Note from Janna: Danica Novgorodoff and Meera Subramanian‘s publicist Tracey Daniels reached out to me about their new book, A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis (First Second). The title caught my attention, because I think many of us are feeling a lot of anxiety about the state of the world, and have questions about what any of us can actually do.
Danica is a graphic novelist and illustrator whose work combines intricate watercolor with deeply personal storytelling. Meera is a longtime science journalist who usually writes long-form nonfiction for adults. A Better World Is Possible is their first collaboration: a 200-page nonfiction graphic novel about four youth climate activists who helped organize the 2019 climate strike in New York City.
During this conversation, we got into the weeds of the publishing process. Danica initially sold the book to First Second on her own, before realizing she needed a collaborator.
How do you bring someone new onto a project you’ve already contracted with a publisher? What happens to the timeline? What does it actually look like to divide the labor between a writer and an illustrator when neither fits neatly into those roles?
We also talked about something I think a lot of creators are grappling with right now: how to keep making work about hard things without losing hope.
Click below to view our full conversation on YouTube, or read the (edited) transcript below.
Tell me about the book — what is it, and what’s it about?
Danica: The subtitle is Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis, which tells you a lot. It features four youth climate activists who are real people. It’s a nonfiction book that tells their stories of how they got involved in climate action and how they came together to help organize the 2019 climate strike in New York City — which was the biggest climate protest in history.
These four young people are incredibly inspiring. We tell their stories, and woven in between those personal narratives are pieces of background: what climate change is, how it works, what the political influences are, what climate justice means, what climate grief is. All the different factors that go into having a real, grounded understanding of what we’re facing.
How did you two start working together, and what was the division of labor?
Meera: It was kind of happenstance. We knew each other from living in Brooklyn at the same time — we ran in the same circles. We were at a mutual friend’s book event, and Danica was already working on the book and struggling a little bit.
Danica: Yes. I had sold the book concept to First Second and was trying to write it myself, but I was really struggling with the research side of it — and also with my own anxiety and climate grief as I learned more about the subject. I was having a hard time putting the book together narratively. I was putting out feelers in all directions, calling people I knew who were involved in climate work or in publishing, asking how do I tackle this, how do I structure this book?
A mutual friend put Meera and me in touch, but I think the first time I reached out she didn’t respond.
Meera: I totally ignored the email. This is where in-person is so much more valuable than email.
Danica: So we ran into each other at a friend’s book release event in Brooklyn. Meera said, hey, are you still working on that graphic novel?
And I said, I’m trying to, but I could really use a collaborator. At that point Meera had just finished her previous book project and had a little more space. So we started working on it together.
Meera: I was also teaching that year, and I was getting excited about the idea of reaching new and younger audiences — and doing something completely different, because I’m usually writing long-form science journalism.
It felt enticing. I thought it would take us about a year. I don’t know what I was thinking.
Danica: It always feels like it should take a fraction of the time it actually does.
Danica, you had already sold the book to First Second on your own before bringing Meera on. How did you navigate that — practically and contractually?
Danica: It was a little tricky, because normally when you work on a book, you know what you’re doing in advance. I thought I did.
I sold on a proposal — I had illustration samples, I had an outline, I knew I wanted to feature youth climate activists. But I was coming from a fiction background, and I don’t have a strong background in journalism or science research.
When I really started trying to build the book from that outline, I realized something was missing. I wanted it to have that quality of a great science writer like Elizabeth Kolbert — where you’re pulled in by compelling human stories alongside the science — but I couldn’t figure out how to do it.
In 2019, I went to the climate strike in New York, and I started talking to Meera about it. She had the great idea to feature the youth activists involved in that strike, and to have me as a character in the opening, someone going to the strike and beginning to learn.
Meera found the four people we ultimately featured and took the lead on the interviews, given her journalism background. It was exactly what the book needed.
Then I had to go to my agent and to First Second and say, hey, I need to bring Meera on as a co-author. And it worked out.
Meera: Journalism is usually solitary. You have an editor, which can be a great relationship — but most of the writing process is just you by yourself, muddling through.
Working with Danica was genuinely great. Even though I took the lead on drafting what was essentially a screenplay, Danica did chunks of it, and we were back and forth constantly. When I got too far into insider language or too deep in the weeds, Danica was great at saying, I don’t follow what you’re saying here.
It worked narratively, too, because we were going through Danica’s own learning process in real time — and I was trying to take complex science and compress it into distilled, clear, visually expressible ideas. That compression was a whole other magic that Danica brought.
Danica: That’s what I’m good at — taking complex information and making it visual and simplified. But I needed the information first. Meera wrote a beautiful script, and then I could go in and say, okay, we need to make this a little simpler, a little more understandable for a 14-year-old.
Our skill sets fit together really well.
Walk me through the full timeline. When did the idea start, and how long did each phase take?
Danica: Let me see if I can remember. I started thinking about it in early 2017. I was at an artist residency in a forest in Kentucky, in a cabin by myself for a couple months in the winter, feeling very connected to landscape and nature.
I had written a graphic essay on ecotourism and was trying to figure out what to do with that. The project started out as something completely different: I wanted to curate a book of graphic essays by different artists and writers on ecology and climate and people’s relationship to nature.
But publishers wanted something more cohesive — one style, one voice — so I shifted to thinking about writing the whole book myself. I worked on the proposal for a couple of years, and I think I sold it to First Second in 2018 or 2019.
Meera: It must have been 2019, because you brought me on in 2020.
Danica: Right — it was right before COVID that we met at that book event. And then Meera and I worked together for several years.
Meera: I’d say it probably took close to two years to really button up the manuscript. Danica didn’t want to pick up her watercolor brush until everything was in place, and we also had to go through the legal review because we were writing a nonfiction book about real people.
That hung things up for a while — we were waiting on legal for almost a year.
Danica: And then it took me a couple more years to draw it. It’s a 200-page nonfiction graphic novel with a large cast of characters.
The legal team alone felt like it took forever — I couldn’t start drawing until I had their approval.
Danica, can you describe the art process? Did you paint it by hand?
Danica: I used a combination of digital and watercolor. I drew the line work digitally, then painted the watercolor by hand, layered it in, and then added some additional digital color on top.
The digital line work saved me a lot of time — on all my previous projects I’d done pencil sketches and then inking, and this cut out that step. But you just can’t get the same quality of color digitally as you can with real watercolor, and I knew I wanted that.
I’ve made almost all my projects that way, with watercolor on paper. Then for things like skin tones, I did those digitally, because with so many characters they needed to be consistent throughout — it was easier to have a palette and match the right tones to each person.
Tell me about the youth activists you featured. How did you find them?
Meera: I just put on my journalist hat. The climate strike event was recorded on YouTube — not a great recording, but I was able to watch the whole thing and take notes on every single speaker.
Then I went through all the news and media coverage of the event, which was extensive — this was when Greta Thunberg had sailed across the Atlantic and there was tremendous energy around climate. I was looking through coverage to see who was being quoted, including people who were part of organizing the event but weren’t necessarily on stage.
We reached out to maybe six to ten people, had a handful of conversations, talked to a filmmaker who was covering the strikes. We were looking for interesting stories, geographic diversity, and that fundamental question: what makes a 15-year-old get up on a stage and speak to 250,000 people? What led them there?
We wanted diversity in what their entry points into activism had been.
Can you introduce the four young people you ended up featuring?
Meera: Sure. Gia Bastida is from Mexico — she was living in New York during the strike and she is just a powerhouse. She was recently named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Rebecca Sabnam is from Bangladesh and experienced a flood there when she was just five years old, so she had a very direct, lived experience of what it looks like to be in a country that’s being hit hard by climate change you had no part in causing.
Shiv Soin is the son of Indian immigrants who grew up in New Jersey. He was interested in politics, then started connecting the dots — he read the IPCC report, understood we had until 2030 to address the worst of this, and began figuring out how to bring policy and climate action together.
And Jamie Margolin is a Colombian American from Seattle who loves the Pacific Northwest, is very rooted in the land, was inspired by things like the Women’s March, and has since become a filmmaker working on animated projects. Three of the four have started nonprofits and continue to be remarkable activists.
Danica: And we’re actually going to meet three of them in person for the first time at our Brooklyn launch event.
What is the pub date, and what events do you have coming up?
Danica: The book came out March 3rd. Our big event together is the Brooklyn launch at Greenlight Bookstore on April 14th — which is also the first time Meera and I will be in the same room since we first connected at that book event years ago. I’ve been doing some events locally in Kentucky, but I’m not traveling much. Meera is handling more of the East Coast.
Meera: I’ve done events in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and then we’ll be in New York together. I’ll also be doing events in Chicago through Anderson Bookstore — they’re getting me into schools, which is brand new for me. I’m really excited to see what it’s like to talk to 170 seventh graders. I also have events planned in New Orleans, and some other irons in the fire.
Danica: I’m doing an event at my daughter’s elementary school too. Even though this book is geared toward high school and up, one of the things I love about it is that it really spans across all age levels. My mom is in her seventies, read it, and said she learned so much — and she’s already a committed climate activist. I’m looking forward to taking it to all kinds of groups.
You can find all the events we’re doing at abetterworldthebook.org.
So many creators right now are feeling overwhelmed. How are you two personally managing that — and did making this book change the way you think about it?
Danica: I am definitely feeling overwhelmed — it’s a crazy time. The climate crisis is connected to and amplified by so many of the other things we’re all dealing with: war, migration, inequality. Making this book helped me feel like I was actually doing something. And I think that taking action and building community is the most grounding thing I’ve found.
One of the young activists in the book, Shiv, said something simple that’s stuck with me: you just need to show up. Even when the activism isn’t exciting, you keep showing up, and you find people you enjoy doing it with.
There’s also an idea I’ve been thinking about — pleasure activism — which is about finding the intersection of what you care about and what you’re already good at or love doing. For Rebecca, it was making trash puppets and doing creative protest.
For Jamie, it’s filmmaking and animation.
For me, it was making a graphic novel. If you can find your niche and apply it to something that matters, that’s incredibly sustainable.
And rest matters too. Burnout is real, especially when you’re involved in work that can feel overwhelming. I went for a hike yesterday. Being with friends, being in nature, doing whatever brings you joy — that’s not optional.
Meera: Community is really the key for me too. I was just at the Mass Energize conference yesterday — 300 climate leaders from across Massachusetts. And just learning about all the individual towns that have sustainability offices, all the people doing this work at every level, from “call your representative right now, here’s the bill number” all the way down to a cartoonist from the New Yorker who’s making single-panel climate cartoons.
There is no wrong way to be involved. You find what you care about, and there’s a place for it.
The title of the book isn’t just a slogan. We really are working toward building the world we want to inhabit. It’s easy to forget that when there’s so much to fight against.
But the vision-making — holding onto what we’re working toward — that’s essential. The book ends with a free downloadable poster that lays out all the ways people can step into this work and find community along the way.
And despair, as Danica said — despair doesn’t feel good and it doesn’t solve anything. Doing something, with people you enjoy, is where it’s at.
Where can people find you and the book?
Danica: Our website is abetterworldthebook.org — events, links to order, everything is there. You can also find process videos and updates on our social media.
Learn more and find events: abetterworldthebook.org
Follow Danica Novgorodoff: danicanongorodoff.com
Follow Meera Subramanian: meerasubramanian.com
Order A Better World Is Possible from Bookshop.org
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Over to You
Are you working on anything right now that feels meaningful to you beyond just the project itself? Leave a comment below, we’d love to hear about it!
