Interviewed
by Cassy Lee
Denali Sai Nalamalapu is a climate activism organizer from Southern Maine and Southern India. Denali lives in Southwest Virginia. They have written for Truthout, Prism, and Mergoat Magazine, and their climate activism has been covered in Shondaland, Vogue India, Self, The Independent, and elsewhere. They studied English Literature at Bates College and completed a Fulbright grant in Malaysia. You can find them at @DenaliSai on Instagram.
Holler: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance is their first book. In this powerful work of graphic nonfiction, Denali tells their own story of getting involved in climate activism and serves as a guide introducing readers to six ordinary people- a teacher, a single mother, a nurse, an organizer, a photographer, and a seed keeper - who became resisters of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a project that spans approximately 300 miles from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia
The following video conference interview with Nalamalapu took place on May 12, 2025 and has been edited for clarity.
Cassy Lee: The title has such a clever double meaning— “holler” as in a rural Appalachian valley, and “holler” as in to get loud. I grew up in a rural area of California where climate activism was often seen as “treehugger” stuff. How did you find the courage to start “hollering?” Has this work made you feel more like an outsider in your hometown—or brought you closer to your community?
Denali
Sai Nalamalapu:
For me, coming from India to the U.S., I think I was kind of preprogrammed to
hold nuances like what it means to be an environmental protector in a world and
a country that often doesn't like activists, at least in a generalized form.
And part of that's just because I am always, to some degree, an outsider either
in the U.S. or in India, so I'm very used to things that I do not culminating
in a sense of fitting in. Also, I am innately someone that feels injustice very
deeply. So on top of living in the dynamic of always feeling like an outsider
to some degree, I also regularly feel compelled to investigate and speak about
injustice in a way that is not always welcomed by normalcy and certain
communities and people who for different reasons would like to maintain the
status quo. I think those two attributes about me as a person helped prepare me
for the realities of being a climate activist, which is this interesting mix of
caring about people and place even when people might not be excited about
having you there. And I think as a queer and activist of color, there are even
more nuanced layers [in me] than your average climate activist.
Generally,
activists get portrayed as looking a particular way. But I was interested in
telling this story in particular because the activists don't look a specific
way. And I feel a sense of belonging in that reality, which is that, for
example, one of the characters has lived on family land for seven generations
from when her white ancestors settled on this land. And one of the individuals
in the book is from the Monacan tribe who are indigenous to this land, and she
came later in her life. She grew up in Baltimore and then came back to
Appalachia where her ancestors once lived and the Monocan tribe currently is.
It's been important to me to tell those nuanced stories because I think climate
activists get sidelined in part because there's an unwillingness to really
understand how diverse the movement is.
 |
| p. 22 |
CL:
Why did you choose comics
as your storytelling format? Your clean, consistent style—line drawings,
limited palette, expressive characters—conveys so much with apparent
simplicity. How did you develop this style?
DSN: When I was a child, my mom gave me a
secondhand cartooning how-to book. I was really captivated by this way of
interpreting people's faces in many different shapes and exaggerating different
parts of them and making the landscape around them in some way part of the
cartoon as well. And then as I grew older, I got more into traditional forms of
writing and art that are respected more by people like my teachers or members
of my family. For example, I got into things like portraiture and ceramics and
printmaking, which tend to be more highly respected than comics. I think I was
figuring out what my voice was and what felt authentic to me and what other
people responded to. I was also really into writing and ended up studying
English literature in college. Then when I was thinking about how the Mountain
Valley Pipeline site had been communicated previously and what we hadn't done
to communicate the struggle against this pipeline, comics and graphic novels
came to mind. And I realized that I could merge my love for illustration and my
skills in writing into the comics and graphic novel form.
I
started consuming and creating more comics and, in reflection, I think of it as
a full circle moment where I started with cartooning and learning how to write
in my young childhood, and then diverged for thirty years, and then now came
back to the form and feel really connected to it as a tool of climate
communications. So often the narrative around climate change and the science of
climate change is conveyed in black and white text. I think that leaves a lot
of people out of the movement and unable to access the stories, but a form like
comics where you can access information through the words, you can access
information through the pictures, you can access emotions through the pictures.
There are just so many different ways of absorbing different parts of the story
for people of all ages and all levels of busyness, and that feels really
important to me.
CL:
I appreciated how the book
begins with your personal connection to the land, then expands to feature
stories of six everyday people who may not have considered themselves activists,
but who took action against the Mountain Valley Pipeline in different ways. Was
your goal always to have a balance between an element of both graphic memoir
and comics journalism centered on a diversity of voices, or did that approach
evolve as you got deeper into the project?
 |
| p. 156 |
DSN:
When I started the project,
I initially just wanted to profile six different activists, and their work and
their stories. But as I worked with mentors and my editor and my agent on
making my manuscript more accessible and sharpening it as one does during the
editing process, we realized collectively that a guide with whom someone could
walk through the stories and initially get to know and then learn along with
could help the reader take in the nuances and the complexity and the, depth of
each individual story. I think because of being socialized as female and
especially being an Indian daughter, I was taught to be in the background and
be more behind the curtain and uplift others. So it didn't come intuitively to
put myself in the story.
 |
p. 55 |
I
am glad I did because I think a lot of environmental narratives get told with
the person behind the curtain as sort of an unnamed omniscient narrator. But I
think it's important for us to put ourselves into these stories sometimes
because we are just as human and complex and flawed and nuanced as the people
we're writing about. And so for the reader to get to see that, I think is an
important marker of transparency and speaks to the reality that nothing is
apolitical. There is a reason why I told this story, and there's a reason why I
live in and am connected to Appalachia. And I wanted to share that with readers
so that we could carry on together.
CL: Spoiler alert: despite years of resistance,
the MVP began pumping gas in June 2024—even after pipeline ruptures during
testing. A year later, what has the impact been on the community? Do some
locals see benefits? What’s happening with the proposed extension to North
Carolina—are protests ongoing?
DSN: I live in Southwest Virginia in one of the
communities that's right next to the pipeline, and it has always been true that
the pipeline was a project created to make a company money. It was never a
project created because there was an existing need.
Scientists
have long been certain that we don't need new fossil fuel projects. And
particularly, the Southeast of the U.S. does not need more gas pipelines.
Sometimes I think of the number of pipelines we have in the U.S. as similar to
the number of highways we have. Like, if you look at a map of the pipelines in
the U.S., it makes you dizzy. And so we never needed another one.
It's
just that some CEOs decided that they wanted to take advantage of the
Appalachian fracking boom in the twenty-tens and pumped out as many project
proposals as they could to see what stuck and what didn't. So I would say that
still stands today. The gas isn't needed in our communities. What we actually
need are more renewable projects that can bring us into the future rather than
drag us into climate demise. And then in terms of the Mountain Valley Pipeline
Southgate Extension, the MVP and many other fossil fuel companies are
continuing to be prolific in how many new fossil fuel projects they're
proposing, including the MVP’s proposing an extension into North Carolina
called the Southgate Extension.
 |
| p. 125 |
So
right now, that project is trying to get regulatory approval to go into North
Carolina and resistance continues, especially with indigenous led groups on the
ground in North Carolina. But next to
that extension, there are dozens of other fossil fuel projects that are being
proposed in Virginia and North Carolina. Resistance to those projects continues,
as well as advocacy in the courts, because often the fossil fuel industry will
target climate activists with really serious criminal and civil charges. Many
activists in the Mountain Valley Pipeline movement were targeted with those
charges and are still defending themselves in court. So that fight also
continues in this misuse of the courts for this dying industry's aims, and is
something that, for example, Enbridge, a big fossil fuel company, used as a
tactic in the North Midwest of the United States to hurt Greenpeace, one of our
biggest environmental groups in the country. The current federal administration
is only stoking more fears that climate activists will be targeted in ways like
they were with the MVP.
CL: There’s a poignant scene in which after the
pipeline gets pushed through, you enter a period of depression. How do you keep
hope alive? Are you focusing on new causes now? Any you’d like to highlight for
our readers?
DSN:
I think that an important
part of climate activism is to redefine winning as not just 100% sunny
circumstances, but rather as a reality that holds more realistic complexity.
For example, winning the climate fight doesn't necessarily look like a pristine
utopia, and losing the climate fight doesn't necessarily look like complete
demise, but rather there's a complete gray area spectrum of possibility in
between the two. It's similar with the Mountain Valley Pipeline fight. Like,
some people, especially fossil fuel proponents, will say climate activists lost
that fight. But there is a case to be made that ten years of community-led
struggle and ten years of this pipeline getting tied up in the courts and in
regulatory agencies because of its own ineptitude is a community win. I mean,
so many community members, including the ones profiled in this book, built
lifelong alliances and friendships and relationships from the pipeline fight.
And I think that's an important part of being human is to build community with
each other. So my hope is that we can redefine winning in a more nuanced way.
Yes, we can always have long-term strategy and it's important to have long-term
goals, but I think it's also really important to honor the work we do and did
every day, and that's important to me when I think about the Mountain Valley
Pipeline site. Yes, this one pipeline did go forward. But, also, the fossil
fuel industry took note of how much resistance happened on the ground and
especially in a marginalized and over-exploited region like Appalachia. They
took note of the reality - that these people that they thought they could prey
upon and would just be silent about it - weren't silent. So that's where I get
my hope. I also think that I feel most authentically connected to the
communities and planet when I'm fighting for them. The surface level, “did we
win?” sort of mentality feels less truthful. Even if one wins against one
pipeline site, there are so many other fossil fuel projects that are being
proposed in so many other communities enduring disproportionate burdens of
environmental injustice, that we have to support and be in community with each
other. So the reality is a lot more complicated than did one fight culminate in
the end of a project or not.
Two
things are making me feel very grounded right now. One is supporting local
climate leadership on the city and state level. In a time where the federal
administration is rolling back environmental protections and attacking states
and local governments for their climate action, it's a really important and
beautiful thing to lean into strengthening our state and local governments. Our
localities along with our communities are on the front line of the climate
crisis, especially in places like Louisiana and Florida and California, but
also in places like Western North Carolina and Appalachia and other parts that
aren't coastal. And so our localities are not only leading on climate action,
but they aren't going to stop anytime soon even though the federal government
is attacking their climate action. So what feels really helpful to me is both
supporting local climate candidates in Southwest Virginia, but also there are
so many mayors that are running on climate platforms that are really exciting
in terms of municipal executive leadership and from there on up including
Congress in Washington DC.
 |
| p. 113 |
The
other thing giving me hope right now is mutual aid networks because I do think
getting involved in local networks is not only an important thing to do in the
present, but is also a radical reimagining of our future and a practical one in
terms of making connections. You need to know who has a hammer in your
neighborhood and who knows how to grow the best tomatoes. Those are very
practical things that will be helpful. I mean, we just saw with bird flu what
it was like to have eggs that cost $9 a dozen. I think it's important that we
know who is resourced locally to weather storms that we've weathered before and
that are increasingly impending, especially with corrupt administrations that
only support billionaires. So mutual aid, both on the day-to-day level and
broader, feels important to me. With both of those things, most people have a
local government, and most people have at least a regional mutual aid network.
So these feel, to me, like tangible things that we can do alongside any broader
climate action that I think is still important. It's still important to gather
in large numbers and show each other how many of us there are and other
strategies that maybe seemed more like the go-to in hopeful times.
CL: Do you see yourself primarily as a climate
activist or as a cartoonist/author/artist? You said this book was the hardest
thing you’ve done. Do you see yourself doing more comics like this? What’s next
for you?
DSN:
I definitely think my
organizing and my creative work are important together. They sort of feed each
other. I don't think I see myself in the near future stopping either because my
organizing work feels very practical. It feels like I can see the difference
that I'm making in my relationships with people. I focus on communication, the
media and social media. And my creative work feels like more of the slow deep
work. I worked on Holler for three years, which is a lot longer than any
specific organizing project, beyond stopping the Mount Valley Pipeline, which
was a very big project. The creative work is longer than the day-to-day
projects, and it's more playful and colorful, and it's the stuff that feels
like it's what I would be doing if the world was a better place. So I guess
they kind of balance each other out. The organizing work fills a part of me
that feels like I can't just sit and watch the world burn. And the creative
work is partially that, but it's also really fun, so it gives me energy to do
the organizing.
I
find it really helpful to have multiple projects moving at once because
otherwise, I put too much pressure on myself for one project. I don't think
it's actually reasonable to be so worked up about one thing that I’m doing, so
I like having multiple projects. And these days, what I'm thinking about is
middle grade and young adult fiction and what it could be like to tell diverse
stories of environmental resistance for and from the perspective of young
people. In a different way, I don't think we can look to any one source right
now to tell our story of climate hope. So what does it look like for us to
write that story into existence? Those are the two general projects I'm working
on right now.
CL:
Who did you imagine your
audience to be while writing? What do you hope readers take away from the book?
DSN:
I remember the first reader
that came to mind is the grandchild of a nurse who reads the story of Karolyn
Givens and feels connected to her story because their grandmother was a nurse
and then follows the book from there. I imagined just random people
picking up the book and seeing that a college student is in the book and
feeling a connection because they're a college student. I imagined people who
are ordinary people who know about climate change and environmental destruction
but maybe don't feel like they have the skills to do anything about it – they
don't feel like their background is in forestry or sustainability or biology
and feel sort of outside the movement. My hope is that they'll pick up the book
and feel a connection to these stories and then start thinking about what's
going on, where they are, and how they want to plug in with the skills that
they have.
 |
| p. 32 |
Cassy Lee is a librarian and a comics artist, currently finishing
up her MFA in Comics at California College of the Arts to bring these passions
together. She is working on a graphic novel memoir about healing from the
intergenerational trauma she experienced in her own rural childhood. You can
see her work at cassylee.com.
All artwork is from Holler: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance © Copyright 2025 by Denali Sai Nalamalapu. Published by Timber Press, Portland, OR. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
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