I first encountered the fiction of Alta Journal’s California Book Club editor, Anita Felicelli, in her 2018 book of stories, Love Songs for a Lost Continent. I was enraptured by her nuanced portrayals of moral dilemmas, as well as by her prose. Her new collection, How We Know Our Time Travelers (she is also the author of a novel, Chimerica), is similarly complex and rejects simple answers to the questions at its heart. Indeed, the writing here explores the slipperiness of time and reality, featuring both surrealist and speculative elements.
How We Know Our Time Travelers is concerned with the past and the ways our memory of it shifts. In the title story, a woman meets a decades-younger version of her distant husband; in “The Night the Movers Came,” a woman’s sense of time is warped by a medical condition. The book is also interested in what has yet to happen: “The Encroachment of Waking Life” involves a woman who takes a plane ride to the future, where she meets her lover, while the computer programmer at the center of “The Glitch” lives with holograms of family members who have died in wildfires. And, of course, Felicelli explores what it means to live in the present, as in “Steam Tunnels,” which follows a group of young women as they run for their lives through a seemingly unending series of underground passages.
Felicelli and I spoke recently by Zoom. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How did you write the stories in How We Know Our Time Travelers?
I usually start with character and image, but with these, I was often starting with concepts. This collection has so much to do with my emotional state during the pandemic and going through certain medical problems, and the stories came to me more intensely during that period, I think, because I’ve always used stories to survive. I told myself stories as a little kid. I was an only child until I was 10, and my parents were both working all the time. So that’s just how I cope.
I feel like stories travel through me; they’re fully formed even before I start. Once I write them, I shift things around and revise and rework scenes to make them legible to other people. But the way it starts is this very intuitive transcription of a vision, and then I fuss around with it.
When did you know you had a collection?
After probably four stories, I noticed a pattern. I was writing about time and reality, and they were bending each other. I’ve always had an obsession with time travel, and so it seemed natural to me to move in that direction and think about it not in the science fiction sense, but via our bodies as conduits for time. So much of living happens in our minds and memories, and we can be so easily transported back in time or into whatever our fears or hopes are for the future, all within our own headspace—you don’t need the external time machine.
“The Encroachment of Waking Life” was an earlier story, and it was fun to write because it fit more with Back to the Future or something like that. [There is literal time travel involved.] But as I was doing it, I thought, Maybe there’s an element of falsity in thinking it’s going to be a machine that does the traveling for us. What about our bodies as these beautiful things that absorb the past, present, and future and are able to move us in whatever direction?
In addition to time travel, climate change is in the background of many stories, with wildfires featuring prominently.
It wasn’t a conscious decision; the stories came to me that way. A number were written during the years that my children’s schools were closed due to smoke. Growing up in Palo Alto, I had never smelled smoke on a regular basis, so I found this period intense. I was like, Is this what our future is going to be? I also had gotten interested in the Koch brothers and thinking about climate change regulation and action, and how there was a time when there was consensus between Republicans and Democrats that, yes, this is a problem, and we need to address it. Then it became a partisan issue, largely because of dark money groups influencing the discourse. So the stories are influenced by my realization that we could really end up in a reality where even places without wildfires have begun to see them.
Many stories feature speculative strategies and often remain within the realm of mystery. You let readers dwell inside these question marks.
I gravitate toward surrealism when things are off-kilter, tapping into dreams and trying to find the connections within dream states or associated connections. In my teens, I read a lot of surrealists and symbolists, like Anaïs Nin and Leonora Carrington, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. You have a lot of time to read when you’re that age, and I started to feel that this was the direction I wished I could take. I’ve always loved the idea of language as associative rather than as logical. I actually enjoy logic puzzles, but as a writer, I would rather unsettle the reader, open a new vista, as opposed to telling people what they already know.
I think it’s a reaction against a society that puts so much emphasis on what’s material and what’s empirical. It’s not that I don’t think that’s important; I’m a huge proponent of fact-checking, for example. But in my art, which is writing—and even when I was a painter—I like that things stand in for other things because I think that, in the world, it’s easy to be like, Oh, a wall is a wall and that’s that, but what if it’s so much more interesting than just, A wall is a wall?
You dedicate the book to an ice cream man you met years ago. I’d love to know the story behind that dedication.
My husband was an ice cream man for 10 years, and I met him while I was walking to class during the Iowa Summer Writing Festival; he stopped and gave me a ride. (I wrote a Modern Love essay about this.) When I first saw him, I thought, This is the person I’m going to marry. At the time, he was a poet, and he worked as an ice cream man so he could write. I think he still loves Emily Dickinson more than me, but that’s OK. She’s dead.
He just fascinated me as a character. We became very good friends for eight or nine years, and I finally found a serious fellow reader—where I lived, I couldn’t find these people. He would send me reading lists sometimes. He did this experimental post-structuralist writing, and there’s a very niche group that will read it and understand it.
So I dedicated it to him because he’s a different person as my husband—we now have three kids together. He’s the one who introduced me to the source of the book’s epigraph, Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel, and to writers such as Malcolm Lowry and all these other authors who were doing something that shook me at an ontological or core level.•
Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. Masad is the author of the novel All My Mother’s Lovers and is co-editing a forthcoming anthology about The Bachelor franchise. Her new novel, Beings, comes out in September 2025.
