Brenda Cooper on her Creative Journey and Latest Work
Brenda Cooper has spent her life imagining what the future holds—not just in fiction, but also in fact. As an award-winning author and professional futurist and technologist, she bridges the worlds of data-driven forecasting and storytelling with a focus on where humanity is heading. It’s this shared commitment to the future that connects her work in public futures with the mission of the Center for Science and Imagination.
Cooper joined us on Zoom and shared insights into her lifelong fascination with the future and the role of imagination in helping shape it. For Cooper, envisioning what comes next isn’t about predicting the future, but exploring a wide range of possibilities.
Forward-thinking has always been a part of her mindset. A reader and writer by craft, Cooper has been immersed in books and fiction since childhood. But she was imagining future worlds long before she was publishing them.
“I have been writing, as far as I can tell, my whole life,” says Cooper. “I grew up reading science fiction and fantasy, and I was writing it and actually sending it in, but not yet getting published as a teenager.”
After taking a break from submitting her work to focus on her family and raise her son, she decided to return to her writing. In 1998, Cooper began classes at a nearby junior college, and it was at this time that she began working with renowned science fiction writer Larry Niven.
“It was like having a mentorship. It was great. I got a chance to learn a lot there, and I’ve just been writing ever since,” she says.
While Cooper has always had two vocations, they aren’t both writing. Alongside her creative pursuits in speculative fiction and fantasy, she built a career in public service, holding positions in the city governments of Longview and Kirkland in Washington. Working in the public sector deepened her understanding of communities and the real-world problems shaping their futures; it also helped provide inspiration for her writing and served as a practical outlet for futurist thinking.
“Because I’ve worked in government for so long and in local government for so long, I have a different perspective than many people do,” says Cooper. “Many people really think government is bad and evil at all levels. And it really isn’t.”
Her real-world experience of grappling with technology and policy, as well as the needs of diverse communities, has shaped how Cooper views the future and she explores it in her writing.
In her latest collection of speculative fiction and poetry, those insights come to life. That leap from real-world complexities to speculative storytelling lies at the heart of When Mothers Dream. Cooper envisions futures shaped by evolving technology, migration and displacement, and climate change, through the intimate lenses of motherhood and femininity.
At first, When Mothers Dream was not a themed anthology. When compiling the collection, Cooper revisited different stories and poetry published over the years, and in doing so, she noticed how often recurring topics consistently surfaced.
“It just seemed so strongly themed to be about women, and I feel like this time right now if we’re going to survive ourselves, we’re going to have to become more empathetic, more caring, and more mature about our approach to the world around us and to each other,” said Cooper.
This ethic of care is emphasized in the collection’s most prominent recurring image: the orca, or killer whale. Orcas appear throughout the book not only as marine animals, but as visual representations of matriarchal strength and ecological interdependence.
But Cooper’s connection to the orcas is more than thematic; it’s personal. She was deeply moved when she witnessed Tahlequah, a southern resident orca on the Washington coast, carry her deceased calf for more than two weeks.
“I feel really connected to the orcas, and they’re brilliant animals. The more we study them, the more we learn that they might even be smarter than we are,” says Cooper. “They’re social animals as we are. They are very family-oriented, as we are.”
Cooper explains that witnessing Tahlequah’s mourning was a significant influence on both the book’s cover and numerous short stories. Through her work portraying orcas in the collection, she was able to explore and reflect on both the grief and emotional endurance that come with womanhood and parenting.
While the thematic foundation for When Mothers Dream was shaped by that emotional experience, it also affected Cooper’s approach to the writing itself. A deep personal connection to nature is central to her creative process; she often relies on meditation and time spent in nature to help spark her imagination.
Imagination lies at the heart of When Mothers Dream, serving as both a starting point and driving force in her stories. For Cooper, imagination isn’t a form of escape, but rather a practical tool for creating the future we want. “If we believe the future is just going to get worse and worse and darker and darker, then we’re going to take one set of actions. And if we believe that we can impact the future, and we can make a better place, we can heal both ourselves and the planet,” she says. “So to me, imagination is really where you can take ideas or hopes about the future and bring them back and weave them into how we make decisions.
Brenda Cooper’s collection When Mothers Dream: Stories was published on August 12, 2025, and is available now from Fairwood Press.