CANR

• Tilt - 2025 Marysue Rucci Books, New York, NY

• Emma Pattee website - https://www.emmapattee.com/

  About Me
  I’m a climate journalist and a fiction writer. I live in Portland, Oregon.
  I’ve written about climate change for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and more.
  In 2021, I coined the term “Climate Shadow” to describe an individual’s potential impact on climate change.
  My fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Idaho Review, New Orleans Review, Carve Magazine, Citron Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review.
  My debut novel, TILT, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in spring 2025.

• American Booksellers Association website - https://www.bookweb.org/news/qa-emma-pattee-indies-introduce-author-april-indie-next-list-top-pick-%E2%80%9Ctilt%E2%80%9D-1631707

  A Q&A with Emma Pattee, Indies Introduce Author of the April Indie Next List Top Pick “Tilt”

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  Mar
  26
  2025
  Indie Next List Interview
  A Q&A with Emma Pattee, Indies Introduce Author of the April Indie Next List Top Pick “Tilt”

  Emma Pattee is the author of Tilt, a Winter/Spring 2025 Indies Introduce adult selection, and the #1 April Indie Next List pick.

  Desirae Wilkerson of Paper Boat Booksellers in Seattle, Washington, served on the bookseller panel that selected Pattee’s book for Indies Introduce.

  Wilkerson said of the title, “A slow walk through a fast-paced day leads to heartbreak, hope, determination and a sacrifice that readers will only find if they read to the end. Tilt is phenomenal and one of this year’s best page-turners!”

  Pattee sat down with Wilkerson to discuss her debut title. This is a transcript of their discussion. You can listen to the interview on the ABA podcast, BookED.

  Desirae Wilkerson: Hi. My name is Desirae Wilkerson, and I'm the co-owner of Paper Boat Booksellers in Seattle, Washington. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Emma Pattee, the author of Tilt, which will be out on March 25.

  Emma Pattee is a climate journalist and fiction writer. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and elsewhere. She lives in Oregon, and Tilt is her first book. It goes on sale March 25. Thank you for joining me today, Emma.

  Emma Pattee: Thank you, Desirae. I'm so happy to be here.

  DW: I could just spend this whole interview gushing about this book, but I have a lot of questions too. I loved this book.

  A little bit about the book without giving too much away: it's about a woman who is nine months pregnant. She is shopping in IKEA for a crib, and a big earthquake hits. (I'm in Seattle, so we’re always waiting for The Big One, if it ever happens.) And it's about her journey to save herself — in more ways than one.

  I just couldn't put this book down. It was a thrill to read from the first page to the last page, and there are so many real and relatable people and scenes in this book. What inspired you to write this story?

  EP: I live in Portland — so very close to Seattle — and like you said, everyone in the Pacific Northwest lives under the shadow of something coming that you can never really prepare for. And as a climate journalist, I was really interested in that. I was interested in the ways that we can't get prepared. And at the time that I started writing this book, I was also pregnant. Pregnancy and having a kid is another thing that everyone tells you to get prepared for, because of how scary and unknowable it is, but the reality is that it's completely unknowable. You cannot imagine it until you have lived through it. I think that, thematically, is what brought me to the book. What gave me the idea for the book was definitely that I was terrified of the earthquake. I was pregnant, and I could not stop thinking about the earthquake.

  DW: I love that connection between those two things, because it is so true that you can never prepare for having children or an earthquake. That's amazing.

  Speaking of Annie, I found her feelings of confusion and loneliness while being pregnant really relatable to myself when I was pregnant for the first time. You just dove into a little bit about how the character Annie was relatable to you, being pregnant and the fear of an earthquake, but are there any other ways that Annie relates to you?

  EP: I really find her relatable. We have made very different life choices. Annie is a very isolated character, and she's lonely and angry, but she doesn't look to others. A lot of the book is about that, right? It's about that sort of shift. In that way, I don't know that I relate to her.

  But I once heard the writer Sheila Heti say that you have to become the person you have to become in order to write the book you're trying to write. I started writing this book six years ago, when I was pregnant and still in my twenties. A lot of the lessons that Annie learns in the book are the lessons that I have learned in the past six years, certainly since becoming a mom, which is really that you cannot go it alone. You cannot go it alone. And why would you want to? So in that way, I no longer relate to her. But I believe that's because I learned the lessons I needed to learn in order to write the book I needed to write.

  DW: Wonderful. Another big thing about this book is the pace: 24 hours. It was such a good fit to just have this story in 24 hours. Did you start writing the book with the 24-hour timeline in mind, or did you start in a different way?

  EP: No, I always knew it would be immediately after the earthquake. And because I knew that I wanted to write a stream of consciousness novel, I could not jump forward in time. That meant that to write it longer than a couple days, the book would be too long. There's just a simple sort of page restriction to that.

  But my very first impulse with this book was a woman talking to her child as she walks. She's talking at the pace that she's walking, because she's trying to keep walking — because she can't stop walking. So it was always about this tempo of walking and the idea of a long walk. Because of that, it was naturally constrained to the moments you would be walking immediately after disaster.

  DW: Yeah, I can't picture it any other way. That’s what made it so easy to read, but also a page-turner the whole way.

  EP: I think I thought, as a little baby novelist, it would make it easier to write. It actually made it so incredibly challenging, because everything is tracked to the actual distance it would take to walk that within Portland.

  At all times while I was writing, I had a Google map up. I was timing it. I have a timeline of exactly the minute the earthquake happens and how long everything happens after.

  When somebody would say something like, “Well, what if you throw in a car wash?” I’d be like, “There is no car wash at that exact location in Portland, and there is no way for her to get to that location in the time you want it.” It became this Tetris that I was not anticipating.

  DW: Oh, wow! When I was reading, it seemed like, “Gosh, she really knows where she's going." Like, I noticed it right away, all the details. So that was actually my next question, what was the research that you had to do to nail down these details of the locations? So, you actually went and walked those distances?

  EP: Yeah. Everything in the book is, for the most part, exactly as it is. You can go walk the exact journey she walked in essentially the time it takes her. Obviously, those of us who are not pregnant will walk a little bit faster.

  It is an actual journey through Portland. The details she sees are the details that, at least at the time of writing, were there. There are some times where I shifted things specifically around people's homes. Or if I brought in a character, I would make sure that it was in a place where it definitely did not exist, so that nobody would look and say, “Oh, that house got destroyed.”

  There's a lot we know, in Portland and Seattle, about how particular buildings are going to fare, and how particular roads and neighborhoods are going to fare. I brought all of that research to bear.

  I had a grad student who's becoming a geologist helping me, and we went road by road and building by building. It was important to me as a journalist for it to be fact-based, but also, as someone who lives in Portland, there was no way I was going to scare people unnecessarily. And there was no way that I was going to soothe people unnecessarily. I wasn't going to under-write this disaster, but I certainly wasn't going to over-write it. I took that ethical responsibility really seriously. I didn't want to just traumatize people for no purpose.

  The book is as close to a nonfiction depiction of an earthquake that hasn't happened yet as it could possibly be.

  DW: Wow, I love that. I loved that it was very real, that this could actually happen. And it was scary, of course. We're hoarding water in our basement, just in case, but we probably won't even be at home. But it was very prominent in the book, that realness of everything.

  The ending really brought the whole story full circle for Annie and her journey. And I felt like, as I was getting towards the end, it could have ended in any way. Did you ever have another ending in mind?

  EP: I did have another ending in mind. For many years, the ending was different.

  I learned that when you're writing challenging books, sometimes we write the scenes that we can bear at the time that we can bear them. When I started writing this book, I was pregnant. Then I had a baby, then I had a toddler, and then I was pregnant again. It is incredibly hard to write terrifying scenes when you have small children. There were a lot of times where I had to have a placeholder scene before I could bear to write the scene that had to be there.

  There was a lot of discussion with my editor about how the book was going to end. And, certainly, hearing from early readers, there is a lot of debate about if the ending is the right ending or not. I love that. If anyone reads this book and hates the ending, I love that. Hold on to your hate. I'm really passionate about hating endings or loving endings, or debating endings. For me, I had to really get clear on the truest message of the book. It stopped being about what would feel satisfying to a reader, or what would feel emotionally soothing to me as this terrified parent, and really became, “Emma, what are you trying to say?” And I said it.

  DW: I loved the ending. I mean, I cried my eyes at the end, because there was sadness, but there was also this hope .

  EP: I love that. I think it really speaks to what we were talking about in the beginning — being lonely, being isolated, going through something alone, and that shift. Something that I tried to shove into the book (and they forced me to take it out) is that there's research that shows when rats become mothers, they become five times as successful at catching prey. They become significantly more vicious and efficient at catching food. I really wanted to show that — this idea that when you become a mother, that what is changing in your brain and in your whole physiology makes you a warrior. We don't have language for that in our culture. That's not how we talk about mothering and nurturing in our culture, but that's the biological reality, and I really wanted to show that.

  DW: That's amazing. And as mothers, we would go to any lengths and do anything possible for our children. I definitely felt that in the book.

  Thank you so much, Emma, this was wonderful. I love hearing all of this. Thank you for answering my questions and talking deeper about the book. I can't wait to sell it. And those details, like how you got those locations, are just something that I can really talk to our customers about.

  EP: Thank you so much, Desirae, I'm excited to come see you in your new location!

  DW: Yes, definitely come visit!

  Tilt by Emma Pattee (Marysue Rucci Books, 9781668055472, Hardcover Fiction, $27.99) On Sale: 3/25/2025

• The Rumpus - https://therumpus.net/2025/03/24/less-workshop-more-sensibility-a-conversation-with-emma-pattee/

  Less Workshop, More Sensibility: A Conversation with Emma Pattee
  Liz IversenMarch 24, 2025

  In Emma Pattee’s debut novel Tilt (Simon & Schuster / Marysue Rucci Books, 2025), Annie is a playwright who has all but given up on her dreams, while her husband, Dom, is an actor who is very much still trying to make a career of his craft. Set over the course of one day, Annie is nine months pregnant and crib shopping at IKEA when a devastating earthquake hits. A geological inevitability for the Pacific Northwest, the Cascadia Earthquake proves to be “the Big One.” Separated from her husband, who she fears is dead, Annie must navigate the earthquake’s aftermath in search of him. Traversing Portland on foot, she reflects on the cracks in her marriage, her once-promising artistic life, and the uncertainty of motherhood. The novel raises questions about how steadfastly we should hold onto artistic dreams, and whether we should prioritize stability and income, especially if we are supporting a family. Described as “The Road meets Night Bitch meets What to Expect When You’re Expecting” by author Lydia Kielsing, Tilt was named one of Time’s “39 Most Anticipated Books of 2025.”

  Pattee is a fiction writer and climate journalist based in Portland, Oregon. Her fiction has appeared in publications including Bellevue Literary Review, Idaho Review, New Orleans Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She’s written about climate change for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian.

  I spoke with Pattee over Zoom about inspiration in motherhood, overcoming self-doubt, and why writers should get less help with words on the page and more help learning to make decisions.

  ***

  The Rumpus: The novel opens with Annie, pregnant and shopping in a lavender linen romper, walking in “stiff little jerky motions like a stork,” with her distended belly like “a blimp exiting sideways out of [her] body.” As a mother of two, how did your experience of motherhood inform or inspire this book?

  Emma Pattee: I came up with the idea for the book when I was pregnant. I was shopping for a crib at Ikea and the building started to shake. I had this moment where I thought, “It’s the earthquake!” It was a big truck dropping off IKEA furniture or something, but I thought, “What would I do if the earthquake was happening right now?”

  TILT cover image
  I then wrote the book through the next five years while having a baby, getting pregnant again, and having a second baby, so every part of the book is informed with my experience of motherhood. I would say the kernel of inspiration—when I rewind to when I was pregnant—was that I felt so patronized as a pregnant person. Everybody kept telling me to “get ready,” but it seemed like what they meant were the most mundane, capitalist things, like, “Buy things!” and prepare your home. Nobody was talking about the soul rearranging of getting ready that I was really craving. Being pregnant, I wanted to run to every person and say, “I’m having a kid, and one day my kid is going to die, and I’m going to die, and how do you love something that is going to die?” I was holding something really existential, and everybody kept talking to me about cribs and strollers. It was the most disconnected, surreal experience.

  Rumpus: In the acknowledgements section, you wrote about a promise you made to your son, Oliver, on the night of his birth: “[I will] do the thing, write the thing, not let my self-doubt keep me small.” How did your self-doubt, as a writer, come into play?

  Pattee: I’m a person who has a lot of self-doubt and was coming from that space already. I was seven months pregnant and had this book idea, and everybody was like, “Emma, you’re seven months pregnant.” I’d never been able to finish a novel before. I had a Google drive full of half-finished novels. Even my writing coach told me, “You need to not think about your novel idea right now. You need to not pressure yourself to write a book. You need to focus on having a baby.” So I had this novel idea, but I didn’t do anything with it. I just had it and held it and felt incredibly frozen by self-doubt. I thought, “You’re not allowed to write a book that’s just about a woman walking. That’s not even a book. That doesn’t even make sense.”

  Then I had my kid, and the birth was very high-drama but in a way that felt really empowering. I was supposed to have a home birth and had gotten whisked away to the hospital. I was incredibly feverish and had this intense feeling like I had touched the Life-Death Continuum. A few hours afterward, my kid was lying in his see-through crib next to me, and he blinked and was staring at me in silence. He had these huge eyes, and I thought, “Oh, I’m going to write that fucking book.” I knew it. I looked at that kid and was like, “I am not going to make you carry the weight of my disappointments, or my playing it small.”

  I feel like a lot of us carry our parents’ disappointments, and they’re carrying their parents’ disappointments. Especially as women, there can be sort of a legacy of thwarted ambition for systemic and cultural reasons, patriarchal reasons. I felt like I’d touched death, and I was going to write the fucking book. The next day, my husband woke up, went to the hospital gift shop, bought a notebook, and brought it up to me. I ended up writing the first chapter in a postpartum fever dream when my kid was eight weeks old.

  Rumpus: The protagonist narrates the novel to her unborn child, whom she addresses directly as Bean. Did that narrative choice limit what you felt you could write, or did it open up possibilities in some way?

  Pattee: When the idea came to me, it came exactly as that: her talking to her baby. So it didn’t even feel like a choice, it just was. The idea was really about stream-of-consciousness. That was the technique I was trying to play with. I had read Ducks, Newburyport [by Lucy Ellmann] and this incredible book called Amnesty [by Aravind Adiga], and I was fascinated with stream-of-consciousness books. It was exciting because it was a challenge I really struggled with.

  I have a science background, and as I learned more and more about the earthquake, there was so much science I wanted to bring in. It became agonizing that I could only write what Annie knows about the earthquake and what she can see, which is very little. Many times, I said to my editor, “Well, maybe she’s walking with an earthquake expert, and as they walk, the earthquake expert can tell her all about what’s happening.” Nobody went for that. It just killed me, the amount of fascinating information I learned that I could not put in the book, because the book is limited by Annie’s scope.

  Rumpus: What is one piece of information you wish you could have put in the book?

  Pattee: Portland is intersected by two rivers, the Willamette River and the Columbia River. Most people work on one side and live on the other, or their kids go to school on one side and they work on the other. A lot of people here talk about the earthquake in terms of the rivers. You want to make sure that there’s always one parent on the same riverside as the kid in case the earthquake hits, so you’re never separated. But there are also a lot of interesting plans about how to get inflatables going across the river. When the earthquake happens, I believe there will be kayaks out, canoes out, people trying to swim across. There will be people boating people back and forth. I think that speaks to the communal DIY spirit in Portland.

  Rumpus: This book unfolds in a dual-timeline narrative: one unfolds in the present, with Annie navigating her way through the aftermath of the earthquake, and the second timeline reveals the backstory of Annie’s relationship with her husband and her life before pregnancy. Was the structure meant to reflect parallel fault lines? How did you decide on this?

  Pattee: That [decision] came very late, probably a few weeks before my book went out on submission. I probably wrote the book five times with different structures. For most of the book’s life, it existed as a timestamp structure, and it was this fragmented thing in ten- or twenty-minute increments. For a while, it existed as a pedometer structure, with [Annie’s] Fitbit tracking her steps. I was getting a little panicked. I had set this date for when I needed to send it to my agent, and I could not figure out the structure. My writing coach told me I wasn’t allowed to write. She said, “Take two weeks and you cannot write it all,” which was really challenging when I was up against this deadline. She said to spend that two weeks trying to get clarity and make a decision about the structure. I was so frustrated by this advice and frustrated to be wasting my time. I felt like I was spending day after day and not getting anywhere. Then, I woke up in the middle of the night with this structure in my mind, and I immediately knew.

  For me, when I think about the craft element of this book and my journey as a writer, so much of it has been about learning how to make decisions. I think with novice writers—myself as a novice writer—there is a belief that things come as inspiration. I think when you get into the work of writing a book, which involves hundreds and hundreds of big and small decisions that impact all the other decisions, a lot of us are unprepared for that. That’s why it’s really hard. What we perceive as “hard,” to rewrite or edit a book, is actually just that we are struggling so much with the decision-making process because it’s not something that’s getting taught. For me, learning how to make decisions as a writer was huge. My writing coach really showed me that when you have big decisions around your book, you need to take a little space from the writing—and make a little space in your mind—so that the answer can bubble up.

  Rumpus: What other help did you receive from your writing coach?

  Pattee: I got my agent in sort of a Cinderella story. She got the first chapter of my novel through a writing teacher of mine and offered me representation based on the first chapter. I wasn’t looking for an agent. I was pregnant with my second kid, and I was actually about to shelve this book. My agent gave me this list of edits, and she was like, “How fast can you give me these edits?” I’d just had the second baby and felt completely lost.

  So, I reached out to this local writer named Margaret Malone. My second kid was probably six weeks old, in his little car seat. I show up all sweaty and sit down with this woman. I show her this long list of edits my agent has requested, and I’m like, “I have to do this. I’m running out of money. I just had a baby. Can you help me?” She said, “Yeah, let’s do this.” She held my hand and guided me through. It’s funny, she never read the book. If I could go back in time and speak to writers just starting out, I would tell them to get less help with the words on the page and get more help with your sensibility as a writer, the way you make decisions, and whatever story you’re telling yourself that’s keeping you blocked. We don’t get a lot of coaching help. We get way too much writing feedback. For me, a lesson of this book was to completely stop going to workshops. I stopped getting any feedback on the book. I realized that it was becoming a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen situation. And that is my process now: I don’t get feedback, and I don’t do workshops. I’m much less interested in getting any feedback on my work and much more interested in learning. How am I making decisions? Why am I making that decision? What am I trying to show here? What are the things I’m weak at as a writer and stronger at as a writer? How can I improve the things I’m weaker at?

  Rumpus: What else can you tell us about your writing process?

  Pattee: I write every day, three pages a day. I’m trying to work up to five pages a day. Three pages a day is four hundred and fifty words, and five is seven hundred words. I write by hand—that’s incredibly important. I just need a little bit more creative play space, which handwriting gives me. At that pace, I think it takes me about six-to-nine months to finish a draft. I put it aside for six weeks, then read it all in one sitting. I make a list of edits that I’m going to do for the next round. Then, I just start over. I do the same thing all over again. Any new material, I handwrite. If I need a new chapter, I’m going to write it by hand. I just keep doing that twenty times. With the earthquake book, and with the book I’m working on now, the process really was about twenty drafts.

  I learned another lesson the hard way: I was judging Tilt on the first draft, the second draft, the third draft. I thought, “This kind of is bad . . . this book sucks. Maybe I shouldn’t keep working on it.” I didn’t understand that a book in its third draft is not the book. It would have blown my mind if someone would have said, “You will write fifteen more drafts of this book, and everything in this third draft will not exist in the published book. So what does it matter whether it’s good or not? It’s not even the book.” I didn’t understand that. I was reading something that seemed bad, and I was wanting to give up on it because it was bad.

  Rumpus: A recurring theme in the book is the tension between the desire to make art and the need to make money. Were you grappling with these ideas as you wrote the book, or have you grappled with them before?

  Emma: I got a degree in writing and graduated with all my writer friends into a recession. It struck me how hard it is to want something, and then to see that it’s not sustainable. I think this is a very millennial experience to be told, “Yeah, you want to do ballet? Of course you can.” “You want to go to the Olympics? Oh my gosh, yes. Follow your dreams!” My parents were these hippie, starving-artist, intellectual types. I don’t know why my parents didn’t really grasp that you literally have to pay bills, so that was something I wanted to write about. How do you give up a dream?

  The pain of Annie trying to give up her dream was something I wanted to examine. Especially this marriage between someone who hasn’t given up their dream—but it’s not taking off—and someone who has given up on the dream but kind of hasn’t, and is bitter, is still unhappy. And the friction between the two of them.

  Rumpus: In addition to writing novels, you’re a climate journalist. Can you talk a little bit about how that work influenced this book?

  Pattee: When I started working on climate change, I was really naive. I thought, “Oh, I’ll be the person that can stop the climate crisis through journalism.” And I also was really angry about how much apathy there was around me—not climate denial but climate apathy. People that absolutely think there is climate change and want it to stop and are totally environmentalists, theoretically. They’re just completely apathetic to what’s happening.

  Through my work as a climate journalist—interviewing a lot of scientists, researchers, and sociologists—I really came to understand that our brains are very efficient at keeping us cognitively safe. It is not a personal failing to look away from the climate crisis, it’s a biological response. I found, through my reporting, an enormous compassion for humans, and I really started to understand humans less as this intellectual species and much more as animals with consciousness. I found great compassion in that. At the same time, I gave up hope that my journalism was going to solve the climate crisis. In this sense, the earthquake is an allegory for something very bad that we know is coming. Everybody who lives in the Pacific Northwest knows this earthquake is coming, and you know you should be more prepared than you are, and you’re still not prepared.

  How do you prepare for something you cannot face? You cannot look at it directly because your brain truly will not let you. To look at it directly would be to feel fear and despair that you cannot hold. That was really what I wanted to talk about in the book. For me, it was a reckoning, a coming to terms with this part of our species that is endearing and also likely a reason we will risk our entire species in the climate crisis.

  Rumpus: What is one thing that you hope readers will take away from your book?

  Pattee: I think what I’m writing about and what I tried to capture is a shock point. It’s the moment when everything changes and you see your life clearly. You’re broken out of the modern-day noise—capitalism, consumerism—and you can see your life really clearly, and you can see yourself clearly. Those moments are priceless, even if they come at really scary times for a lot of us. I want people to be able to have that moment through Annie. To feel like, “If my whole life was turned on its head tomorrow, what would I change?” To have the chance to get that shock of perspective. That’s the thing I hope people will take from it.

• Literary Hub - https://lithub.com/emma-pattee-on-imagining-the-devastating-aftermath-of-the-big-one/

  Emma Pattee on Imagining the Devastating Aftermath of the “Big One”
  Jane Ciabattari Talks to the Author of “Tilt”
  By Jane Ciabattari
  March 4, 2025
  Speculation about the “big one” is common in California, where we’ve seen bridges and highways fall, houses burn and chaos reign after the Loma Prieta in San Francisco (1989), the Northridge in Los Angeles (1994), and dozens of smaller jolts. Emma Pattee imagines the impact of an anticipated 9.0 magnitude earthquake on the 700-mile Cascadia fault on the city of Portland in her breathtaking first novel, Tilt (out March 25), and gives us a second by second, twenty-four-hour account of how it feels for Annie, who is thirty-two weeks pregnant and standing in the crib section at IKEA when the ground gives way.

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  Jane Ciabattari: What inspired this first novel? What was your first inkling of its existence?

  Emma Pattee: The idea for Tilt came to me when I was very pregnant, at IKEA, shopping for a crib. And the building started to shake. I was immediately terrified that it was the big earthquake and thought to myself, “How will I get home? What will I have to do to survive?”

  It ended up being a big truck full of Swedish furniture which caused the building to shake. By the time I realized that, the idea for Tilt was fully formed in my mind.

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  We will have to fend for ourselves and fend for each other. I wanted to explore what that community response actually looks like in real-time.
  JC: Did you always intend to have your narrator Annie be a mother-to-be about to give birth, which creates it’s a separate dramatic arc?

  EP: Because of how the book idea came to me, the narrator was always going to be a pregnant woman. Pregnancy is this interesting intersection of extreme vulnerability and heightened savagery. A will to survive and protect.

  JC: How has Tilt been influenced by your work as a climate journalist?

  EP: I’m fascinated by the way we live under the shadow of something terrible which we know is coming, but we don’t know when, and we can never really prepare for it. So in this way, the Cascadia earthquake is a very apt analogy for climate change. And of course, reading about and reporting on climate disasters over the past five years has shown me, time and again, that in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, the official response is almost always outmatched. We will have to fend for ourselves and fend for each other. I wanted to explore what that community response actually looks like in real-time.

  JC: You coined the term “climate shadow” to describe one person’s potential impact on climate change. Did that thinking have any part in your choice to write a novel telling the story of one woman’s experience of a historic earthquake?

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  EP: I started working on the book about two years before I came up with the concept of climate shadow, so I would say it was the opposite process. Annie is a woman who is stuck, she is frustrated by the way her life has turned out, and in many ways she suffers from apathy. The earthquake shakes her out of her apathy, gives her a chance to make different choices. To change her life. Spending years writing from Annie’s POV really forced me to think deeply about apathy, the enormous cost of climate apathy, and the choices we would make differently if we looked directly at the thing instead of looking away.

  JC: Speculation about the “big one” is common in California, where I live. I was in San Francisco on the day of the Loma Prieta, and in a hotel on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles when the Northridge hit in the pre-dawn hours. What has your own earthquake experience been, living in Oregon, with the Cascadia potentially looming?

  EP: I’ve been fascinated by the earthquake for years. It’s scientifically fascinating, it’s historically fascinating, and it’s psychologically fascinating. But it also really really scares me.

  So it was very surprising to me to realize how many people in Portland laugh about the earthquake, or speculate that it’s overblown or dismiss the (very clear) scientific evidence. I’ve definitely become the mom at the playground that nobody wants to talk with!

  JC: How did you go about researching the details of impact of the 9.2 earthquake that hits Portland in Tilt?

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  EP: There is so much known about how the city of Portland will be impacted by the Cascadia earthquake, which I thought would make my writing work so much easier, but in fact made it so much harder. In a moment where it would have been so convenient to just make something up, I had to stick closely to the facts and it really limited my artistic choices.

  I relied a lot on a book called Full-Rip 9.0 by Sandi Daughton, and a book called The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley. I also used the [Kathryn Schulz] New Yorker article about the Big One that won the Pulitzer. I talked to geologists, seismic engineer, and first responders who were in Turkey and Kashmir directly after those earthquakes.

  I also had the opportunity to attend a training day with the Portland NET team (we have the largest network of emergency volunteers in the country!) and see firsthand what a rescue scene might look like.

  JC: Why limit the time frame of the novel to the first day after the earthquake?

  EP: I chose to set Tilt in the immediate minutes and hours after the earthquake, because I wanted to show what happens before the emergency response, before the news articles, before anyone knows what’s going on, when it’s just humans turning to other humans, trying to survive. And as we just saw in LA, those moments are terrifying and confusing, and also there is incredible camaraderie and generosity.

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  JC: At what point did you decide to alternate the unfolding drama with back-story chapters telling Annie’s story, from dropping out during her freshman year at NYU seventeen years before, and returning to Portland, where her first play is produced, to meeting her husband, an actor, and making choices she has come to question?

  EC: That choice was very late in the process. I had been working on the book for about three years, and agonizing over the best way to structure it. Then one night I woke up at 3 am and the alternating structure came to me.

  JC: You make another telling creative decision: to focus on one woman’s journey across a devastated city to find her husband, focusing on only what she witnesses, and the others she interacts with.

  EP: Tilt is really about having the chance to change your life. And it’s told in a stream-of-conciousness voice to Annie’s unborn child. So it always was going to be just one woman’s journey. Which was incredibly frustrating at times, because it meant that the reader can only know as much about the earthquake as Annie knows! And I’m sitting here, overflowing with random earthquake facts I’m dying to share with someone, and yet I have this main character who doesn’t know anything about what’s going on.

  I wanted to show what happens before the emergency response…when it’s just humans turning to other humans, trying to survive.
  JC: In the aftermath of the quake, phones don’t work, so it’s impossible for Annie to tell where her husband is, or if he’s alive. That’s one of her biggest overarching questions. Did you consider a range of answers?

  EP: Yes, there were many different versions of this book. I played with every possible outcome. Then I had this experience of hiking with my husband and my son in Lake Tahoe. My son was about a year old, and he was in a carrier on my husband’s back. A couple hours into the hike, we looked behind us, and a brown bear was following us on this narrow path.

  Without even thinking, I told my husband to walk fast ahead with our son, and I would walk slower so that if the bear was going to attack anyone, he would attack me. And that no matter what, he shouldn’t try to save me but just get our son to safety. And my husband immediately agreed. Both of us knew that my life meant nothing compared to my son’s. And because it happened so fast, and we were both terrified and full of adrenaline, I knew it was authentic. We weren’t performing being protective parents. This wasn’t a moral decision. It was a biological one.

  When I got home from that Tahoe trip, I had my answer to how I would end the book.

  JC: How did you map out the journey Annie takes, from the rubble of the IKEA store to its parking lot and then through the devastated city? Did you consult earthquake preparedness documents?

  EP: I spent hours on Google Maps, and then hours walking and biking the possible routes that Annie could take. I researched which roads would fare well, and which would be washed out due to liquefaction. I researched which bridges and overpasses would stand, and which would fall. Every street in the book is an actual street; every landmark is real. Every destruction point in the book is what experts say is going to happen during the earthquake. So, it is as factually accurate as a book about something that hasn’t happened yet can be.

  JC: What are you working on now/next?

  EP: Right now, I have some investigative journalism pieces I’ve put off for far too long, so I’ll be turning my attention to those. I am also working on another Oregon novel but the themes have not made themselves clear to me yet.

  __________________________________

  Tilt by Emma Pattee is available from Marysue Rucci Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on March 25.

Tilt

Emma Pattee. S&S/Rucci, $27.99 (240p)

ISBN 978-1-6680-5547-2

* In Pattee's nail-biting debut, a pregnant woman navigates the aftermath of a major earthquake in Portland, Ore. The story opens with Annie, 35, shopping for a crib at IKEA on her first day of maternity leave. She grows angry with salesperson Taylor for overlooking her, until a huge tremor rattles the building and she's trapped by shifting boxes and cabinets. After Taylor helps her escape, Annie flees without her wallet or keys, joining a crowd walking to the heart of the city. She needs to find her husband, Dom, a jovial, struggling actor who works at a cafe four miles away. Despite her pregnancy, few are willing to give her a ride on the city's cracked streets, and she is wary of those who do stop. Still, Annie is tenacious and leans into her dark sense of humor, mentally drafting an Instagram post ("Well, didn't think my morning would go like this") and wondering if all the damaged housing might mean that she and Dom will be able to afford their own place. Pattee's depiction of a post-earthquake Portland feels bracingly realistic, and her depictions of marriage and impending motherhood are achingly raw. Shocking and full of heart, this leaves a mark. Agent: Julie Barer, Book Group. (Mar.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
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"Tilt." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 2, 6 Jan. 2025, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300356/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a1899d1d. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.

Byline: Mark Athitakis

Annie, the narrator of Emma Pattee's debut novel, ǣTilt,ǥ is very pregnant and very stressed. Shopping at an Ikea in Portland, Oregon, she accosts a well-meaning staffer when she learns that her crib of choice is seemingly unavailable. Years of professional disappointment and months of maternal anxiety coalesce into Annie exploding: ǣI'd like to speak to your manager,ǥ she demands.

That minor crisis of selfishness is interrupted by a major one: The cataclysmal earthquake that has long threatened to hit the Pacific Northwest finally arrives, leaving Annie stranded. She's lost her car keys, and she could hardly navigate the chaos in the parking lot anyway. All she can do is wend her way toward the coffee shop where her husband works, miles away.

ǣTiltǥ is an apocalyptic novel of sorts: Pattee is a climate journalist, and her novel is informed by an awareness of the ways environmental pressures change how people in societies help or abandon one another. (One book she cites in the acknowledgments is Rebecca Solnit's ǣA Paradise Built in Hell,ǥ a classic study of collective responses to disaster.) But ǣTiltǥ is more of a book-club-ready existential novel, and part of its charm is that Pattee never quite allows Annie to conquer her unpleasantness. Her pregnancy makes her neither a hero nor an object of pity. Rather, she's a millennial who's sometimes scattered (she's really pushed the deadline on crib-shopping) and fixated on what her life means now that near-death has put it into focus.

ǣTiltǥ runs on two alternating tracks, its chapters shifting from her trek through Portland on the day of the quake to locate her husband, to flashbacks of a lifetime of disappointments. She went to college in New York with dreams of being an acclaimed playwright but was soon overwhelmed by the competition. Back home in Portland, she delivered one well-received play and met her future husband, an actor. But adulthood has become a grind. She works a spirit-sapping cubicle job and struggles to make ends meet - her marriage was hastened, unromantically, to get him on her insurance to cover two root canals. Her mother died during the pandemic. Annie and her husband await their big breaks. They don't arrive.

ǣIs this life?ǥ she asks her soon-to-arrive baby, nicknamed Bean. ǣSometimes it seems like your father and I have spent not just years doing this but eons. An infinite amount of time spent unloading the dishwasher and waiting in line at the grocery store.ǥ

Rare is the person who's looked at a stack of dirty dishes in a sink and not bemoaned their fate. But Annie's failure to move past those everyday hassles suggests much deeper problems. As the novel proceeds, we learn that she has some legitimate reasons to feel wounded, on guard and mordant. And a post-earthquake environment gives Pattee a big canvas against which Annie can contemplate what it means to be a decent, accomplished person, and question all the platitudes about goodness and support. She encounters injured people who are cared for and others who are abandoned. Annie's pregnancy is attention-getting but doesn't open up deep reservoirs of compassion among panicked strangers. She mulls over something one man says about looters and rioters while he's boarding up his weed shop: ǣYou know how people are.ǥ

And what kind of person is she? When she says ǣI'll helpǥ to those assisting a wounded woman, she catches herself internally: ǣWhy do I say that?ǥ

The earthquake boldfaces the matters of goodness and disappointment that have been part of Annie's everyday life. She is forever wondering whether she should have tried harder to make it as a professional writer and struggles to sort out if she's ultimately being cruel to her husband by allowing him to keep pursuing his acting dreams. She's unsure whether she or he is the one being childish, but her worries tend to push her toward negativity. The earthquake becomes a metaphor for her own capacity to catastrophize. ǣWanting to be famous is like a rash,ǥ she thinks. ǣJust when you think it's gone, that you're cured, there it is again, on your leg, your face, your elbow. So itchy. Bright red.ǥ

Pattee can focus on this negativity to, well, a fault. Annie's sourness runs counter to the moments of generosity she's afforded; there are a couple of only-in-a-novel coincidences that test the reader's trust. And though Pattee is careful not to have Annie wallow in abject self-pity, she does occasionally lapse into morose platitudes.

Still, the storytelling in ǣTiltǥ is brisk, and Annie has, in the moments when she can afford it, a winning gallows humor - this is probably as funny as a novel about humanity at its worst can be. And though the setup is rooted in '70s disaster dramas - she's pregnant! during an earthquake! - Pattee eludes the more cornball possibilities it suggests, and the ending is deliberately ambiguous.

A person facing parenthood, a person facing the dishes, a person facing death - we're all confronting what it means to make use of our time and humanity. Pattee's ambivalence about human goodness is a powerful thing; it calls into question the assumptions we make about ourselves. ǣI am the Mother. The Mother does not give up,ǥ Annie thinks. ǣThe Mother finds the Father. This is the only way it can go.ǥ It isn't, though. You know how people are.

- - -

Mark AthitakisÇëis a critic in Phoenix and the author of ǣThe New Midwest.ǥ

- - -

Tilt

By Emma Pattee.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Athitakis, Mark. "On the cusp of motherhood, a woman faces down disaster." Washington Post, 21 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A832058153/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6eebe521. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.

Pattee, Emma TILT Marysue Rucci Books (Fiction None) $27.99 3, 25 ISBN: 9781668055472

On the cusp of motherhood, a woman faces peril.

Annie is 37 weeks pregnant, shopping for a crib at IKEA, when suddenly she feels a terrible jolt, "a wave underneath me," she thinks, "lifting me up." An earthquake has hit Portland. In her assured debut novel, Pattee follows Annie through a horrific day: With wreckage all around her, she is intent on making her way to find her husband. She has miles to walk, it's hot, she's hungry and thirsty and afraid. She's alone, and yet not alone, because she's carrying a child, her precious Bean. "How did we get here, Bean?," she asks. "You and me, IKEA, Monday morning, AISLE 8, BIN 31, hand on metal rack, eyes wide in fear, body tensed like a firecracker about to explode?" As she trudges across devastating landscapes--collapsed houses, bridges, and schools; supermarkets and convenience stores overrun by looters; bodies of the wounded and dead--Annie answers that question by beginning 17 years earlier, when she fell in love with Bean's father, Dom, and they set out together to fulfill their dreams of becoming stars: she, a playwright; he, an actor. But Annie gave up writing, and Dom, while tirelessly auditioning, works at a cafe. Annie worries, as she walks, about their lack of money "to have a baby, much less feed a baby, much less house a baby, much less pay somebody to watch said baby." She worries that they'll never be able to afford a home of their own, with real estate prices ballooning. She worries about her ability for mothering, for being a "lifelong cheerleader" for her husband, and about realizing their dashed dreams. Recounting Annie's precarious journey across the city and into her past, Pattee reveals that the quake has upended more than the earth.

A captivating novel.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Pattee, Emma: TILT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A832991683/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b126d71d. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.

Emma Pattee's debut novel, ''Tilt,'' takes place in the 24 hours after ''the really big one'' devastates the Pacific Northwest.

TILT, by Emma Pattee

The most read New Yorker article of 2015 was Kathryn Schulz's ''The Really Big One,'' about the potentially devastating Cascadia earthquake that has a 1-in-3 chance of striking the Pacific Northwest within the next 40 years. Taking this very real threat as its knockout premise, Emma Pattee's debut novel, ''Tilt,'' is a moving adrenaline rush that also manages to be very funny.

When ''the really big one'' hits, Annie -- who narrates the novel as if addressing her unborn child, ''Bean'' -- is 37 weeks pregnant and shopping for a crib at Ikea in Portland, Ore. ''Tilt'' takes readers through the next 24 hours, with chapters that flash back to fill in the details of Annie's life. Annie and her husband, Dom, are ''star children who forgot to become stars'': Annie, once a promising playwright, supports them as the office manager at a tech company, while Dom auditions for acting roles and picks up shifts at a cafe. Financially strapped, creatively stifled and increasingly distant, Annie and Dom are, ''if not on the path to breaking up, at least able to see the path to breaking up from where we're standing.''

But when Annie emerges from the rubble of Ikea, all she can think of is finding Dom. And so she embarks on a journey across the ravaged city. In the summer heat, swollen and dehydrated, Annie trudges past collapsed bridges and burning houses, looted shops and leveled schools. Along the way, she crosses paths with others in their own dire circumstances -- most memorably an Ikea employee named Taylor -- some of whose fates we will learn, some of whom the narrative will leave behind as Annie presses on.

The ingredients in ''Tilt'' are familiar: a bit of Emily St. John Mandel's ''Station Eleven'' (theater kids in the apocalypse) and a bit of Rumaan Alam's ''Leave the World Behind'' (cutting social observation in the apocalypse); the acerbic takes on marriage and motherhood reminiscent of Ashley Audrain and Rachel Yoder. Shaken together, these ingredients make for a potent cocktail.

I cried more than once reading it. The book's cover image -- a small model bird -- comes from an anecdote about Annie's late mother's unrealized artistic ambitions that is as heartbreaking as any of the tragic scenes Annie encounters on her journey. I also laughed out loud at many of her dark, unfiltered thoughts, like this one: ''I read somewhere that in the case of a natural disaster, you should not look strangers in the eye in case they die later and you're forced to eat them.''

Readers' mileage with Annie may vary. Her emotions are often dialed up to 11 -- not just in the aftermath of the earthquake, but in flashbacks, too. The novel's prose sometimes strains to capture the intensity of her perspective. ''I need your father. Like hunger. Like thirst,'' she tells Bean as she walks. Flashing back to a fight with Dom the day before the earthquake: ''The terribleness of it fills my entire body. Not just this moment but all the moments.'' Her heart is frequently ''pounding.''

Often, I wanted to grab Annie by the straps of her lavender maternity romper and shout: ''What are you doing? Stop walking, find water and shelter, and protect your baby!'' Of course, the novel's plot depends upon Annie not doing this. But her decision to keep walking is also indicative of Annie's initial resistance to motherhood and its demands.

The ruined city is a crucible through which she passes -- a perilous trial not unlike childbirth itself. While Pattee's readers will not get the answer to every question, at the end Annie will have an answer of her own: All that matters is this ferocious creature she is becoming -- a mother, prepared to do whatever she must.

TILT | By Emma Pattee | Marysue Rucci Books | 227 pp. | $27.99

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PHOTO This article appeared in print on page BR8.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The New York Times Company
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Schaitkin, Alexis. "Life in the Ruins." The New York Times Book Review, 13 Apr. 2025, p. 8. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835274994/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=80c987bc. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.

"Tilt." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 2, 6 Jan. 2025, p. 49. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300356/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a1899d1d. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025. Athitakis, Mark. "On the cusp of motherhood, a woman faces down disaster." Washington Post, 21 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A832058153/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6eebe521. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025. "Pattee, Emma: TILT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A832991683/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b126d71d. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025. Schaitkin, Alexis. "Life in the Ruins." The New York Times Book Review, 13 Apr. 2025, p. 8. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835274994/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=80c987bc. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.

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