Anyone can play a role in the fight for climate justice.

That’s the message that climate organizer and comics artist Denali Sai Nalamalapu wants readers to take away from their inspiring debut, Holler: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance (Timber, May 13, 2025).

“A poignant portrait of an Appalachian environmental movement,” according to our review, Holler follows Nalamalapu as they join an effort to halt construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline through southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia. The author interviews six subjects, “everyday people turned pipeline resisters” who found ways to protest the project’s environmental destruction.

Ranging from a seed keeper from the Monacan Indian Nation to a science teacher who used her 1970s Ford Pinto to block the pipeline’s path, “these are the leaders we must learn from,” Nalamalapu writes in the beautifully illustrated book.

Along the way, the author directly addresses readers, asking them to consider the power of direct action and how they, too, might become part of this polyphonic political story.

Nalamalapu spoke to Kirkus via Zoom from their home office in southwest Virginia, about 10 miles from the pipeline. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did Holler evolve from an idea to a book?

One of my favorite questions to ask myself as an organizer is, “Who am I missing?” Movements can get caught up in talking to the same people all the time.

I was thinking about what we hadn’t done in terms of storytelling in the pipeline fight, and comics is what came to mind. There is such a range of reading ability in the movement, from young kids still learning how to read, elders who haven’t learned how to read comfortably, and busy single moms who don’t have time to read. There are groups of people who are coming up in this movement who might be interested in learning more through comics than by showing up to a protest.

As opposed to a 300-page book in black-and-white text, I wanted there to be something fun for different people to pick up that had a certain degree of liveliness and color but also faces the issues in a pretty realistic way.

How did you come to graphic narrative as an art form?

I started drawing at a really young age. Between 5 and 7 years old, I started drawing cartoons after my mom gave me a book on how you can make anything that you see in the world into a cartoon. I was so into cartoons for years and years. At the same time, throughout my life I’ve been a writer. Before I learned to write words, I would just scribble in journals and pretend I was a writer. All along, there have been these parallel tracks of illustration and writing, and this book is what brought them together. Before, they felt distinct.

I thought comics would be a really interesting way to tell the stories of these six incredible people in a much more accessible way than climate change is generally written about, inspired in part by my favorite graphic novelist, Lee Lai (Stone Fruit), who writes for [the comics publisher] Fantagraphics.

Tell us how you landed on the six people whom you profile in the book.

Throughout my career in climate communications—and through doing grassroots climate work alongside the people in this book—I’ve realized that it takes all different kinds of people to fight this fight. We’re up against some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world, and their destruction of our planet has put into crisis every single aspect of the way we’re living, from food to our children’s future. My hope is that people can pick up Holler and find pieces of their family, their friends, or themselves and start thinking about how they want to protect the land or water around them.

More broadly, Appalachia is often depicted as a predominantly white region, which it is, but there are many immigrants and people of color and indigenous tribes and queer people here as well. It felt important to weave in their stories as seamlessly as I myself experience interacting with diverse people.

I wanted a degree of balance between people from West Virginia and Virginia, and I wanted the story to be very intergenerational, because that’s one of the most beautiful parts of the MVP fight to me—that it includes everyone from students in college to grandmothers of five.

What was your process as you collected their stories? Where did you start?

The first step was conducting oral history interviews. Then I transcribed each of them and went through the text with a yellow highlighter to identify the aspects I liked most, what sparked enjoyment in me. From there, I looked at every chapter, and the order of the stories materialized, starting with Paula and her activism through her camera’s lens.

Then I moved on to the illustrations, which I started on printer paper, sketching them out very roughly in pen. I translated those sketches onto a drawing tablet, which saved my hand from fatigue. When I get started on a project, I become extremely absorbed, and it’s hard to stop, so it was helpful to use anything that would reduce pain in my hand.

Holler has such a distinctive color palette, and you switch up the accent colors for different characters. How did you come up with that look?

I’m very fond of constraints. With digital art, you can’t mix colors, so for Holler, I wanted to choose colors that would guide the reader’s eye. One of my favorite things about comics is that there’s so much you can look at. As a kid, my favorite books were ones that I could stare at endlessly because there was so much going on, like Where’s Waldo?

I wanted there to be an abundance of elements for the reader to look at, but I also wanted to guide them toward what was important to the story—where the shadows were on a person’s face, what their expression was. I started out with a pastel green color—

Like the color of your walls and your shirt!

Totally. Then I chose the three different character colors [that I rotated among] based on complementary colors. The red I chose was complementary to the pastel green, then orange was a step over [in one direction on the color wheel], and purple was another step over [in the other direction]. I chose two colors for every chapter because of my enjoyment of constraint.

You’re a character in the book, too. How did you end up showing yourself interacting with the activists you interviewed?

Putting myself in there wasn’t something I ever dreamt of doing. I always dreamt of highlighting the work of other people and just being behind the screen with my own pen.

But as individuals who are writing these stories, we can be powerful guides. Readers can follow the different stories with me in a way that ties together the narrative more than if they were going from individual to individual without someone to walk beside them.

Hannah Bae is a writer in Brooklyn.