For the Love of Disaster
Do you enjoy disasters—fire, flood, warfare, or plague—in your hometown?
If you answered no, may I suggest that you haven’t given the question enough thought?
I, for one, would love a good disaster in my backyard. I think a battle would be my preference. My clever little caveat is that I would only enjoy said disaster if it happened a comfortable century before I was born.
Now you’re nodding your head!
Because who could say no to a nice little Saxon vs. Viking conflict in your local park? A castle, half-ruined by an ancient conqueror, poking its bony stones through the grass of a nearby hillside? Ah, yes, a well-aged disaster sounds delectable just now, doesn't it? Just a little something marking the landscape, well-seasoned with story and legend. History that isn’t on a page or a screen, or even several hours’ drive away, surrounded by park rangers and little “interpretive” signs. History you can touch.
Here’s the rub: I live in Oregon. We have no castles, very little in the way of battlefields, and the people who lived here before us built in wood, not stone, and left very little in the way of stories.
Imagine my excitement, then, when I learned about the Missoula Flood; a disaster did take place in my backyard. A catastrophe so huge that it could have been seen from space, and so powerful that it shaped every inch of the land I sleep, eat, walk, and shop on.
And it happened during the Ice Age, which was just about the most adventuresome time period ever. We actually had scattered tribes struggling for survival on a planet caught in the grip of a climate disaster, after a global apocalypse (Noah’s flood) destroyed civilization. Sprinkle in a handful of strange, almost mythical beasts with names like glyptodont, Smilodon, and “dire wolf,” add some outsized natural disasters, and what have you got? A story world that science fiction and fantasy authors would kill for–but it actually happened.
I knew I had to write this story. I enlisted the help (willing and otherwise) of multiple geologists, fact-checking as many details as possible, in order to come as close as I could to experiencing a cataclysmic Ice Age flood—without actually getting dripping wet.
Because, thanks to a science-y thing called embodied cognition, it turns out that the best way to experience the past is to read about it. When you read, your brain mimes the actions and experiences of the characters you read about, recreating the event in your mind.
Does a well-aged disaster sound as delectable to you as it does to me? Click below for your free copy of The Last Climb. It’s a quick trip (just a 20-minute read) to a major catastrophe that changed the PNW forever.
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Shannon is a homeschool mom and ancient history science nerd. She lives in a small logging town in Oregon with her very own hero and their ten children.
Her life could best be described as a love affair with beauty, which explains the number of babies, and her greatest joy is to know God, from whom all beauty comes.
In 2026, Shannon won the Aurora Award for Science Fiction and the ACFW Genesis Award for Historical Fiction. In 2025, she won the Vision Christian Writers Most Promising Writer award and semi-finaled in ACFW’s Genesis Award. She has also been longlisted in History through Fiction.
Shannon is represented by Bob Hostetler of the Steve Laube Agency.
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