The idea for Becky Bronson’s debut novel, When North Becomes South, came from a trip she and her husband made to the Liberian village where their son was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer. Bronson loved the experience, and it shed light on her own life, in which electricity and running water are taken for granted. “When we returned, I began thinking deeply about the impact of technology on our lives and the lives of our children,” she says.

Bronson recalls another unlikely influence: a power outage at their home outside of Boston. “It was just a couple of hours, but we were going, ‘Oh my God, what do we do?’ ” she recalls. She saw her own dependence on modern comforts and began to consider what a world without them might look like.

The result is When North Becomes South, a novel in which a superstorm causes the Earth’s poles to switch, knocking out power worldwide. In its laudatory review, Kirkus states, “Bronson manages to give the proceedings a sense of eerie familiarity, which has the effect of making her story utterly magnetic.”

The novel’s central character is Laurie, a high school teacher and mother to two adult sons, Brendan and Josh. Brendan is a teacher in a fictional West African country; Josh ran away from home years ago and now wanders the U.S. southern border.

Laurie’s disenchantment with modern society is palpable from the beginning of the book. She sees technology as a crutch—and as a dangerous influence on young people: 

Laurie’s predictable days felt so mechanical, like many of the things in the house. Everything was controlled by some device to the point where she now felt utterly bathed in a virtual reality. She had a smartphone, a smart TV, a smart kitchen. Hell, even her bathroom was smart! The toilet seat opened when she entered the bathroom and the toilet flushed itself when she was done. She wondered if kids these days even knew how to flush a toilet. Sinks turned on automatically. Food was prepared quickly and easily in her kitchen—all she had to do was press a button. Robots vacuumed her house, mopped her floors, took out the trash and performed all the other little tasks of the day. If she needed something, she simply ordered it by pushing a button (or speaking aloud to her smartphone), and it would magically show up on her doorstep within a day. 

“I wrote the book to inspire people to think a little differently about the world,” Bronson says. “We take so much for granted in our lives, and I believe understanding the fragility of our infrastructure is important.” 

Bronson hasn’t always thought of herself as a writer. She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Boston University and worked as a research scientist. For 15 years she ran a yoga studio until retiring in 2018. Somehow writing always found a way into her life. She wrote blogs for her yoga studio; she helped her sister write a book; and when her mother died in 2017, Bronson assembled, polished, and then published her mother’s memoir. 

“She was a good writer,” Bronson says. “Writing and editing helped me through the grief process, and I knew this was what I should be doing.” Bronson discovered her knack for editing and even considered a future as a ghostwriter. Soon after, she joined a writing workshop in which most of the members wrote fiction. “The workshop group said, ‘Just write,’ and I was really quite at a loss,” she recalls, and struggled getting started. She came to fiction with an editor’s sensibilities and found it difficult to produce anything from scratch.

“I thought of writing a little bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle,” she says. “When I do a jigsaw puzzle, I always do the edges first. So I have my outline and fill in from there. But when I started writing fiction, I couldn’t do that.” With encouragement from her writing group, she eventually began to generate her own material. “It was more like I had been given this lump of clay,” Bronson says. “There was a story in there somewhere, and I had to find it and dig it out. Writing fiction is more like sculpting.” 

The process was far from easy. At one point, Bronson got badly stuck, unsure where to go next with her novel. Again, her writing group came to her aid. A fellow member gave her a valuable piece of advice: Listen to your characters. “They told me, ‘If you know your characters, they’ll tell you where they want to go,’ ” Bronson recalls. “That was really freeing for me.” 

Bronson’s growing more comfortable and confident in her new life as a fiction writer. But she hasn’t abandoned the research skills she honed in her former life; in fact, they proved quite handy during the writing of When North Becomes South. She researched solar flares, which play a significant role in the novel’s plot. She read material on the planet’s poles, such as The Spinning Magnet by Alanna Mitchell—a study of the Earth’s electromagnetic field. 

Bronson even went into the field. She talked to a woman in charge of local emergency management services, asking her what would happen if a power outage lasted for days and days. She got in touch with the local ham radio club and went to one of their meetings. 

Though she’s sold the studio, Bronson still practices yoga. Meditation and yoga are a part of her morning routine; both are essential to her writing process. “Some of my best writing is done in meditation,” she says. “A lot just comes to me.”

Bronson says her next book is about online gambling. Like her debut, the book draws from real events to reflect some unsavory features of our current world. Bronson considered writing a work of nonfiction but decided against it. She’s a fiction writer now, composing character-driven stories to comment on society, building narratives that guide readers to reconsider the best way to live.

“If a reader tells me the book made them pause and reflect on what is truly important in their life,” Bronson says, “then I feel I have succeeded in that mission.”

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and teacher living in Brooklyn, New York.