05/31/2026
âThere is a lot of climate grief in The Fall-Down Effect... And yet, at the same time, each of the characters also tend to and preserve their hope for and connection to the natural world.â
-Liz Johnston
To read the full interview please visit our blog at Riverstreetwriting.com.
http://www.riverstreetwriting.com/blog/2026/3/27/2sv8ryy5346o2fa1xdlg52gussf1an
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Exploring protest, climate change, and fractured family relationships, Liz Johnstonâs eagerly anticipated debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect, asks what we really owe people in our lives when we are fighting for a greater cause.
As a child in the late 1980s, Fern is the wild heart of her tree-hugging familyâquick-tempered and yearning to spend every minute in the woods of the small Pacific Northwest logging town where they live. She is also most like her environmental activist mother, Lynn, who chafes against the demands of motherhood and yearns for the protests of her youth. As tensions escalate, Lynn leaves her partner, Tom, and their three children, telling herself she will devote her life more fully to fighting for the earth.
At nineteen, Fern commits her own radical act of protest, which authorities label ecoterrorism. When Fern goes underground, her parents and siblingsâresponsible grad student Sylvia and budding artist Riverâstruggle to make sense of her actions while also trying to cover up her absence. Fernâs secret proves impossible to keep, and when she becomes a wanted woman, the rest of the family trades blame. Years later, when Lynn takes shelter from a forest fire in the home she left so many years before, the family is forced to confront their regrets during a fraught, baggage-filled reunion.
LIZ JOHNSTON grew up in Revelstoke, B.C., and now lives and writes in Toronto. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Poets & Writers, The Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Grain, The Antigonish Review, and The Cardiff Review. Johnston is an editor of Brick, A Literary Journal. The Fall-Down Effect is her debut novel.
đČ: .d.s.johnston
