In this episode, I’m joined by Liz Johnston, author of The Fall-Down Effect, a novel about fractured family relationships, environmental activism, and how personal ambition can test the bonds of family ties.
The novel follows the journeys of Sylvia, Fern, and River, after their mother leaves them to pursue her own path of environmental activism. Inspired by their mother’s activism, Fern commits an act of ecoterrorism, blowing up a mill at 19 and going on the run, leaving her family to try and make sense of her actions and cover up her crime. Years later, a forest fire forces their mother to return to the home she left and to confront her past.
Show highlights
- The haze that sparked the book
- When radically begets radicality
- The weight of blame when loved ones make terrible decisions
- A glimpse into activist groups
- How to silence the editor brain as a writer/editor
- How does an editor manage being edited?
- The secret to staying on the journey of the art
“I was just struck by the haze… and I just felt such grief seeing the way that the province had changed in just within a decade.”
Liz Johnston
The Fall-Down Effect is available for purchase through the links below.
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About Liz Johnston
Liz Johnston grew up in Revelstoke, B.C., and now lives and writes in Toronto. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Poets & Writers, The Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, and Grain, among other publications. She is an editor of Brick, A Literary Journal. The Fall-Down Effect is her debut novel.
About The Fall-Down Effect
Liz Johnston’s eagerly anticipated debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect, asks what we really owe people in our lives when we are fighting for a greater cause.
As a child in the late 1980s, Fern is the wild heart of her tree-hugging family—quick-tempered and yearning to spend every minute in the woods of the small Pacific Northwest logging town where they live. She is also most like her environmental activist mother, Lynn, who chafes against the demands of motherhood and yearns for the protests of her youth. As tensions escalate, Lynn leaves her partner, Tom, and their three children, telling herself she will devote her life more fully to fighting for the earth.
At nineteen, Fern commits her own radical act of protest, which authorities label ecoterrorism. When Fern goes underground, her parents and siblings—responsible grad student Sylvia and budding artist River—struggle to make sense of her actions while also trying to cover up her absence. Fern’s secret proves impossible to keep, and when she becomes a wanted woman, the rest of the family trades blame. Years later, when Lynn takes shelter from a forest fire in the home she left so many years before, the family is forced to confront their regrets during a fraught, baggage-filled reunion.
Host’s links
Book a one-on-one with Lola: https://wordcaps.com/coaching/
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