Catching up with Emma Burnett (Again!)

Emma Burnett is a researcher and writer. She has had stories in Nature: Futures, Mythaxis, Northern Gravy, Apex, Radon, Utopia, MetaStellar, Milk Candy Review, Roi Fainéant, JAKE, and more. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky @slashnburnett or emmaburnett.uk.

Emma is the author of “Instructions for Rewilding the Wasteland” from Issue 10.

Q: We’ve had the pleasure of interviewing you three lovely years in a row. What’s new since we last caught up in 2024?

Oh, shitting hell. This caught me out. I was, like, isn’t it still 2024? It’s not. I know this now. I’ll probably forget soon, though.

Let’s see, what’s happened . . . I’ve had a bunch more stories published, including “Instructions for Rewilding the Wasteland” (Radon), and one of my favorites being “Bone-Eater Earth” (Uncharted Magazine).

I had my first novella accepted for publication! It’s slated to come out in June 2026 with Atthis Arts, and I am absolutely thrilled. And I’ve been doing some quite cool research on regenerative agriculture in arable systems in the UK (if you’re actually interested, you can find out more about that here).

Q: How do you find that you approach the world now that you are a little older and wiser?

I can’t say I’ve noticed a correlation between these things. I’m deffo older, no matter how much I disagree with this. But wiser? I dunno. Not much. I’m a disaster zone, most of the time.

Actually, no wait. Excuse me as I go on a mini-bender here, because what I have noticed is that the older people get the lazier they seem to be when it comes to approaching the world wiser. Like, we blame kids, teens especially, all the time for being lazy. But I know so many adults, especially later-stage adults, with the privilege of time, money, security, who do nothing when it comes to things like making the world a better place. They’re so sanguine, all ‘oh this has all happened before, it’ll work its way through the system,’ but they’re not out there lending their voices and their bodies to ensure that the world is safe, demanding that people in power do better. They have wisdom, maybe, or at least knowledge, but they have no action. And, like, fuck that. You gotta be loud, and bold, and active. You gotta keep doing the things.

Q: In our last interview, you shared that you often write titles before there’s a story attached. “Instructions for Rewilding the Wasteland” is an incredible title—is it one you came up with first?

Yes! I did. I totally did. And then I had to decide how many instructions I actually wanted to write, and then I had to come up with the story. Epistolary stories like this are tricky, because you’re doing two things at the same time, there’s the actual instructions or letters or whatever you’re doing with structure, and then there’s the personal story. Something has to move, change, evolve. The title definitely did a lot of heavy lifting for me here, in that I knew where we had to end up.

Also, if you’re not a title-writer, but you’d like to steal some of mine, pleeeeease do this. I have a title page with free-to-use content. The only catch is that if you have a story accepted for publication, you have to tell me (both so that I can cross that title off the list, and so I can go and read it!).

Q: Your Issue 10 story is quite relevant to our present moment. Do you consider it speculative fiction, allegory, or something else entirely?

This isn’t the first time I’ve played with some sort of photosynthesizing people. I did it in “At a higher dose, love” (Daikaijuzine), but I don’t think it was as well-crafted. Instructions works better.

TBH, I think it’s more about the removal of choice that captures me. There’s so much of that in the world right now, isn’t there? People doing things to us, not with us—shoving all forms of tech down our throats, bombing people and places that are apparently inconvenient, imprisoning people who disagree with destruction/hatred/you. A lot of my stories are screams into the void, and this one isn’t really any different, in that way.

Also, aren’t all spec fic stories allegory at some level?

Q: How did you decide to narrate your story in the second person? What role do you think the author’s choice of perspective shapes the readers experience?

I fucking love the second person. I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m so neurospicy that it’s just a relief for someone to straight up tell me what I’m feeling? What me and the character together feel? Whatever it is, it captures me hard.

I find writing in the second really bizarre, too, and I get a bit of a high off it. There’s so much power there, being able to control not just me but you. I don’t know how N.K. Jemisin did it for the Broken Earth series—I think I might have gone bonkers.

I’ve heard that the second person can put some readers off, and there are definitely markets that rarely publish it.* It’s a risk to use, and you definitely need to know what you’re trying to elicit, know why there’s so much pressure. If you’re talking about ‘you,’ then who is the storyteller? Who am I? Why are we getting this up close and personal?

*Clearly, this isn’t an issue for Radon, who have published some of my all-time weirdest POVs. “Softer Shades of Zap and Blue” was a mindfuck, with a grand total of zero personal pronouns in it.

Q: Your piece feels like the direct inverse of the common “nature as salvation” narrative trope. Nature almost becomes a sentence we have to serve. How do you wrestle with hope, despair, or ambiguity when writing about environmental futures?

I had this thought the other day: Is everyone who pays for some form of carbon credit just buying modern age indulgences? A form of forgiveness, so we can buy our way into heaven.

Nature as salvation is an odd trope to me. There’s no purity to nature, no salvation, unless you have a belief system built around it. Nature is the world. It just is, it exists. We exist in it. To set it aside makes it something other. You can argue about its value, but in assigning value you can also assign affordability (this is only valuable for such-and-such a reason, only worth so many units of currency, only available to those who can pay to play or to pay to destroy). Setting nature apart, especially those people who are more embedded in nature, also has an embedded racism and colonialism to it – look at these pure, sweet, cute, dumb, childlike, uncivilized people, living in the forests, so close to nature. This seems to lead to either:

• They need our help, let’s fix them, make them see the way (then we can sell more solutions to imposed problems), or;

• They are untouchable, perfect, we’ll ruin them by allowing them to come into contact with us.

Both of these assume a dominance of one group and exclude the voices of the ‘other.’ It’s weird, and generally not a good look.

Circling back to the question, I’m not an optimist. I’m not really a pessimist, either, but I don’t go around thinking about the best outcome. As a species, we’ve accidentally fucked things up big-time. But instead of recognizing our failures, we’ve just kept digging deeper. We tell little kids, when they make a mistake, to apologize, to roll things back, to change their ways. But adults, especially those with power? They nope right out of that.

So, yeah, I think we are going to pay nature-based penalties. I think many of us already are. Right now, it’s disproportionately hitting those who shouldn’t have had to pay, who have done almost nothing wrong. In this story, we don’t know what the MC’s fault is, why they’re paying a price. We know it feels unfair, though, that they’re holding a lot of pain and fear. If we don’t want that to be us, all of us, then we need the opposite of trickle-down.

We need things need to trickle up, to hit those with power, with leverage, hard enough for change to happen. Otherwise, there’s a nature-based future for us all which isn’t pretty.

Q: Has your academic/research existence changed recently due to world events?

Sadly, yes. I don’t want to talk specifics here, but in general it seems like world events are knocking everyone for six. All the space for grounded innovation, for pluralist ideas, for amazing humanity, it all feels like it’s receding, like an octopus’s arms when it’s frightened, or a turtle retracting into its shell. Everyone is scared, and so the worst of them is shining through. It’s really sad to see.

Q: Why has the UK government closed sustainable farming schemes you’re a part of over the last year?

I really wish I knew. They’ll say something about not printing money, but that can’t be right, because they make money appear when they want to (ref: 2008 banking crisis). So, I guess the government doesn’t think it’s worth investing in farming, in the long-term. This is obviously a mistake, because food and farming are always about long-term thinking. If you want to see change happen, you need to support people over decades, not by promising, then yanking, environmental schemes meant to improve agriculture and production. And if you want to eat, I’d recommend supporting farmers.

Looking at the way many people in government are taking decisions, though, I don’t think that’s what they want at all. I think they want to sell land for houses, keep some bits set aside for pretty trees and parks, and outsource food production to other places. This seems hella dumb to me. There’s no resilience embedded in that model at all.

Q: Many of your recent published stories feature plastic-eating fungi, bone-eaters, composting soil during the apocalypse, and other dystopian-organic topics. Do you find it a boon to your creativity that you can tap into your work to fuel your story writing?

OMG they do, though, right? It’s a little worrying how much I think the planet is going to eat us. At least it’s not stories about us eating each other . . .

There’s a satisfaction, I think, in giving the planet voice. Not literal voice, but more, I dunno, the ability to bitch-slap us. No one wants to live in a dystopia or in a painful reality, but at the very least it’s healthy for people to experience it through fiction. Maybe I also find the words a little easier to find, because, as you say, I work in the sector. I know about food and farming and general alive planet things.

Also, also, because so many things seem dystopic right now, I think I’m actually tapping into a need for the earth to be ok, even after we’re gone. I’m sitting with my own terror most of the time, especially for my kid, for everyone and everything vulnerable. But these stories, there’s always some implied ‘after,’ which I think I need in order to get through the day.

Q: In your opinion, what is the scariest monster humans must deal with?

I know the answer is probably ‘humans,’ but really they’re all just people. It could be plastic, or techbros, or all the machine learning bullshit.

But actually, I think it’s capitalism. Capitalism in the way it’s practiced now is an ideology, almost a religion. It’s predatory, and people have normalized it to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine a world without it. It’s been on crusade, acquiring money and allegiance, expanding into the furthest corners of the earth to keep getting more, more. But it’s hitting barriers—social, physical, financial—and it doesn’t like that. People who believe in capitalism as an end goal, a moral value, they don’t like that. I think if we reclassed capitalism as a religion, rather than legitimizing it via economic theory, we would quickly box it off, remove it from the halls of power, impose limits.*

*I’m not saying I have an issue with religion in principle, btw. But there are plenty of examples where belief systems lead to negative impacts on other people, and that’s not lovely.

Q: Are you still having the most fun in your playground of 100-1,000 words?

The most fun, yes, absolutely. Super short stories give me space to play, to explore ideas (sometimes on repeat), to do a quick void scream. They also let me play with voice, POV, language. I’m working on one right now that is all about an imaginary cooch, and I’m super into it, but also I don’t think I have it in me to write more than 1,000 words on this vulvic situation.