Red Flag Warning

Two survivors of California fires compile a guide for living physically, mentally, and emotionally amid ecological destruction. When warm temperatures, low humidity, and strong winds combine they produce an increased risk of fire danger called a "red flag warning"—a common event in Northern California. Through essays and interviews, Red Flag Warning sheds light on how wildfire impacts our communities and offers wisdom on living with fire from Indigenous Californians, community organizers, mental health care workers, environmentalists, fire analysts, sustainable loggers, parents, and more. The collection explores the ways these fires take root and impact rural and urban Northern California, it examines our relationships to place and community and to understand the importance of mutual aid, organizing, community care, land stewardship, and resilience. Red Flag Warning covers the stories not frequently found in the often disaster-porn obsessed media and exposes what is lost in the news written by parachute journalists. Readers are invited to examine what fire can and does mean to them, what it means for us to reimagine the world, to prepare for the worst, and to examine flames through different lenses. Contributors include Manjula Martin, Hiya Swanhuyser, Zeke Lunder, Lasara Firefox Allen, Margo Robbins, Kailea Loften, Redbird Willie, and more.

Dani Burlison (she/her) is the creator/editor of All of Me: Stories of Love, Anger and the Female Body, and the author of Some Places Worth Leaving. She has been a staff writer at a Bay Area alt-weekly and a regular contributor at Yes! Magazine, Chicago Tribune, KQED, and elsewhere. Her journalism, fiction, and personal essays can also be found at Ms. Magazine, Earth Island Journal, The Rumpus, Portland Review, Hip Mama Magazine, and in various anthologies and zines. Dani teaches and lives on unceded Southern Pomo land in California. Margaret Elysia Garcia (she/her) is the author of the poetry collection the daughterland, of the short story collection Graft, and the poetry chapbook Burn Scars. She writes a history column for High Country Life, a regional California magazine covering the eastern Sierra Nevada. Manjula Martin is author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History. She is coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, which won the 2020 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Martin edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, and she was managing editor of the National Magazine Award–winning literary journal Zoetrope: All-Story. She lives in western Sonoma County, California.

INTRODUCTION by Manjula Martin 1. Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid in Chico, CA by Hiya Swanhuyser 2. UndocuFund: Grassroots Solidarity Networks of Mutual Aid for Liberated Futures by Beatrice Comacho 3. The Community of Evacuation by Margaret Elysia Garcia 4. What Wildfires Do to Our Minds by Dani Burlison 5. Heaven Over Fire: Finding Community in a Burn Scar by Jane Braxton Little 6. Formerly Incarcerated Firefighters as Community Servants: Q&A with Brandon Smith of Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program 7. Listening to the Loved One: Wildfire, Community & Ambiguous Loss by Amy Elizabeth Robinson 8. Parenting in Fire Country: Q&A with Kailea Frederick of NDN Collective 9. Funding and Finances During and After Disaster by Sue Weber 10. Ground Truth: The Limits of Scale by Zeke Lunder 11. Triptych in Smoke by Lasara Firefox Allen 12. Bringing Fire Back to the Land: Q&A with Margo Robbins, Yurok Tribe 13. The Little Saw Mill That Could by Margaret Elysia Garcia 14. We Circle Up For Fire: A Community Burn by Redbird Willie