After writing her first book Bad Endings, Vancouver author Carleigh Baker wanted her next project to turn away from the autofictional and dig deeper into the anxieties we all seem to share about the state of the world.

In her new story collection Last Woman, Baker approaches climate fiction and misguided characters with honesty and humour.

Last Woman is a collection of 13 short stories that explore the "hellscape" world of the contemporary moment through anxious and sometimes otherworldly characters. A group of billionaire aliens observe planet Earth, a snobbish professor looks down upon genre fiction, homes are lost to wildfires and floods. In these ever-present and absurd stories is a greater theme of climate change and our fear of what is to come.

Baker is a writer and teacher of Cree-Métis and Icelandic heritage. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings won the City of Vancouver Book Award and was a finalist for the Emerging Indigenous Voices Award. She previously taught creative writing at Simon Fraser University.

Ali Hassan spoke with Baker on The Next Chapter about her inspiration for these new short stories.

When I finished Bad Endings, I was happy with the choices that I made with that book, obviously. But at that point, I was very interested and eager to talk about myself, I guess to tell my own stories. Some elements of autofiction are quite challenging, one being that obviously you're on display and also the characters in your stories are real life or perceived as real life characters from your family and friend group.

When I finished with that seven years ago I had a lot of time to think about the fact that I was ready to exercise my imagination a little bit more, to work on creating worlds that were beyond my lived experience. So with Last Woman I made a specific choice to turn my attention from the gazing of the navel to the world around me.

I'm going to try not to use the royal "We" here too much — because of course it's not right for me to talk about how other people are feeling — but it's kind of a non-stop hellscape right now, isn't it?

Aside from being very anxious about the past, present and future, I was also feeling quite blocked because I was working on a bigger project that wasn't going anywhere. There's a lot of vigorousness in the way that I wrote those stories that was designed to help. Writing isn't therapy, in my opinion — therapy is therapy — but there was a therapeutic element in writing those stories in that I had a lot of fear inside me and there's different ways to cope with your fear … So I was feeling fearful and as a result I was feeling anger and then on top of all that I was blocked! I couldn't write and so when it was time that what I eventually had to do was switch away from the bigger project and go back to the stories and I feel that that really came through.

Those characters are nervous, those characters are feeling isolated, they're lonely and sad. Some of the characters are quite wrong-headed in their view of the world. They're wrestling with this influx of post-truth things like "fake news" and also just not knowing. They don't know what's next — they're having trouble accessing any kind of information about what's next — and that's certainly the way that I was feeling in real life.

Outraged on Your Behalf is about a fire and about a character who takes her parents in after being evacuated for a fire and Displacement is about a couple of characters who are seniors who are displaced due to a flood. Both of those events happen to my parents, they live in Merritt, B.C., so I believe this was both in the same year. There was some catastrophic flooding that occurred in B.C., and it wasn't just Merritt, it was throughout the province … and so with Outraged on Your Behalf, the parents have to leave.

I remember waking up at 9:00 at night one night and a phone call at 9:00 at night from me is unlikely, but from my parents it's absolutely unheard of. We're an early to bed, early to rise family and so there had been a phone call that came in from my dad and I couldn't reach them but I checked the news.

I'd been following the situation with the fires there and at that point when I checked every road out of town was blocked due to fire — scary from my perspective, terrifying from their perspective and fortunately it was only about 40 minutes before one of the highways was cleared.

I think it's very easy to read my work as very serious, but my coping mechanism is humour.

That was a terrible situation but the absurdity of that situation was that my family came down: three family members, my parents and my sibling and I stayed in my one bedroom apartment, which offered little comfort except for that we got to be together throughout that time.

I definitely consider an element of my writing to be climate fiction. As someone who writes very place based, I write about what's going on around me and I read about the environments that are familiar to me that it seems impossible for me to write stories without including elements of climate fiction in there or climate change.

It's not fiction, it's weirder than fiction — it's uncanny and it's upsetting so it just seems natural to include that.

I'm also thinking about readers too. I thought a lot writing Last Woman about how I hoped readers might feel at the end of reading those stories.

Of course it's my job to take you on a ride, go dig into the places that might be uncomfortable and upsetting at times but I sort of hoped that there would be a chance maybe to purge some of that.

I don't think that climate fiction is going to change the world, I don't think it's going to heal the environment, but I do think that climate change fiction enables us to wrestle with, in particular, our grief and our anxieties. So that's the most I think I can hope for with my stories is that it might allow the reader an opportunity to say, "Yeah, I've been feeling that."