My guest today is author BrightFlame, who writes, teaches, and makes magic for bright futures! I had the honor of sharing a TOC with her in Bright Green Futures, and also of blurbing her novel, The Working. This is what I had to say:

"In The Working, BrightFlame shows us why she's a master of climate fiction and lunarpunk. Her novel is a compelling narrative following five witches seeking to repair what's wrong with the world. I was left wanting to have a meeting with this coven. Highly recommended!"

You can find her on Bluesky and Mastodon. Less often on Instagram. Enjoy!

Tell me more about The Working and what made you write it.

The Working is a labor of love that took over a decade to birth. While it’s an exciting fantastical read, my contemporary novel addresses climate, environmental, and social justice, so it’s as relevant as ever (unfortunately). The Witches in my story need to thwart the entity ripping apart Earth’s Web of Life. They traverse the ethereal and physical realms, seeking the Working to repair the Web and create bright futures.

The Working is solarpunk that lifts hope, community, and chosen family.

The five coveners are of diverse sexualities and backgrounds. I wanted to assure readers get to know each character and their internal demons as well as how they come together to form the main plot. A challenge! The book is multi-POV, and I’m so glad reviewers say I succeeded in making each voice distinct. I love hearing how and why readers gravitate to Betsy, Sail, Mari, Fire, or Tal.

I wrote the novel to answer the question, What can we do about those causing catastrophic harm to our planet and all who live here? Also, I wanted to portray real Witches and our practices—partly because my students through the years have asked me to write a nonfiction Witchcraft book. And I prefer reading fiction.

Sidenote: I switched publishers and am thrilled that Android Press has picked up The Working. As the publisher of solarpunk and diverse books, they are so aligned with The Working and all my writing! New purchase links on my site.

We often hear about the technological side of Solarpunk. Tell me more about the magical side of it!

The magical side of solarpunk honors and lifts ways of knowing that are often pejoratively called “other ways of knowing.” That’s a way my flavor of solarpunk overlaps with diverse futurisms.

Magic is a tech like any other and it behooves us to have more and varied tools to perceive the world and to create change.

Everything is comprised of energy. Witches are adept at sensing and shaping energy, which is how I define magic. I embed magical activism in The Working to offer new skills for effect and resilience.

Really, my book is more fabulist than fantasy. For those who don’t know, fabulism is like magical realism, the genre reserved for those in Latinx diasporas. (I’m white.)

What is a piece of fiction by another author that you think didn’t get enough attention?

So many stories come to mind. I recently read Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk and loved it. The hopeful story and visceral characters stick with me so much. But Andrea’s published by one of the Big 4 and gets more attention than others on my list.

Here’s a wonderful book that folx may not know of: Be the Sea, a solarpunk novel by Clara Ward. Science, chosen family, decentering humans in Nature, queer and neurodiverse characters—all woven in a riveting near-future tale of discovery, both personal and scientific. Wend (the lead) must untangle a plot to silence scientists amidst bioengineered microbes and inexplicable dreams.

There are many more books I recommend in the Great Reads section of my site. These include solarpunk, climate fiction, and diverse futurisms.

Show me an illustration that you love and tell me why!

Since I had a hard time choosing, here’s a collage—meaning, I snuck in four illustrations! Upper left is the cover of Be the Sea illustrated by Matthew Spencer. I love the bright blues and purples of the ocean with neon and silhouetted sea creatures. Upper right is the cover of Bright Green Futures, edited by Susan Kaye Quinn—the anthology I’m delighted we’re both in. Sue used historical botanical prints to compose the cover, choosing one plant for each of our stories to form a bouquet of our work. Brilliant!

At the bottom are two of my doodles—the amateur art I draw for the blog posts on my site. The one on left shows a neon line of Ancestors to Descendants, past to future, through a central stick figure who is the present. On the right is one of my attempts to express solarpunk. An umbrella holds a vivid (healthy) planet Earth—meant to contain all the possible iterations of solarpunk—with sunlike radiating yellow lines behind all.

What do you teach in your workshops? What can attendees expect?

Short answer: how to stay grounded and centered as we change the world!

Another answer: experiencing practices for resilience and agency!

Another: how to decenter ourselves among our Nature kin!

I love creating curricula and, for decades, I’ve offered adult workshops and classes for mainstream and magical audiences—from K-12 teachers and international academics to Witches, writers, and artists.

I customize my offerings for audience. For instance, for writers, the above topics become writing nonhuman Nature and decentering humans in our stories; teaching characters resilience and agency … and grounding stories that lift hope.

All my work is experiential and offers tools and practices. My latest offerings include:

I’m on a mission to get more hopeful stories out in the world, so an important new strand is how to write hope. I just offered a WriteHive workshop (July 2026), “Writing Hopeful Futures”—the recording will be public soon.

I’m also developing “What Writers Can Learn from Witches”—a fun workshop that helps us craft more visceral and flowing stories. After all, I’m a ritualist and story is ritual, ritual is story.