An Interview with Susan Kaye Quinn
Susan Kaye Quinn has designed aircraft engines and studied global warming, getting a PhD in environmental engineering along the way, but now she invents cool stuff in books. She’s been writing across multiple genres for 15 years, with her latest works focusing on hopepunk, solarpunk, and the new stories we need to build a more just and sustainable world. Her short fiction can be found in Grist, Solarpunk Magazine, and Reckoning, and all her novels and short stories can be found on her website: SusanKayeQuinn.com. She is the host of the Bright Green Futures podcast.
Susan was interviewed by BWG member Marianne H. Donley
BWG: While I enjoy your adult novels and short stories, I was charmed by Faery Swap. (Math based magic—how could I not!) As a retired teacher I also was thrilled by all the bonus content you created for teachers and students. What lead you to writing a middle-grade book? Creating all the bonus content? Will you be writing more?
SKQ: I started out writing YA novels when my three kids were 6, 8, and 10 years old—they thought it was kind of cool that Mom was writing books, but why not a book they could read? So I set out to write a middle-grade sci-fi story about a runaway cloned caregiver and her young charges, fleeing oppression across the galaxy… and let’s just say, they were a tough audience! But reading a chapter to my kids each Friday afternoon really zoomed my craft ahead. Nothing like getting live feedback from the kiddos! While I never published that novel, it informed the first YA novel I did publish (Open Minds) and soon after, I wrote Faery Swap, before they were all grown up and not interested in middle-grade stories anymore. I worked with one of their teachers to create the bonus content, but sadly, middle grade is a hard audience to reach, especially for self-published authors. I’ll always love that little story though. Math-based magic!
BWG: I LOVE your cover art, especially your Nothing Is Promised series and all the stories in the Halfway to Better collection. How do you go about designing your covers?
SKQ: Making covers is one of the coolest parts of being a self-published author—you have the freedom to do things like spread a single image across four novels or hire a lincocut print-making artist you meet at a craft show to make a cover for your short story collection that includes elements from each of the stories. I always use professional artists and cover designers (never AI!)—sometimes they’re the same person, sometimes not—and it helps that I have somewhat of an eye for art and graphic design (despite not being an artist myself). Not everyone has that ability to see what works and what doesn’t, plus you need to understand covers as marketing and something that signals genre, etc. I feel very fortunate to be an author in the era of self-publishing where I get to play with every element of a book, from the stories to the cover art to the way it’s produced and distributed and marketed. It’s not for everyone, but I love it!
BWG: What would your advice to an emerging writer be?
SKQ: I’m going to channel Ira Glass and say “create a large volume of work.” (I still, after writing for 15 years, watch that video at least once a year.) Just write. Write a lot. Write a story and then another and then another. Writing is a craft, and while books and classes are great, there’s nothing like practicing the craft itself to move ahead. I was instinctively driven to do this because I’d bottled up my creativity for a long time, and when it came pouring out, I was pretty obsessive about it. But I accidentally did the right thing.
BWG: What is the funniest (or sweetest or best or nicest) thing a fan has ever said to you?
SKQ: I’ve gotten so many wonderful notes from fans over the years—if you love someone’s work, gushing about it on social media or dropping them a note really makes a difference. Readers really have no idea. I’ll be struggling with a story, or even to write at all as we collectively live through The Horrors, and a note from a reader will pop up and say “what you wrote really impacted me” and it just makes all the difference. This sweet little review on social media about my solarpunk Nothing Is Promised series was a while ago but I still chuckle about it:
BWG: I’ve read so many different definitions of hopepunk climate fiction, how do you define it? How does hopepunk climate fiction differ from solarpunk?
SKQ: I tend to use hopepunk (or hopeful) climate fiction and solarpunk interchangeably. Broadly, they’re both trying to describe those rare stories that show positive visions of a more just and sustainable world and the fight we have to wage to get there. There’s some solarpunk that’s utopian, but not the kind I write. Hopepunk is a broader term that’s anti-dystopian, radical compassion stories about collective struggle for a better world, or just gentle vibes that rebuke the brutality of the world. If you told a hopepunk-y story that was also about climate (and, really, every story should have the climate crisis in it, that’s just the reality we live in now), then that’s probably solarpunk. These genres are being co-created by all who write them, so I’m not the authoritative expert on what they are—no one is. Which is also a very solarpunk approach: anti-hierarchy, anti-gate-keeping, a little loose and messy because it’s a collective project. But the stuff I write tends to be near-future stories about how we get out of this giant disaster we’ve made with capitalism, colonialism, and climate change… and that the way forward will be through working together, healing the world and ourselves.
BWG: Would you tell us a little bit about your Bright Green Futures podcast?
SKQ: This is where I talk about those stories! Sometimes I monologue about solarpunk or the challenges of writing stories that are out of the mainstream; for example, how do you write a story about a collective? Why is the Hero’s Journey part of the problem, not the solution? Then I also bring on authors who are writing in this space, and we talk about their stories, usually focusing on one aspect of hopeful climate fiction storytelling. I often say the podcast serves as an extended tutorial on how to tell these stories and the challenges writers face. We need a lot more of them! Which is why I asked guests of the pod to write a solarpunk story just for the Bright Green Futures anthology—we published that on Earth Day 2025, and it’s a great sampler to see what the genre can do. (I also encourage folks to download my free solarpunk zines from the podcast/website!)
BWG: Where can our readers get your books?
SKQ: Most of my books are available in all formats: ebook, audiobook, and print. They’re available almost anywhere you get your books. I encourage folks to shop Bookshop.org for print books and Libro.fm for audiobooks because a portion of those sales go to indie bookstores, and our entire literary system is under attack right now. We need to give them all the support we can. And that includes libraries—most of my ebooks, audiobooks, and print books are available to libraries, although you might have to put in a request for them to carry it (which they love to hear from patrons!). Libraries also prefigure a solarpunk future (I love how we have the seeds of a better world here already)—I have a whole podcast episode about solarpunk and library economies.