Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: Joining us today, we have Night Beats’ own Rachel A. Rosen, talking about her title story in the Antifa Lit Journal Vol. 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht? This is a story about whales and capitalism, so why did you choose to make the protagonist an art major?

Rachel: Because of my own background, there are a disproportionate number of characters across all of my fiction who care a disproportionate amount about art and art history. For this, I blame my own high school art teachers for making the subject far too interesting to my adolescent mind. You know what you did.

In terms of the story itself, I needed a “useless” major that would accumulate a student debt that Maria could never hope to repay by normal means. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a useless major, but I do find it interesting the degree to which Western governments focus on STEM and business as the only possible useful majors. (I say “interesting” in that these same governments are largely uninterested in funding scientific research or listening to what actual scientists have to say.) Studying visual arts has always been a path to poverty, but it is also a vital body of knowledge, as it teaches you, more than anything else, how to see what’s in front of your eyes. It’s why Maria is the only character who is able to see through Chase’s slick image to what he’s doing behind the scenes.

Zilla: Is “eat the rich” meant to be interpreted literally?

Rachel: No thank you, I’m vegan.

Seriously, though, the rich are apex predators, prone to biomagnification, and you shouldn’t eat them as you’ll be ingesting the same toxic media ecosystem that they did. You don’t want to get RFK brainworms or a prion disease, do you? A better idea is to compost the rich and grow tomatoes in the soil, and if you need a good recipe or two for your tomatoes, I’d advise readers to check out the Sad Bastard Cookbook that you and I co-wrote.

Or, I don’t know, we could just have a fairer tax structure. Seems like it would cause less fuss.

Zilla: Can orcas smile?

Rachel: They can! And they also “kiss,” which is to say, they lightly bite each other’s tongues. Romance. You know how it is. My browsing history has been forever destroyed in an attempt to research far more than anyone ever needs to know about orca mating habits. In order to find out what, exactly, makes an orca smile, you’ll have to read the story.

Other fun orca fact: An orca can eat a moose. This happens rarely, but often enough that when they list the components of an orca’s diet, they do have to mention moose.

Zilla: Why are orcas the perfect symbol of the resistance?

Rachel: The trend of orcas sinking yachts is iconic to the point where I had to furiously Google to see if anyone else had already written a story about it. Why do they engage in this kind of behaviour? It’s because orcas are highly intelligent, highly social animals that communicate and learn from each other. (A lesser-known, though still stylish, orca trend is the fashion for wearing a dead salmon as a hat, which goes around every few years or so, like bell bottoms or acid-washed jeans.) Some people suggest that they’re playing with the yachts, downplaying the possibility that after several hundred years of all-out abuse of the ocean at the hands of the most predatory forces of capitalism, one of said ocean’s most intelligent lifeforms has decided to take a bit of revenge. It seems to me that, being on the frontline of humanity’s most shortsighted and reprehensible behaviour, they are engaging in the kind of action that we here on land are not courageous or desperate enough to undertake, even though we know the stakes.

It’s important to know that our ocean comrades aren’t perfect, and they often direct their violence towards targets that don’t deserve it. In addition to the yachts, they have been known to hunt blue whales for sport, or sink the craft of innocent small-scale fishers. But no activist or organization is perfect, and analyzing their shortcomings is also critical for building effective social movements.

Zilla: In your story, Maria seemed pretty trapped. How can us non-orca-types engage in resistance?

Rachel: [The following paragraph has been redacted for the sake of not further adding to the workload of the CSIS agent tasked with monitoring Rachel’s internet activity.]

You should write strongly worded letters to your local representative.

Zilla: *looking around nervously* Where can the Night Beats community find you and read this story?

Rachel: I am everywhere, including on this very blog! You can find me via my website, my podcast, Wizards & Spaceships, my Bluesky account, on Mastodon, or even on Instagram if you’re still on Meta for some reason. You can find this and future issues of the Antifa Lit Journal through the publisher, Not a Pipe Publishing, or wherever you buy books on the internet.