I'm just wondering, as someone who's done this job and been out there and knows how hard it is, what do you think the impact of that kind of law intervention could have on crews and on us actually having the ability to suppress some of these fires?

There has been a wildland firefighter shortage for many, many years.

And actually, with the last administration, there had been a lot of headway made, a lot of recruiting that was done, raising pay, et cetera.

And then with all the firings that happened, the levels of wildland firefighters dropped way down.

This was a contract crew, which are crews that are essentially contract themselves out to the federal government, which are really vital right now because we don't have enough federal firefighters.

And essentially something like this will scare people and make them not want to do this job.

Also, something that happened was that the team that was managing that fire designated that crew as staging rather than actively fighting fire specifically on that day so that they could say this crew wasn't actively fighting fire and get around a law that says you cannot detain people who are actively handling an emergency.

I mean, what was that transition like for you? And did you always have this thought about writing? Did you always think that was going to be where you might eventually end up?

That's the life wildland firefighting saved me from." So could you tell us about that? How did you end up going from there, what I just read, to fighting fires?

Like I said, I, uh, I ran away for the first time when I was 12 years old.

I was in sixth grade.

My mom gave me $13 and said, "Good luck." And that was the environment I was raised in.

It's not that my mom didn't care about me, it's, it's that she was raised in a similar environment where it's kind of just fend for yourself.

I'm, you know, my capa- I'm at my limit and my capacity.

And I spent a lot of my adolescence homeless.

I don't know if that's the right word.

And I'm just curious if you would share any reflections on, like, the role of privilege and resourcing and access when you think about whether you're on social media or not at any point in time.

Yeah.

I have thought about this so much, and there are a few different kind of threads that I have in my mind.

One of them is social media is a space where it can feel like you're doing an action.

It can feel like you're doing something about something.

So when you're somebody like me who does not have a safety net, I don't have a family safety net.

I don't have savings.

Like, do you see yourself staying in the landscape of traditional publishing and academia? Do you want to go elsewhere? Like, how are you sort of grappling with the present and looking ahead?

Can you tell me more about your childhood and young personhood? 'Cause you write about it with sort of brave frankness, I have to say, in the book, about why you were struggling so much before your thoughts, through a friend, turned to firefighting.

Before I found firefighting and even for a couple years after, I struggled with addiction to all sorts of substances, including heroin, and I struggled in general to just be a human in the world.

I didn't know for a long time that I was autistic or that I had ADHD, which I learned a few years ago, and I spent a lot of time trying to stay alive really and/or being very self-destructive.

And so, during my childhood, my mother struggled a lot.

I lived with my grandparents for a couple years.

She kind of just dropped me off and left me there, and my dad was pretty much totally absent.

So, I didn't have any stability other than maybe my grandparents, and my grandmother had died when I was 19, and that was devastating to me.

But then doesn't it just get more and more dangerous that way?