A Q&A with Emma Pattee, Indies Introduce Author of the April Indie Next List Top Pick “Tilt”

Emma Pattee is the author of Tilt, a Winter/Spring 2025 Indies Introduce adult selection, and the #1 April Indie Next List pick. 

Desirae Wilkerson of Paper Boat Booksellers in Seattle, Washington, served on the bookseller panel that selected Pattee’s book for Indies Introduce.

Wilkerson said of the title, “A slow walk through a fast-paced day leads to heartbreak, hope, determination and a sacrifice that readers will only find if they read to the end. Tilt is phenomenal and one of this year’s best page-turners!”

Desirae Wilkerson: Hi. My name is Desirae Wilkerson, and I'm the co-owner of Paper Boat Booksellers in Seattle, Washington. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Emma Pattee, the author of Tilt, which will be out on March 25.

Emma Pattee is a climate journalist and fiction writer. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and elsewhere. She lives in Oregon, and Tilt is her first book. It goes on sale March 25. Thank you for joining me today, Emma.

Emma Pattee: Thank you, Desirae. I'm so happy to be here.

DW: I could just spend this whole interview gushing about this book, but I have a lot of questions too. I loved this book.

A little bit about the book without giving too much away: it's about a woman who is nine months pregnant. She is shopping in IKEA for a crib, and a big earthquake hits. (I'm in Seattle, so we’re always waiting for The Big One, if it ever happens.) And it's about her journey to save herself — in more ways than one.

I just couldn't put this book down. It was a thrill to read from the first page to the last page, and there are so many real and relatable people and scenes in this book. What inspired you to write this story?

EP: I live in Portland — so very close to Seattle — and like you said, everyone in the Pacific Northwest lives under the shadow of something coming that you can never really prepare for. And as a climate journalist, I was really interested in that. I was interested in the ways that we can't get prepared. And at the time that I started writing this book, I was also pregnant. Pregnancy and having a kid is another thing that everyone tells you to get prepared for, because of how scary and unknowable it is, but the reality is that it's completely unknowable. You cannot imagine it until you have lived through it. I think that, thematically, is what brought me to the book. What gave me the idea for the book was definitely that I was terrified of the earthquake. I was pregnant, and I could not stop thinking about the earthquake.

DW: I love that connection between those two things, because it is so true that you can never prepare for having children or an earthquake. That's amazing.

Speaking of Annie, I found her feelings of confusion and loneliness while being pregnant really relatable to myself when I was pregnant for the first time. You just dove into a little bit about how the character Annie was relatable to you, being pregnant and the fear of an earthquake, but are there any other ways that Annie relates to you?

EP: I really find her relatable. We have made very different life choices. Annie is a very isolated character, and she's lonely and angry, but she doesn't look to others. A lot of the book is about that, right? It's about that sort of shift. In that way, I don't know that I relate to her.

But I once heard the writer Sheila Heti say that you have to become the person you have to become in order to write the book you're trying to write. I started writing this book six years ago, when I was pregnant and still in my twenties. A lot of the lessons that Annie learns in the book are the lessons that I have learned in the past six years, certainly since becoming a mom, which is really that you cannot go it alone. You cannot go it alone. And why would you want to? So in that way, I no longer relate to her. But I believe that's because I learned the lessons I needed to learn in order to write the book I needed to write.

DW: Wonderful. Another big thing about this book is the pace: 24 hours. It was such a good fit to just have this story in 24 hours. Did you start writing the book with the 24-hour timeline in mind, or did you start in a different way?

EP: No, I always knew it would be immediately after the earthquake. And because I knew that I wanted to write a stream of consciousness novel, I could not jump forward in time. That meant that to write it longer than a couple days, the book would be too long. There's just a simple sort of page restriction to that.

But my very first impulse with this book was a woman talking to her child as she walks. She's talking at the pace that she's walking, because she's trying to keep walking — because she can't stop walking. So it was always about this tempo of walking and the idea of a long walk. Because of that, it was naturally constrained to the moments you would be walking immediately after disaster.

DW: Yeah, I can't picture it any other way. That’s what made it so easy to read, but also a page-turner the whole way.

EP: I think I thought, as a little baby novelist, it would make it easier to write. It actually made it so incredibly challenging, because everything is tracked to the actual distance it would take to walk that within Portland.

At all times while I was writing, I had a Google map up. I was timing it. I have a timeline of exactly the minute the earthquake happens and how long everything happens after.

When somebody would say something like, “Well, what if you throw in a car wash?” I’d be like, “There is no car wash at that exact location in Portland, and there is no way for her to get to that location in the time you want it.” It became this Tetris that I was not anticipating.

DW: Oh, wow! When I was reading, it seemed like, “Gosh, she really knows where she's going." Like, I noticed it right away, all the details. So that was actually my next question, what was the research that you had to do to nail down these details of the locations? So, you actually went and walked those distances?

EP: Yeah. Everything in the book is, for the most part, exactly as it is. You can go walk the exact journey she walked in essentially the time it takes her. Obviously, those of us who are not pregnant will walk a little bit faster.

It is an actual journey through Portland. The details she sees are the details that, at least at the time of writing, were there. There are some times where I shifted things specifically around people's homes. Or if I brought in a character, I would make sure that it was in a place where it definitely did not exist, so that nobody would look and say, “Oh, that house got destroyed.”

There's a lot we know, in Portland and Seattle, about how particular buildings are going to fare, and how particular roads and neighborhoods are going to fare. I brought all of that research to bear.

I had a grad student who's becoming a geologist helping me, and we went road by road and building by building. It was important to me as a journalist for it to be fact-based, but also, as someone who lives in Portland, there was no way I was going to scare people unnecessarily. And there was no way that I was going to soothe people unnecessarily. I wasn't going to under-write this disaster, but I certainly wasn't going to over-write it. I took that ethical responsibility really seriously. I didn't want to just traumatize people for no purpose.

The book is as close to a nonfiction depiction of an earthquake that hasn't happened yet as it could possibly be.

DW: Wow, I love that. I loved that it was very real, that this could actually happen. And it was scary, of course. We're hoarding water in our basement, just in case, but we probably won't even be at home. But it was very prominent in the book, that realness of everything.

The ending really brought the whole story full circle for Annie and her journey. And I felt like, as I was getting towards the end, it could have ended in any way. Did you ever have another ending in mind?

EP: I did have another ending in mind. For many years, the ending was different.

I learned that when you're writing challenging books, sometimes we write the scenes that we can bear at the time that we can bear them. When I started writing this book, I was pregnant. Then I had a baby, then I had a toddler, and then I was pregnant again. It is incredibly hard to write terrifying scenes when you have small children. There were a lot of times where I had to have a placeholder scene before I could bear to write the scene that had to be there.

There was a lot of discussion with my editor about how the book was going to end. And, certainly, hearing from early readers, there is a lot of debate about if the ending is the right ending or not. I love that. If anyone reads this book and hates the ending, I love that. Hold on to your hate. I'm really passionate about hating endings or loving endings, or debating endings. For me, I had to really get clear on the truest message of the book. It stopped being about what would feel satisfying to a reader, or what would feel emotionally soothing to me as this terrified parent, and really became, “Emma, what are you trying to say?” And I said it.

DW: I loved the ending. I mean, I cried my eyes at the end, because there was sadness, but there was also this hope .

EP: I love that. I think it really speaks to what we were talking about in the beginning — being lonely, being isolated, going through something alone, and that shift. Something that I tried to shove into the book (and they forced me to take it out) is that there's research that shows when rats become mothers, they become five times as successful at catching prey. They become significantly more vicious and efficient at catching food. I really wanted to show that — this idea that when you become a mother, that what is changing in your brain and in your whole physiology makes you a warrior. We don't have language for that in our culture. That's not how we talk about mothering and nurturing in our culture, but that's the biological reality, and I really wanted to show that.

DW: That's amazing. And as mothers, we would go to any lengths and do anything possible for our children. I definitely felt that in the book.

Thank you so much, Emma, this was wonderful. I love hearing all of this. Thank you for answering my questions and talking deeper about the book. I can't wait to sell it. And those details, like how you got those locations, are just something that I can really talk to our customers about.

EP: Thank you so much, Desirae, I'm excited to come see you in your new location!

DW: Yes, definitely come visit!

Find out more about the author at emmapattee.com

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