Emily Mitchell is the author of The Last Summer of the World (W. W. Norton), a novel, and two collections of short stories: Viral (W. W. Norton, 2015); and The Church of Divine Electricity, winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Fiction Award, published by University of Wisconsin Press in November 2025. Her short stories have appeared in Harpers’, Ploughshares, The Sun, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, The New Statesman (UK) and Guernica. Her second novel, Far Ocean, won the 2025 Big Moose Prize and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. She serves as fiction editor of New England Review and teaches at University of Maryland. She lives just outside Washington DC, with her husband, writer and editor J. M. Tyree.
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Emily Mitchell’s The Church of Divine Electricity is a speculative story collection that uses dark humor, science fiction, magic, and inventive forms to create worlds and characters that are dystopian, twisted, funny, warm, and also very much our own. The collection includes ghosts and video drones, futuristic technology, grotesque Victorian pastimes, and conclusions that are as absurd as they are accurate—that land with a devastating thud in the pit of my stomach.
It was a delight to speak with Emily about the intersection of technology and magic, the dystopian creep of climate disaster and authoritarianism, and how our human capacity for care and connection persists anyway.
Allison Wyss: What is the intersection, for you, of technology and magic, or other supernatural forces? Do they function the same way? Can they exist at the same time? How do they push against one another?
Emily Mitchell: Magic and tech are similar in that they both create estrangement, defamiliarization, bewilderment, uncanny possibility, a sense that anything could happen. The reader encounters magic or imaginary technology and suddenly the whole world of the story seems strange and unstable even if much of what is depicted is ordinary life. That’s what I want to create when I’m writing in those modes, and I see it as political, that emotional and psychic opening to the genuinely new and unknown. It’s also one reason why I’m not a huge fan of the sort of fantasy literature that mostly reinscribes the rules, problems, and limits of contemporary life onto some other realm. So, in my stories, magic and tech are doing similar work.
But then magic and tech are also different. Science fiction does imply a naturalistic explanation for everything. That lends itself to the creation of different emotional experiences than magic, which can’t be explained, and it’s different again from the supernatural, which implies a whole order of reality with its own, usually sinister, rules and laws. I don’t combine them in a single story, but other writers do, brilliantly. Charlie Jane Anders’s amazing novel All the Birds in the Sky is a good example of a book which does that.
AW: You don’t combine them in the same story, but they both exist in the collection.
EM: They’re different, but they also feel similar in the sense that they take us out of the realistic bargain with the reader and take us somewhere else. In terms of putting the stories together, one thing I had not really reckoned with until trying to place them as a collection, is these stories are dark. As individual stories, I hope they are also quirky and funny and brightly colored. They have some levity to them.
AW: They are quite funny.
EM: Thank you! I hope they’re funny. Humor is a way to let people get close to what would otherwise be hard to look at. You’re laughing and it opens you up emotionally to other kinds of feelings that you might otherwise fend off. That’s what I’m going for in any case.
But when I put all the stories together, I saw there is real skepticism about the way that human beings are at the moment in the world, and it runs through the collection.
AW: Yes, they’re very dark. Do you consider any of your stories to be horror?
EM: There is one story, “Her Face I Cannot See,” where I set out consciously to work with the conventions of horror, which is different from magical realism in that it implies a hidden, sinister order to the world, one which is only gradually revealed to the reader and the characters.
I’m more and more interested in horror as a genre. In film especially, it’s been having such a moment, being put to amazing use. And then there is a wave of women writers, especially from Latin America, doing work in this mode that is just out of this world fantastic: Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin, Fernanda Melchor. It’s very difficult to cultivate a sensation of uncanny dread in adults, so it’s remarkable when you see it done well.
AW: So we’ve talked about elements of various genres, including literary fiction, and the ways your stories play with them. How do you categorize the stories in The Church of Divine Electricity?
EM: Literary fiction is a daft marketing category that sometimes refers to fiction that does something interesting on the level of form and language. We had a word for that already, and it was literature. But you don’t know if something is literature until it endures and remains meaningful to people over time and that does not help anyone sell any books. I’m being a bit snarky here: publishers are in business to sell books and need to do what they can to make that happen. Also, some people just do not like stories about robots and space, while others just do not like stories about, say, middle-class couples dealing with mid-life malaise while their beloved dachshund slowly succumbs to cancer. Having curated categories helps people find more of what they like. But I’ve always been omnivorous as a reader and writer, moving between genres and forms. My first novel was historical fiction, and I’ve continued to work in that mode. I write realistic stories with contemporary settings, too. For a long time, I thought that was a problem. I’m way too old to worry about that now.
AW: I’d love to talk about the way these stories handle climate change. We get characters struggling to live amid increasingly dangerous conditions, structuring their lives around them the best they can, rather than a sudden all-or-nothing big catastrophe. It’s this dystopian creep, as in the novella, “Life/Story.”
EM: We talk about frog boiling because, appallingly, it serves as a metaphor for so many things: climate change, authoritarianism, inequality, political violence. Somehow, when I was younger, I imagined a switch would be thrown between non-emergency and emergency, and then we’d know it was time to drop everything and respond. In fact, though, so much of our energy as adults goes towards repetitive tasks that are designed to maintain stability.
This seems negative when I say it, but what I really mean is caregiving in its many forms, the replication of the conditions that allow life to continue—which includes going to work, taking care of our loved ones, making food, paying bills, cleaning, worshipping, exercising, voting, volunteering, etc. Those things don’t stop because stuff is getting hairy at the world-historical level.
In “Life/Story,” I wanted to capture a sense of struggling to maintain the little world of love, family, friendship, work and community, in the face of these big overwhelming forces. And to do that I wanted the reader to trip over some of the differences between the characters’ world and ours, the things they just take for granted, like the fact that there are checkpoints everywhere, climate defense infrastructure, closed borders, mass climate migration. I want the reader to be surprised for a moment and then, almost as quickly, not surprised at all.
AW: I love what you’re saying about care—about how mundane tasks are also the really important stuff of life. Do you think there’s a way to celebrate that in stories? Is Martin actually doing important work before the drones start following him around? I read it as a very sad story. But maybe that’s in there too.
EM: Martin is actually happy with his life—at the beginning, not perfectly, but in a fundamental way. My feeling about contemporary life in the U.S. is that you’re really not supposed to be content with your life. Part of that is the necessity of consumer capitalism to create dissatisfaction so we’ll buy things. And part of that is human nature—we’re not very good at remaining satisfied with what we have. And part of that, in the world of the novella, is the instability brought in by climate change.
On the one hand, Martin has a kind of wisdom about not yearning for more than you could have. On the other hand, his wife Lilah also has a certain insight, that the physical conditions of their world (and perhaps of our world) are too unstable for that. Even though it seems they’re all right, they’re not really. They’re all right for the moment, but who knows in five years. And so, she sees they must do something more dramatic and heroic to get themselves out of their current situation. And she’s correct too. He’s correct, and she’s also correct.
AW: The fault isn’t in Martin or in Lilah. The fault is with the world.
EM: The world and with our culture. In our society, is there a category of person who is neither ambitious or lazy? You’re either one or the other. So there’s a cultural level. Then there’s a more fundamental level which has to do with economics and the environment. If you are that category of person, you might be swept away.
AW: How do these stories interact, more generally, with current technology and societal trends?
EM: A lot of things are scary at the moment, and the tone of the book responds to that. Authoritarianism and climate change scare me most because they stand to reinforce each other: as the climate crisis gets worse, it creates the conditions and excuses for clamping down on human freedom in all kinds of ways. The authoritarian innovations of the post-Soviet era, such as the deliberate distortion of people’s understanding of reality through misinformation and disinformation, the simultaneous flood of “news” coupled with a lack of good-quality information and the erosion of trust that causes—no one has really figured out how to overcome that yet, how to shore up democracy for the future. I’m deeply, furiously angry with all the people in power since 1979, who squandered rather than built on the (stingy, inadequate) social safety net we inherited from the New Deal and the Great Society, who somehow forgot the historical lesson that massive economic inequality is incompatible with democracy and leads to very bad things.
What gives me hope on a very practical level is the energy transition. It’s underway now, probably too far along to be stopped, and so much innovation is taking place in that sector. It’s not happening fast enough, but it’s happening, and it has the potential to generate chances for other positive things to emerge.
And then, people do have the capacity to find each other, care for each other, and collaborate in surprising ways. Sometimes, I think human history is the process of people discovering more and more interesting, generative, complex ways to be connected to one another, to work together. Without downplaying how dire our situation is now, I don’t see any reason that capacity for renewed and reinvented connection won’t continue.
AW: This seems related to “Mothers,” in which giant robot dolls provide therapy—but only for rich people. Despite the strange technology, is this a story about connection?
EM: Yes, very much. Technology isn’t good or bad, but it can be put to positive or negative or neutral uses. In the world of the story, the weird giant therapy dolls actually help people. We might feel discomfort because it feels so peculiar, and we wonder, Is it really ok? But the problem isn’t that you can be made to feel better in this peculiar way; the problem is that it’s only available to a few people, and some of those people don’t deserve it. They should feel bad forever. Augusto Pinochet is the model for one character in the story. Obviously, nobody who did those things should feel okay even for a minute.
But I also wanted to suggest that if there’s only feeling bad and feeling safe, that seems like a pretty narrow range of experience. I was reading a lot of Mark Fisher, who writes about capitalism and depression. At the end of the 20th century, which had been a time of huge and mostly disastrous experiments with what society could become, the idea came in that capitalist liberal democracy is the only system that works, and if you want something else, you’re a fool and probably dangerous. Fisher is very interested in what it feels like to live in the 1990s and 2000s, thinking, “well, this is as good as it gets.” And he suggests that it felt depressing to have such limited and curtailed horizons—this is big abstract stuff—but I was thinking about why the son is so bummed out. Well, he’s right to feel bummed out.
AW: But the ending feels triumphant.
EM: So the end of the story is this moment of stepping into the unknown—both of them, the mother and the son are taking this big risk and sort of finding each other as companions again.
AW: I love that. What about the title story? Can we see “The Church of Divine Electricity” as being about connection?
EM: It’s a really tricky story. It’s obviously about new ways of connecting, but they’re not completely trustworthy.
AW: Right, the church provides this community and sense of belonging that seems to help the character, but it requires members to undergo experimental and invasive bodily modifications.
EM: I wanted it to be a bit difficult to tell the right thing to do. The church is sinister not because it’s easily identifiable as terrible, but because it’s not easily dismissible. I want it to be an organization where the reader is pretty convinced this is not a good thing. But then again, didn’t it help the daughter? Before she joined the church, she was in real trouble. And the modifications themselves are not necessarily negative for the people who have them, and they’re not necessarily negative in the abstract. The church does contribute research that will help people.
So, the story investigates how you tell the difference between something that is merely discomforting because it’s unknown, and something that is actually harmful.
AW: So, what is the real harm in the story?
EM: It’s the idea of the top-down organization telling people what to do, but it’s also the idea that the goal is to get out of the body.
The idea of the body, the human body—we can’t think without it.
We have an idea right now—and it’s coming up a lot with AI—that we can somehow separate the thing we call intelligence or consciousness from the body that makes it make sense, but we probably can’t. So whatever it is we’re creating that is disembodied is going to be fundamentally different, not the thing we’ve referred to up until this point as intelligence.
I wanted to be quite careful with the way the story’s imagined religion might figure into contemporary debates that involve the body and self-determination of the body and identity. The religion in the story is about dismissing this fundamental aspect of human experience, not about going more deeply into it.
It’s that overall framework that I want the reader to be more skeptical of, that it’s toward the goal not of empowering people to live more fully within the human body—but to leave it behind altogether. As a person and a writer, to me, that’s the place where the religion becomes harmful.
AW: Is the story about AI?
EM: It was published before this latest wave of AI development, but the idea of uploaded consciousness has been around in science fiction for a long time. The story is definitely responding to that trope. So yes, in a sense it is about AI.
AW: “The Woman Who Loved a Tree” is a story about communing with nature in a way unmediated by devices. Yet, the way the woman taps into the tree’s consciousness seems very science fiction-y, almost like the way we envision virtual reality, or perhaps just the internet, as a different way to transcend our bodies.
EM: I hadn’t thought of it as a story about VR, but now that you’ve put it that way, I can see it. It seems related to the question at the heart of the story, which is whether the protagonist has really experienced what she believes she has experienced—that she loves and is loved in return by a beech tree she encounters in a park near her home. Or has the experience been all in her head, as her husband believes?
At one point, I noticed the stories in the second half of the book all ended on a down note, which was one of the reasons I moved “The Woman Who Loved a Tree” to its current place near the end. That story has this ending where we don’t know what’s going to happen, but it might be something amazing. To have that moment of, “Oh, are we going to step through a door into something expansive and magical and has enormous importance for the future?” rather than these stories that end on a down beat or that can be pretty gloomy about the human condition.
AW: “Life/Story” also sits in unknowing, in a productive way.
EM: My sincere hope for the ellipses in these stories—there’s another significant one at the end of “Mothers,” where the story stops quite deliberately before we find out the main character’s ultimate fate—is that they make the reader reflect on their own expectations and desires. What do I think is possible, given the parameters of the situation? What do I think these characters and maybe people in general are capable of? What kind of world do I long for or fear?
In the case of “Life/Story” the possibility that Martin’s wife Lilah has deliberately set up a dangerous situation to create drama, even to the point of putting their children at risk, is so horrifying that for Martin to admit he’s suspicious would damage their marriage perhaps beyond repair. They have to live with this silence, and so does the reader. This seems like an important part of life, to live with mysteries that cannot be resolved and to essentially put your chips down on a hypothesis. Martin decides to live as if he believes his wife is not the kind of person who would do that, but he still can’t completely dismiss the possibility. I want the reader to test their own picture of reality against what they see in the story and maybe unearth some beliefs they held without knowing it.
AW: The final sentence of the final story is: “It is beautiful and terrifying to behold.” What is it about the combination of beauty and terror that might appeal to people?
EM: So that line comes at the end of a story in the form of a list of instructions for turning yourself into a cat, and it’s intended to suggest a transformation that can’t be fully understood from this side. It’s the last story in the book because it takes us furthest afield from daily human life, and I’m not sure if it is magic or science. It might be trying to reach the point where they touch. Samuel Delany writes about science fiction as visionary literature, a way to explore transcendence in a secular context, and that resonates with me with regard to this piece. I’m not sure, honestly, how I feel about the transformation the story describes, how ironic the story is meant to be.
Sometimes I think it’s ultimately trying to recall for the reader the value of humanity, of humanness, despite all the difficulties, the nonsense and foolishness and clutter it entails. If that’s true, the reader ought to conclude that they don’t really want to trade their humanity for this other, alien form of consciousness the story envisions.
But it’s also possible to read the story straight: as a rebuke to humans as we’re currently constituted. We are so self-obsessed; we create so much garbage. Maybe it’s understandable to long for some kind of radical transformation, even as we find it frightening. I guess this is another place where I want the reader to be left with a mystery, a tension that combines enchantment and fear, one which they could try to resolve for themselves.
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