In her new poetry collection, Smother, Rachel Richardson depicts her daughters through their elementary school years, intermittently living amid the smoke of Northern California’s wildfires. In one poem, she studies an air-quality map as the Tamarack Fire approaches the forest where they’re attending summer camp. In another, her daughters hang from the ceiling, learning to be circus performers, while the Caldor Fire surrounds the buildings in the same beloved camp, and a network of parents remains glued to the news.
When Richardson herself was her children’s age, fog used to seep over the hills of Berkeley, covering the trees in moisture. Now, the summers are filled with smoke. The air isn’t the only thing that’s changing: The world moves at the pace of breaking news, technology has transformed our relationships to time and friendship, and friends themselves sometimes pass away. Smother contends with all these forms of grief and documents Richardson’s own struggle to find resilience in light of it. It will be published by W. W. Norton on Feb. 18.
High Country News recently spoke with Richardson about learning to love things that are ever-changing and how writing can be a source of regaining control.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
HCN: Can you tell me a bit about the inception of Smother?
Rachel Richardson: I didn’t think I was writing about fire; I thought that I was writing about my friend Nina’s death and parenting and technology. But then the fires rose up: From 2017 through ’21, there were record-breaking fires across California. And those started wedging their way into the subjects, too.
HCN: What fires do you remember most?
RR: The first one that really affected us deeply was the Camp Fire in November of 2018. Smoke descended on the Bay Area and just stayed there in this really low-lying haze and made the air quality terrible. We hadn’t had COVID yet, but suddenly the schools were all saying, “Stay inside. Don’t go out. Wear masks.” That was the first time that it really felt like a global change, like this is a new place that we live in, and we’re probably not going back.
HCN: One of your poems is about a fishbowl where your daughters raised goldfish, and you compare it to living in a house with windows surrounded by smoke. What inspired that metaphor?
RR: In the Camp Fire, at the end of that two-week period of endless smoke, there was this great New York Times graphic that showed how the smoke moved through the atmosphere — how it moved from California to Michigan to New York, all around the world. Every continent had some of our smoke. I watched that again and again, thinking about how this is not something that you can opt out of or run away from. There are going to be different outcomes depending on luck, privilege, preparedness. But really, we’re all inside of it.
“This is not something that you can opt out of or run away from. Really, we’re all inside it.”
HCN: You write about different information streams: air-quality data, wildfire updates, news articles, text threads with other mothers. How has the internet changed your experience of wildfires?
RR: I think as humans — and maybe it’s heightened for parents — we want to be able to control the situation. We want to be able to ensure our own safety and our kids’ safety. So it’s irresistible to look for information. You want to look at the air quality in every area across your city and the next cities over. What does it look like? How can I plan and pivot to protect us from this? It can make you feel like you’re doing something when really the experience is of having no power and no control and just having to sit and wait and find out what’s going to happen.
HCN: Does writing help with that powerlessness?
RR: Poetry is controlled in a lot of ways. That’s part of what I like about the form: It’s so short and precise. You want the language to be accurate. You want it to communicate the experience, the feeling. I could really craft it and spend a lot of time with it. I mean, this book took me eight years to write, so you can see how much control I exerted.
HCN: What were you hoping to accomplish in writing it?
RR: I think what I wanted to do most in the book was (to) feel like I was not alone.
The day that the sky turned orange in the Bay Area in the fall of 2020, it was shocking to me how physical the experience felt. It is hard to understand until you experience it. Like parenting, you can’t really know what it’s like until you’re in that body and in that experience, and then you can’t unknow what it is. These are not just news stories that flit in and out when the fire is extinguished — this is a sort of larger and longer-term condition, and it affects us in much more complete ways.
HCN: What is that longer-term condition?
RR: The emergency is slow. It’s something that stays in the back of your mind.
I’m writing in the flatlands of Berkeley. I don’t think that my house is going to burn down, (but) I am worried about my friends who live up in the hills. I am worried about other towns that might burn, and I’m worried about the smoke that will come to us from all of these fires. That’s the thing that stays with you: It might kill you, but it’ll kill you slowly over time. I have time to feel like I’m sitting inside it, trapped.
HCN: And yet, the poems are the opposite of trapped. They feel defiant.
RR: The most fun poem to write was the title poem, in which I invent the smoke as a persona, the ideal, impossible mother and all the cultural expectations of motherhood: how you should be able to do everything and do it all well and give your children (your) full time and attention and not find any emotional conflict in that. I had a really fun time thinking of lines for that poem. I cut them all up and reshuffled them a bunch of times. I think that’s where it became clearest to me that those two subjects are deeply intertwined: the conflict I feel in motherhood, and the energy on both sides of it, is similar to trying to live with this major adversary, the danger of this climate and the fire in it.
“That’s the thing that stays with you: It might kill you, but it’ll kill you slowly over time. I have time to feel like I’m sitting inside it, trapped.”
HCN: Were you inspired by other storytellers as you wrote?
RR: My friend Julia — her method of coping is so admirable to me. She’s an environmental lawyer and a firefighter. She sees the problem, and she goes and defends the salmon’s rights and defends the forest. My method is, of course, not that. But I’m trying to take the same stand, and I think most of the women I love, most of my friends, are feeling something similar.
This book isn’t really about feeling like a victim. I would rather feel like I could be contributing to a healthier relationship between humans and our land, coming at it before it becomes the crisis that we’re running from.
HCN: Your publisher’s summary of the book begins with a question: “How should we raise our children in, and for, a world that is burning?” Do you feel like you found an answer?
RR: For me, it was just finding people. It was just in friendships. Specifically, I’m celebrating friendships with other women, other moms, people (who have) been mutually supportive in each other’s lives. That’s where I find my sense of — I guess it’s hope — for my kids, too. You don’t solve this on your own. And I’ve done it more and more consciously so that my kids will have it, too — prioritize their relationships, multigenerational friendships, extended family relationships, because I think we need each other.
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This article appeared in the February 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Mothering in the age of wildfire.”
