Writers and poets love islands almost as much as they love the moon. In Jeanette Winterson’s novel Sexing the Cherry, her protagonist declares: “Islands are metaphors for the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise,” in defense of her own heart’s wild and undiscovered terrain. The American poet Matt Rasmussen, meanwhile, has this beautiful line in his collection Black Aperture: “No island is an island, he said/There is no new land, just the same body broken open.”

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I love this notion of islands as extant parts separated from their original self. (Do continents remember the islands that were once part of them, as an amputee might remember a missing limb?) The narrative and thematic possibilities in these waters are endless, which might explain why islands of every imaginable kind drift through the literary canon, populated by castaways and runaways.

The island as idyll pops up in The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, and on Peter Pan’s Neverland. (Assuming you consider it idyllic to shun ever growing up.) It looms as a sinister force in The Lord of the Flies, Robinson Crusoe, and The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa. The island as bulwark against a dangerous world?

Look to Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure or Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor. It can also act as a place of banishment or abandonment, as in The Tempest and Allegra Goodman’s Isola.

One common thread among stories of islanders, both voluntary and coerced, is this: good luck getting free of them.

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When I first arrived at the idea of writing a novel about two women working at the world’s last zoo, the landscape of my project was littered with the usual mysteries. Who were these women? What did they want? How would these desires be thwarted?

One common thread among stories of islanders, both voluntary and coerced, is this: good luck getting free of them.

But the one mystery I didn’t have to solve was the story’s setting. It was always an island. I knew this zoo needed to feel both lonely and crowded; it needed to keep thieves out and animals in; it needed to be bio-secure, at a geographical remove from the rest of society, and easily fortified.

As I spun the globe searching for the perfect island on which to build my zoo, possibilities would come into view and recede. French Polynesia? Too Edenic for the kind of horror-show I had in mind. An uninhabited isle in the Mediterranean somewhere? Europe wasn’t calling, perhaps because I associated those shorelines with languorous summers rather than decaying societies.

No, it needed to be Stateside, this zoo that would do triple duty as ark, one-percenter theme park, and prison. It was inevitable I would eventually wash up on the shores of the island: Alcatraz. No other real-world island so powerfully conjures the horrors of incarceration with the natural beauty of an imperiled world, all in the shadow of a tech industry intent on bending the world into a new shape.

Though I had never been there, Alcatraz existed in my mind as a kitschy artifact of a vanished era that inspired breakouts, manhunts, and several movies I’d never seen. (Little did I know that by the time my book came out this old-timey institution would be ludicrously, sinisterly, back in the zeitgeist.)

I was eager to properly get under the skin of it, to consult with the ghosts. So it came to pass that my husband, Adam, and I spent two consecutive summers in San Francisco, one year staying in an apartment on Nob Hill, the next dog-sitting in the Marina District. On the first visit we pre-booked tickets for Alcatraz, but because part of the story takes place on the mainland as well, we decided to explore San Francisco first.

The structure I had devised involved two alternating narratives, one told through the eyes of my protagonist, a zookeeper named Camille, who never leaves Alcatraz, the other from the POV of Sailor, a firebrand who arrives at Alcatraz and blows up Camille’s safe, melancholy little life.

The Sailor parts—short, third-person interstitials inserted between the main story—would mostly take place off the island, in the abandoned office buildings, jellyfish markets, and dogless dog parks of a near-future San Francisco.

We wandered, wide-eyed, around Fisherman’s Wharf, a gaudy promenade lined with souvenir stores and crab restaurants that emits a subtly uncanny valley air, like a Potemkin village or a nautical-themed historical reenactment town. Bay Area people tend to shun this neighborhood. I gather it is to them what Times Square is to New Yorkers, and I get that, but I found a kind of tawdry magic there. In a way, it felt like the future my book depicted had already arrived.

On the day we were supposed to go out to Alcatraz, we arrived at the Embarcadero ticket office to be informed there would be no tours that day. It was windy and the passage across would be too dangerous.

I was amazed. The island is so close to shore and the water in the bay, which the breeze had rucked into a frenzy of small whitecaps, didn’t seem to be giving the smaller fishing boats any trouble. I experienced a little chill of excitement. Maybe Alcatraz—even the sanitized, slightly hokey Alcatraz of today—hadn’t fully lost its ability to strike fear into the hearts of men. The postponement of the trip due to bad weather just added to the malign promise of the place.

We turned up the following day for our rescheduled tour, ready to be disappointed. The city’s famous fog hung over everything and the chilly air sliced through our inadequate summer clothing. But the conditions, apparently, were favorable, and we boarded the ferry.

I loved that this was the only way to get there. An island connected to the mainland by a bridge is a different proposition than an island you can only reach by boat, or helicopter, or by swimming there. The former is a cheat, in a way, the idea of an island rather than the lonely reality of one.

It’s hard to recall now, but it’s possible I might have changed my mind about the setting for The Island of Last Things if Alcatraz had been disappointing. The book was still in the nascent stages then, and the major advantage books have over movie productions is that their settings are very easy to relocate.

It would have been simple to choose another island. But the moment I stepped on shore I was certain. What a strange and haunted and unforgettable place, with its brutally utilitarian buildings and wind-scoured open spaces and dazzling views of the scenes you see on postcards from San Francisco. (The Golden Gate bridge, the Marin Hills, the higgledy-piggledy skyline.)

It didn’t require much imagination to picture the old prison as a dystopian world. It was already dystopian. The cramped cells, the gun towers, the special windowless hells they devised for solitary confinement, the mundane panopticon horror of it all. The corridors named after famous avenues suggesting a sadistic desire to remind prisoners of an urbane existence they might never enjoy again.

The temptation to retreat in the face of all this is so strong and painfully human —keep your head down, build the wall a little higher, stock up on sandbags—but that mode of thinking is the doomer’s disease.

But step outside the prison buildings themselves and there is a fantastical beauty to this place, located a brisk swim away from one of the world’s most famous cities. (That’s one of the funny things about seeing Alcatraz for the first time, trying to square its fearsome reputation as this inescapable fortress hemmed in by a merciless ocean, with the intrepid swimmers who regularly freestyle the two-mile stretch of open water for fun.)

On an island like Alcatraz, the veil between wildness and civilization is paper-thin and you are reminded of your circumstances at every turn. You have to raise your voice to be heard over the howling wind.

There are no cars because there’s no need. There is nowhere on the island—barring perhaps the dungeons or whatever they have down on the levels they don’t let visitors go—where you can forget you’re encircled by water. You are, at least temporarily, marooned. If you want to leave, you can either swim or wait for the next boat.

How lonely, to be so close to civilization and yet so far. How freeing.

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An island is, by definition, alone, which might be why some people—shoutout to our old pal John Donne—are always warning against becoming one of them. The characters in all those wonderful island novels are either seeking isolation or have it thrust upon them.

They are in exile from the world or from the truth of their own lives. That all sounds very romantic until isolationism is forced upon you, as it is upon many of the people trying to live through our current moment.

As the United States rushes to isolate itself from the rest of the world, the country is beginning to feel like an island, in self-imposed exile from its allies and its world-famous brand of promise. There are people to whom this is appealing, but I think there are more who understand that to make an island of yourself is to lead an impoverished existence.

Like many others, I’ve been thinking a lot about community lately, about what we owe each other and this planet. The parallels between the dystopian future of my novel and the world in which you and I live are more numerous than they were when I first started writing this book. The water is creeping up the shores of the fever dream that has been the twenty-first century. The sanctuaries are shrinking.

The temptation to retreat in the face of all this is so strong and painfully human —keep your head down, build the wall a little higher, stock up on sandbags—but that mode of thinking is the doomer’s disease. That’s why when Sailor arrives on Alcatraz and observes the apathy of her fellow keepers, she sees a task even more critical than freeing the animals.

The antidote for doomerism, as she sees it, is art and music and connecting with nature and throwing parties with friends (even if the authorities tell you not to) and fighting like a wildcat for the future you want. Sailor is right. We are not islands—solitary, needing nothing. We are connected.

We need other people, animals, an unruined earth, in order to thrive. Things we assumed would be around forever are being lost every day. The thing that is left is taking care of each other.

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The Island of Last Things by Emma Sloley is available via Flatiron.