard before.
My next question is a quote in the story. You say, "When we read in the news that a tsunami has wiped out a coastal island, we feel many things heartbroken, distressed, sorrowful. But we don't feel scared." Why is it important to use real life events to invoke emotion surrounding climate change from young readers?
I'm glad you talked about that specifically, because one of the strange things about this eruption is that it was an event in Indonesia, and to the people around it, it had a devastating impact. Usually when that sort of thing happens we feel like, well, that's something that affects them. It doesn't affect all of us. And one of the things that the eruption of Mount Tambora showed us is that we're all connected. You know, we're all under the same sky. We're all on the same earth. There's nowhere else for us to go.
This was one of the first natural disasters that had a truly global impact. They didn't know why any of this had happened. It was a complete mystery. You know, almost no one knew that Tambora had even erupted. Plus, they had no way of explaining to themselves any sort of scientific explanation for any of these things. They didn't even really know how the weather worked. Our advantage is that we know why our climate is changing. We know why all of this is happening. We have the information and we have the expertise. But unlike them, we don't have the advantage that, you know, one day we'll wake up and all of it will have disappeared.
Is there anything you'd like to add while we reach the end of this interview?
I guess I'd like to say that this is a book about many things. I think above all, maybe it's a book about noticing, about paying attention to the world around you. What I wanted to do with this book is, I think, bring readers in part back to the idea of paying attention to what's happening and be willing to say like, no, this is different. Just because, you know, there's wildfire smoke that's blanketing our skies today, as there was a couple of days ago. And just because that happened last summer and the summer beforehand, that doesn't mean that it's normal. It's something we should still pay attention to, that we should still say okay, what's going on and what can we do about it?
Nicholas Day is the author of "A World Without Summer." Thank you, Nicholas, for answering our questions and being here today.
Thanks so much for having me.
This is a production of NEPM Media Lab.
