The Nitty Gritty Interview with Christy Tending

By Charlotte Hamrick

Christy Tending’s High Priestess of the Apocalypse (ELJ Editions, 2024) is a unique collection of flash memoirs that weaves together threads of climate change, activism, parenting, personal reflection, trauma, grief, and healing. Christy freely opens her heart and invites the reader in as she shares her life experiences, the wonderful and the tragic. Christy’s prose is lush and powerful, her imagery is breathtaking, her passion is fierce. 

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Your memoir is written in short, even micro, chapters. Why did you decide to present your story this way?

I love this form for a lot of reasons, but one of the main reasons is that you can get really intimate and specific about certain events or seasons of life. With that kind of economy of storytelling, there’s not as much context, but you can get to the guts of the thing really quickly, which I love. And the language doesn’t have as much time to get bogged down in the logistics quite as much.

For instance, I don’t get into the timeline of how I met my husband and how he became my husband. But you get the zoom-in of him taking my tear gas-soaked clothes off me on the porch and us trying not to wake our child. That tells you far more about our relationship than where we went on our first date or what it was like to meet each others’ parents.

But that form also allows for me to maintain a certain level of privacy. It’s funny that I’m a memoirist because I’m actually intensely private. I find that the short form gives me the leeway to redact anything I want to keep for myself, whether because I want to keep it private or because I haven’t figured out what I think about it yet. It’s a really fabulous way to show one facet of things without having to pull back the curtain on every aspect of a life.

Your writing is lyrical, poetic and, like poetry, leaves a lot of white space for a reader to wander through, explore, and question. Was this a deliberate technique to draw the reader into the narrative?

It is deliberate. So many of the things that the book grapples with are really open-ended questions. It took a long time, in many cases, for me to arrive at how I feel about some of these ideas—and that I may never be finished questioning what certain ideas mean to me. My favorite books are the ones that spark something in my own writing—ironically, I find myself putting the book down to go write.

It can be hard to feel anything but alone when you’re writing sometimes, but I like to think of myself as being in asynchronous conversation with whoever is reading my work. I love to think about them considering how these themes live in their own lives, even if they have really different experiences.

I’m always clear that I’m only writing from my own perspective, and I want to leave space for all the other voices that are also grappling with these ideas. My writing is decidedly political, in that I have a very specific worldview from which I write, but I’m really interested in writing within an ecosystem of readers and other writers instead of in a vacuum.

I don’t want my work to necessarily tell you what to think or even what I think (at least not directly). To me, it’s more interesting to show you what’s happened and how it felt and to leave things open to different interpretations.

In the chapter “Roots, Seven to Fourteen” I was intrigued by your comment under “Eleven” about Rachel Carson. You said, “She couldn’t leave well enough alone, and it killed her. I learned that this is what it is, sometimes, to love the world.” Can you expand on that – what did you learn at age 11 to make you draw that conclusion?

Rachel Carson passed away at a fairly young age from cancer; I don’t think it’s an accident given her deep research into the carcinogenic pesticides and other chemicals from which she tried to protect the planet and its inhabitants. She saw the dangers and went towards them, in service of the planet with which she was so fascinated and enamored. I learned then that loving the world isn’t just about loving the pretty parts, but about being so devoutly in relationship to it that you are willing to give up a comfortable life and to risk not being palatable or convenient.

I saw her sacrifices—her cancer, but also her harassment by the chemical industry for speaking out—and I understood that if you love something and refuse to be quiet, there are often steep consequences. Activism isn’t always drum circles and letter writing, but sometimes it means giving up a level of comfort that you’d enjoyed in order to protect what you love more than that comfort.

I think it’s important to understand that as a white climate activist living in the US, I have a huge amount of privilege. It costs me relatively little to believe what I do. But that is not universally true. There are people who have been killed in other parts of the world for the same actions that I’ve engaged in without much thought. Loving the world and the people in it is not necessarily without risk.

“The Ten Things That Will Happen in College” was an interesting and eclectic list. Looking back, which one thing surprises you most about your younger self and why?

I’m actually surprised how much my younger self got right about her values. I don’t love all her choices, but it’s really interesting to me to see the through-lines in my life and to see all the ways I’ve always been very much this way. She really knew who she was and what mattered to her, even if she didn’t always know exactly how to put it all together.

“How to Freehand a Banner” begins as instructional but segues into beautiful and heartfelt sentiments. “There will not be room to explain why the things we want are sacred.” and “Let the words breathe the way the land is gasping for air.” I think prose like this, which is sprinkled throughout the book, is enlightening for people who might see protests as chaotic and even bullying and protesters as dogmatic. I think prose like this makes the protester human and, therefore, makes the cause more human. Does that make sense to you and is this something you’ve thought about?

Absolutely. I can tell you all of the wild stories from my activism and it might seem sensational. But the fact is that I’m an ordinary person. I’m not especially brave or prone to risk-taking. (This is something that I say when I train new activists as well.) I’m not engaging with protest because I like chaos; I’m there because these issues are morally urgent for me.

To bring it back to Rachel Carson, I do what I do because I love the world. And when my actions are informed by that kind of love, the risks seem worthwhile. What I want people to understand when they see a protest like mine is that we are taking these risks not for their own sake, but because the stakes feel so high to us.

In my experience, storytelling is one of the most powerful forces in activism. Even on a one-to-one level at a protest, explaining the human cost of an issue can be incredibly impactful on a passerby who had never heard of the issue before. Hopefully, humanizing protest lowers the barrier to entry and empowers people to think about how their engagement with the world could look.

Then, at the end of that chapter, you tell us about your son making his first banner, how “he wanted his sign to make people smile.” I just love that. Clearly, you’ve had a significant influence on your child regarding environmental justice. Please expand on how your activism has contributed to your parenting path.

In a lot of ways, I’m just a regular mom who—most of the time—is just trying to get her kid to eat something besides chicken fingers and to take a bath. But I also got arrested when I was pregnant with my son, protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. So, he knows that activism is in his blood.

We try to cultivate a fascination with the world that will translate into action as he gets older. And while we try to lead with our values without being overly didactic, we do talk honestly about how we feel about the police, what we feel our responsibility is to our neighbors—and try to make that a part of our family culture.

I believe that parenting is inherently political, particularly in a country where there are people with significant power who feel very comfortable with gun violence against children, with children who go hungry, and with leaving an unlivable planet for future generations. I think that anyone who is raising children is doing political work. Care work is inherently political. Teaching kids how to be good humans is inherently political.

In a memoir of powerful chapters I think one of the most powerful is “The Trouble with Little Violence” that really cracks open how seemingly small moments and disparaging comments are at the root of big violence. These lines particularly stood out: “The way I become smaller and smaller, until I could fit in the palm of your hand. Until I was sweet, pocket-sized” and “The little violence is insidious because it makes me wonder if it happened at all.”
I’m sure it was a difficult chapter to write and live through again while writing. What was your motivation for this particular chapter?

That chapter was a doozy to write. I almost didn’t include it in the book. I’m so grateful to the folks at Autofocus who first published it.

I am always interested in troubling the notion of violence, and it wasn’t until I was quite a ways through writing the book that I knew I needed to include this slice of my life through this particular lens. The funny thing is that when I look back on that time in my life, it felt very ordinary. I remember eating a lot of Chinese takeout. But once you scratch the surface, you can see the ways that banality is actually a cover for something very sinister.

I’m interested in the way that violence functions that way in relationships and the way that—even as I was writing the piece—I was questioning whether things were really that bad or whether I was blowing things out of proportion. I think a critical way that violence works is to make us question our own credibility and validity and by minimizing the way that force and coercion shapes our lives in these unspoken but powerful ways.

Your last piece, “I was Loved,” is a poignant end piece to the book. Do you remember what prompted this look back in this particular vein? Was it written specifically to end the book?

It wasn’t originally in the book—the manuscript had already been accepted—but when I wrote the piece, I knew that it needed a place in the book. This piece has a special place in my heart—I wrote it in response to a prompt from Melissa Faliveno at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in 2023.

And the process of that piece being workshopped shaped it into such a perfect summary for the book in some ways. To me, so much of the book is about what I love and how I’ve been in relationship to the things and the people I love, that it was interesting to flip that back on myself.

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