Connecting to the outdoor world can be as simple as going through your front door. Or…it can start with a book!

Did you know that most children (5-8 years old) spend at least three hours a day on screens, and for older kids, it’s 5+ hours – and these are considered low estimates. Meanwhile, the time children spend outdoors engaging in unstructured play has plummeted. Some estimates are as low as five minutes a day.

Growing up is hard (and being a parent/caregiver is hard!). But connection makes it better. That is why Camp Fire connects young people to the outdoors, to others, and to themselves.

Camp Fire teamed up with the PLA to write this blog and highlight inspiring picture books that motivate us to get outside! Here are five we recommend:

The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats

The Snowy Day tells the story of Peter, a young Black boy exploring his neighborhood after a winter snowfall. With very few words, and with bold, minimalist illustrations, the book reveals a city neighborhood magically transformed by snow.

Published in 1962, The Snowy Day has had its share of critics. Though it was considered groundbreaking at the time because of its young Black protagonist, it was also challenged and banned on more than one occasion. But it also has generations of fans. In 2020, The Snowy Day topped the list of the most checked out books of all time by the New York Public Library.

Today, The Snowy Day could be considered groundbreaking not because of the protagonist’s race, but because of its portrayal of a free-range child, exploring his neighborhood without an adult in sight. Roaming the neighborhood bundled into a snowsuit, stick in hand, while parents remained indoors, was once a common feature in childhood. Now, it has all but vanished.

 Jayden’s Impossible Garden by Mélina Mangal and Ken Daley

Jayden’s Impossible Garden won the 2019 African American Voices in Children’s Literature writing contest and brings some of themes in The Snowy Day into the 21^st century. It tells the story of a Black boy named Jayden, living in a city where, his mother tells him, there is no nature. But Jayden finds nature wherever he looks: from squirrels foraging for nuts, to cardinals singing in the trees.

Jayden finds a kindred spirit in Mr. Curtis, a wheelchair bound senior citizen who loves being outside, and who, like Jayden, is not too busy to notice and admire a tiny crocus by the corner of a building. Soon, they form a friendship based on their mutual love of nature. Eventually, they hatch a plan to show others that there really is nature where they live. They begin to plant runner beans, nasturtiums, and other flowers using old milk jugs and cast-off containers. The flowers attract butterflies. Before long, the entire neighborhood has come outside, connecting to the nature around them, as well as to each other.

Tiny Perfect Things by M.H. Clark and Madelina Kloepper

Tiny Perfect Things (2018) tells a similar, yet uniquely magical story. This time, it features a child and her grandfather out on a walk through their neighborhood. Yet their ordinary walk is filled with treasures, as they see beams of light glinting off spider webs, a single leaf blown down by the wind, and a tiny snail crawling along a fence. This book captures the curiosity of a child, for whom the outdoor world is new. It shows how meaningful a walk between an adult and a child can be.

Outside In by Deborah Underwood; illustrated by Cindy Derby

Outside In is a 2020 Caldecott Honor Book. The story begins with these evocative lines: Once we were a part of Outside. And Outside was a part of us. But now, we often forget that outside is there.

Yet Outside has special ways of reminding us. It sneaks its light beams and shadows in through the windows. It taps gently on the glass. It takes new forms, in clothing, furniture, and in the food we eat. Even rivers come inside, the text states. The water we drink doesn’t exist just in our plumbing. It comes from Outside.

Outside, as presented in this book, is our friend. It misses us. It seeks to reconnect. But Outside is also with us more than we realize. We are reminded of the ways we continue to connect with Outside even when we are inside.

Sila and the Land by Shelby Angalik, Wentanoron (Ariana) Roundpoint, and Lindsay DuPre; Illustrated by Halie Finney

The last book we’d like to highlight is Sila and the Land. This beautiful picture book was written by three young Indigenous authors and draws on conversations between the authors and young people from First Nation, Métis, and Inuit communities across Canada about their relationship with the land. In the story, a young Inuk girl named Sila sets off on a journey to North, South, East, and West, talking to animals, plants, and different elements along the way. Each being she meets has something to teach her about her responsibility to the land, and about the protection of nature for future generations.

We invite families to enjoy these five books together, and to follow them up by getting  outside. This can be as simple as walking, strolling, or riding  around the block, or even around the library, looking for tiny, hidden treasures. Take a compass (or use an app) and determine which way is north, south, east, and west. Listen to bird song. Look under the leaves. Touch things that are soft, smooth, slimy, or sharp. Find a stick and measure a puddle.  Inhale the scent of the soil after a rain. Build a wonder box and fill it with treasures. (Just don’t harm anything living in the process.)

The phrase “I wonder…” can begin your journey. “I wonder where that slime trail came from?” “I wonder what that sticky mud feels like?” “I wonder what that basil leaf tastes like?” 

Go outside and wonder together!

The post Let’s Wonder Together: Book Inspiration to Get Outside with Kids first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The novel is based on your friendship with a real person, Ralph Silverman. Can you talk a little about Ralph and your relationship with him?

Sure, I can. I mean, there’s a lot of evolution there. When I met Ralph, I was in high school living in Riverdale, and we both were going to a school called Barnard School for Boys that later became the Horace Mann School. He was tremendously smart, but very eccentric, very different than I was. I was interested in girls and I was interested in sports. I wanted to be a great basketball player or a baseball player. I admired my father, who was a salesman. Ralph wasn’t interested in things like that. He didn’t care about sports. He didn’t understand them. He didn’t play them. He was interested in philosophy and he was reading books by guys like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty that I’d never even heard of. He was very eccentric. He didn’t really relate to other students in an easy way. He had to stretch across a vast terrain, as if he were born from a different world, to relate to them. I found that very, very interesting. He referred to himself, even as a teenager, as an alien, and that’s when it made sense to me. He was a different kind of guy. So we came from different worlds, but we were attracted as friends, and we got along really well,

I was really intrigued by what you write at the beginning of the book when you thank Ralph. You acknowledge his gift for his “unsettling insights.” Can you talk a little bit more about that?

You know, his point of view about the world was just different than that of anyone I’d ever known, even when he was a kid. Over this great expanse of years, talking about this relationship really is—I can’t think of the analogy offhand, but it’s like going up Everest and coming down and then going up again. Ralph and I were very close in a very eccentric way when we were kids, and yet I knew nothing about his life. His life was a mystery. We engaged in our friendship at school and at my house. My mom was a painter, and [my home] was a kind of artsy place, but I knew nothing about his house. He never invited me there. I only learned fifty years later the strange things that were going on in his house that made him the person that he was.

We were close friends when Ralph was fifteen and sixteen and seventeen years of age. Then he went to college and graduate school and became an astonishingly precocious and brilliant philosopher. He was regarded highly by the top philosophers in the world. And then this tragedy took place in his life. The family structure that he lived with, that I didn’t understand when we were kids, fell apart. His father was extremely successful, but in a dark way. He owned fourteen office buildings in New York, but they were all sort of crooked in a way. His partner was Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, who was responsible for nineteen different murders. [Ralph’s father] made a lot of money, but it wasn’t safe money, and he lost it all. And Ralph, by the time he was forty years old, had nothing. He was a homeless person, and he lived on the street for twenty-five years.

Now, during the period of time that he was living on the street, we stayed in touch, but only nominally. He would call me up collect from Miami Beach, across the street from the Fontainebleau Hotel, where, ironically, I used to vacation with my father. He would tell me about what was going on down there. But I felt he was wasting his time. I felt like, “What is Ralph doing as a homeless person?” Because my life was so different at that point. I was doing journalism, I was writing for a lot of big magazines, I was raising a family, and I was trying to make my own life. I thought that my best friend in high school was wasting his life fooling around. I had no vision of what his life was at all. I just knew that he was calling me from the street. He would talk about philosophy, he would talk about the inventions that he was creating in his head while he was living homeless. But I kept thinking, “What the hell are you doing, man? I mean, let’s get back to the real life.”

And so what you were referring to about the unsettling insights, what that relates to is this. About four years ago, when I had lost two of my closest friends, and I was sort of dealing with the aftermath of that emptiness, I wanted to find out what happened to Ralph. One day, I was able to track him down. I didn’t even know if he was still alive. I found out that he was living in a very small section eight apartment in Fort Lauderdale. I got on the phone with him, we started to talk. Remarkably, in certain ways, he was the same person I’d known in high school and he wasn’t the same person that I didn’t know when he was homeless for twenty years. There was a great rebirth in our friendship. I asked him how he would feel if I wrote a book about his life, from what happened when he was a young man to the twenty years that he was homeless to today, and he agreed to that. So the line that you’re interested in, the unsettling insights, has to do with his storytelling ability. It was remarkable. I mean, he would tell me what was going on in his life and I was just blown away again and again by his insights. That’s where that line came from.

You get that sense reading the book of how Ralph has almost this otherworldly gift of connecting with people, especially in all the relationships that he builds in the encampment in Miami Beach where he lives. Different members of the community almost view him as a therapist.

I didn’t know about any of this, really, until three years ago when we started talking about it. In the book, there’s the juxtaposition of two voices. Fred narrates some of the book and Ralph narrates about 75% of the book. The Fred character really doesn’t know anything about the homeless life. Fred lives in New York City, and he sees homeless people living on the street, but he sees them and he really doesn’t see them. They’re just sort of like the furniture of New York City. He doesn’t think of them as individual people. He thinks of them almost monolithically: as drug addicts, as people who are disturbed, as people who are kind of lower class.

Meanwhile, Ralph is living with these people at the same time, and he sees them very differently. He tells all sorts of incredible stories. For example, he tells a story about a couple that run one of these camps around Pompano Beach, Florida. The female, Melanie, before she became homeless and fell in love with Wayne, who was her husband, was a computer prodigy. She was a computer genius, and Ralph is sort of a minor computer genius himself. He’s the kind of guy that can build a computer from scratch, and he knows computers backwards and forwards. But Melanie knows much more about computers than Ralph, which is uncanny to him, that in the homeless world, he finds a woman that knows more about computers than he does. Likewise, he tells me [while living] in the Homeless World, he discovers that there are people from the outside world who come into these parks, these enclaves where homeless people live, because they want to talk to several people that they’ve met there in the past because they have such deep insight. It is almost as if the tragedy of their lives cut away so much of the pretension of living that they have a kind of pristine wisdom that most people in the outside world don’t know about. When he renders the homeless world, it’s almost like a different civilization. It’s almost like there’s a world beneath the world that we don’t know about that’s populated by rapists, drug addicts, and violent people. But also people who are wonderful, who have deep insights, who are literary, who are knowledgeable, who have love affairs. This is really unbelievable that this world exists, that I think people don’t know very much about at all. He gave me this gift in our conversations.

You write early in the book about how, as a young man, the Fred character had these aspirations of living out on the road from reading Henry Miller, George Orwell, and Jack Kerouac. I was wondering if you could talk about how your friendship with Ralph and writing this novel impacted your views on people who are homeless.

Well, I’m embarrassed about the views that I had about homeless people before really deeply delving into it with Ralph, as I alluded to before. My office is on 28th Street in Manhattan, which is the Flower District. If you walk down my block, you’ll see stores with beautiful arrangements of flowers up and down the street, and in between the stores, you’ll see homeless people. They’re sleeping on the ground, they’re sleeping on the concrete. This is not a big deal in New York, because everywhere you look, you find this. Where I live in the Soho area is a beautiful little park that was put up about four years ago. Homeless guys live on the benches, and it doesn’t smell good. Most of the people in my neighborhood are very liberal minded, but somehow they can’t deal with the strange neighbors who have come into this neighborhood.

Ralph, as I suggested before, made this much more approachable. He created an explanation for it that didn’t seem so ominous. He made me feel that this was something that we had to understand more deeply, rather than just saying, like Donald Trump says, “Take them all and lock them up. Put them in a van or send them out of the country because they’re deviants, or they come from insane asylums and jails.” Which is insane, because they don’t! Ralph enlightened me to a lot of this.

Even though the book is based on an actual relationship, it’s a novel. Can you talk about the choice to write this as a novel rather than a nonfiction account of your friendship with Ralph?

I think that’s a great question. I’m very suspicious about these clear distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. I really think serious writers of fiction are writing a hybrid, they’re writing a combination of nonfiction and fiction. I think it exists—not just in my novel, but in most novels. For example, if you talk about a book like The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, if you look at the first draft of that novel, Hemingway uses the names of his friends for the various characters in the book. It’s only when he gets into the third draft that he changes the names of the characters. But what actually happens during that trip to Pamplona is very, very close to what happened to a trip in Pamplona that Hemingway took. But like most novelists, he called it a novel. Of course, it isn’t exactly like what happened in the trip in Pamplona, but significantly, it has, in fact, characters that were on that trip complained to this day. You should have called it a memoir, but I think that’s ridiculous. Take a book like The Old Man And The Sea, which is the first novel that really gripped me. You’re reading about this fisherman who battles a huge fish. It was utterly compelling in my life. It really started me as a writer. But if you look into the research, fifteen years before [Hemingway wrote the novel], he wrote an article for a magazine about this old man, Santiago, who caught this giant marlin and the sharks ate it up. So, you know, I think that most serious novels have a nonfiction core to them. For lack of a better word, I’m saying, “I just don’t play that game.” What I say at the beginning of my book is, “This is a work of fiction based upon a true story.” Other writers do that too. It’s not just me alone, but I put it out there.

You’ve been writing for so long and written so many books. Has your approach to writing or the writing process changed since you first started out?

Yes, it absolutely has. Let me say a couple things about that. For one thing, when I started writing fiction and before I went into journalism, I was a painfully slow writer. I could spend five days on a paragraph. I just had to work it to death. In my recent years, what I’ve discovered is the kind of thing that Jack Kerouac talks about in his writing, the liberation of fast writing. I find that by writing more quickly, I come to insights without thinking about them. They just come to me, and they’re some of the best insights that I have. After I get the draft down, I slow down and rewrite, but I let it come very, very quickly. In this book, I had an astonishing breakthrough in terms of style. I would say normally, in almost all of my other books, I would take breaks when I was writing a novel or a work of nonfiction. I would take long breaks, a month or five weeks.

But in this book, once I started writing, I wrote for two years without stopping, except for maybe on Sundays. I took Sundays off, but other than that, I worked every single day. What happened was—I mean, this is a cliche, but experientially it was profound for me. What happened was the book began to write itself. I didn’t have to think about what to write next. It just came.

When I reached the end of the book, I was worried about how to end it. I didn’t know how to end the book. It scared the hell out of me. Then one night, I was falling asleep, and I woke up in a start. It was still only one o’clock in the morning, and I saw what I had to write the next day. I had a little pad behind my bed, and I jotted it down. Then for the next four months, the way I wrote the end of the book was that either before I was falling asleep or when I was waking up in the morning, I would have a dream vision of what I had to write in the next chapter. I wrote the whole last seventy-five pages of the book in that state. It came to me almost in a dream. I love the ending of the book that I conceived of. I had no idea that would be the ending of the book until I started having these strange voices from deep inside. I think all of that came in part because of the fact that I never stopped writing from the beginning to the end.

I love that. Finally, what role the has the library played in your life?

I have an office now on 28th Street and this is sort of my cave. This is where I go to do my work. But when I was writing Searching for Bobby Fischer, I was living in our apartment and I had two children. There was a lot of action there. It wasn’t a place to write a book, so I was always working at the library. I would go the NYU library, which was very close to my house. A lot of that book was written in libraries. I’ll often spend part of the summer in Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, and there’s a beautiful library there, the Chilmark library. This summer, I’ll be working on something else, and I’ll go to the Chilmark library. Having all these books around me will be very inspiring. There are quiet rooms where I can work, and the people that work there know who I am. They give me a wave. So libraries have been wonderful in my life. I’ve had my romance with libraries. I used to find them intimidating. I would wonder, “Am I going to fit in here?” But libraries are wonderful and they’ve been very helpful to me.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post Fred Waitzkin On The Lifelong Friendship At The Heart Of His New Novel first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Your background is in improv and sketch comedy and also late-night television. How did you get into cartoons?

I’ve always loved cartooning. I’ve always drawn cartoons in some fashion, but my earnest entry into cartooning for The New Yorker really started with the pandemic. I was performing frequently at night, and then all of a sudden all of the performance venues shut down. I didn’t really have a creative outlet at night anymore and I had a lot of free time. I decided to start submitting weekly to The New Yorker, literally, like, March 2020, right when the shutdown happened. And then I submitted every week since.

What’s the relationship between your background in improv and sketch with cartooning? Does one feed into the other?

I do think it’s really all the same muscle—or it might not be the exact same muscle, but it’s the same cluster of muscles. Like if your comedy is the arm, maybe sketch writing is the bicep, and joke writing is the tricep. I think it’s all sort of the same thing, it’s just sort of executing it in a slightly different way.

I really think that all comedy writing is effectively the same. It’s all set up-punchline, and the difference is just what form it takes in the end. In stand up, for example, you might have a real thing that happened to you as the setup, and then your commentary on it is the punchline. But in cartooning, the setup is basically the image and the caption is the punchline. It’s still that same basic structure, set-up punchline, but it’s just a slightly different way of getting to the same place.

Was there something appealing to you about working in a more visual medium?

I think the challenge is drawing stuff that you’ve never drawn before. For example, I will very rarely draw a cartoon that takes place outside of a car, because I can’t draw cars. And there’s really no joke that’s worth it to me to try to figure out how to draw a car. (laughs) And there are other things that I won’t draw. If it’s a crowd scene, I have to really like the joke to make it worth it, because it just takes so long to draw those people. But I think the benefit of the image is that it increases your efficiency, because you can say so much with just the image than if it were just a straight verbal joke. It would take you a much longer time to establish that, so I like the efficiency that that an image packs.

Woven throughout the book is this long conversation that you’re having with a person where you’re kind of investigating your relationship with comedy and why you’re a cartoonist. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I was just curious about how that made its way into the book?

When I set out to write a book, I was very deliberate about making it not feel like I had just printed out my Instagram and told people to buy it. I really wanted it to be a complete thing itself, and that’s kind of hard to accomplish when what you make is a bunch of discrete jokes. And you know, in the end, it really is a cartoon compilation. You can find throughlines, of course, because I have similar themes that I play with a lot, but I wanted to give some sort of throughline that made it feel more like a book, not just a series of images. I came up with the introduction first, and that really was born out of a sincere exploration of why I do what I do and am who I am. The others sort of flowed naturally through that. So without spoiling the content, I’ll just say that those really are earnest explorations of things I spend a lot of time thinking about. I wanted to include something thoughtful and interesting that wasn’t necessarily just a single panel gag cartoon.

I really loved it too because it was a level of self-introspection that isn’t often present in a compilation like this.

I’m really glad you said that. I was honestly a little self-conscious about including it, because one of the things I really like about cartooning is that it’s not me, that I can hide behind these characters. Putting myself in the book was a difficult decision. That’s the truth. But I also felt like I named the book, Well, This Is Me, and I wanted to fulfill that promise and actually put a little bit more of myself in there. And even though I know that, in a sense, my body of work is representative of me in its own way, I also wanted to have a little bit more of a literal interpretation in there.

You’ve divided the book into sections. How did that come about?

It’s broken into four sections, “Life,” “Love,” “Work,” and “Play.” In my first draft, it actually had something like twelve sections, and they were a little bit more granular. It would be something like, “Well, This Is Healthcare,” “Well, This Is Teaching,” etcetera. So they were more specific. When I read through it that way, I felt like it hurt all the individual jokes to have them butted up against other similar ones. I wanted to spread them out a little bit more, so I picked those four chapters. I deliberately picked them because most cartoons could fall into most of them, and you sort of could pick what’s the category that fits the most that would also serve the general flow of the book. I treated [organizing the cartoons] a little bit like putting together a running order for a sketch show, where you want to keep similar scenes away from one another. You want to have a big group scene and then a two-person relationship scene and a couple of blackouts. I wanted to just keep that variety, and I felt like those chapters allowed me the most freedom to do that.

You already mentioned this, but a lot of the cartoons in the compilation are ones that people wouldn’t have previously seen before, either online or in The New Yorker. What went into deciding what would go into the book and what would stay out?

It was mostly a lot of obsessive ruminating. (laughs) I also crowdsourced a good amount. I relentlessly abused my friends and sent them things and said, “Hey, do you think this is good or is this bad? Do you think this should be in the book?” Or, if I was picking between two, I would ask, “Should it be this or should it be that?” Especially because this was my first book, I felt anxious about what I should include, and so I leaned on my friends to help me with those decisions.

Was were there any feedback that surprised you?

Yeah, yeah. I’m actually pretty consistently surprised by the cartoons that people like a lot, and also the cartoons that they don’t really respond to. I think that my favorites almost are never my audience’s favorites, and vice versa. I don’t think I’ve really developed a strong ability to predict what people are going to like, but I also have no problem deferring to my audience. If two people tell me a cartoon works, even if I don’t feel great about it, I’m like, “Great.” I believe them. If I love a cartoon and a couple of people tell me it doesn’t work, I also believe them. Not to wax poetic about the nature of comedy, but the audience is right. If they laugh, they laugh, and if they don’t, they don’t. My intention going into it matters, but I tend to defer to the audience.

Since you started cartooning in earnest, is there anything you’ve noticed that’s evolved in your style or have you been aware of how you’ve developed as a cartoonist over that time?

I would say my style has evolved from absolutely horrible art drawn by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing to slightly less horrible art drawn by someone who has four years of experience. (laughs) The big thing that I needed to unlock first was what my faces were going to look like. I sort of landed on these dot eyes and pendulous noses. Once I had that, I built everything else around it. I recently started using a thicker marker, which I like. I used to draw these really thin lines. And I draw hands now! I used to just put all the hands in the pockets, and now I’ll draw hands half the time. (laughs)

Looking back on your cartooning experience, is there a cartoon that you’ve surprised yourself by, or something that you’ve worked on that maybe 2020 Asher would not have thought he was capable of?

I think I drew a mouse successfully for the first time a couple weeks ago. I feel like most animals when I draw them for the first time look nothing like the animal, and then eventually I can get them to sort of look like the animal, but they don’t really look like my style. And then the twentieth time is when they look both like the animal and my style. That’s kind of true of all things. I remember the first couple of times I drew a dentist’s office, I eventually got it to look like a dentist’s office, but it didn’t look like my style. It looked like I was drawing a dentist’s office using a photo reference of a dentist’s office, because that’s what I was doing. (laughs) And then eventually, I was able to draw a dentist’s office in my style that looked like it belonged in my world. And so I feel like that every individual thing sort of takes about ten iterations before it feels both like the thing and my style instead of just one or the other.

And finally, what role has the library played in your life?

Honestly, the library has played an enormous role in my life. Growing up, we used to go to the library all the time. I don’t even know how many books I owned, but there were books that I would check out at the library twenty, thirty times over the years. All the Calvin and Hobbes books, Bob Kane’s Batman, Lil’ Abner, Bloom County. I used to just sit in the library and read cartoon books for hours. As a kid, they played a huge role, and then into my adult life as well. In college, I spent maybe 90% of my time in libraries. Even now, one of my favorite places to go is the Brooklyn Public Library. So yeah, I love libraries. I think they’re the best.

The post Asher Perlman On Obsessive Ruminating, Getting Personal, And Drawing Hands first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Ordering the Classics

Manga has exploded in popularity recently, but the genre has existed long enough to have its own canon. You wouldn’t start a British literature collection without Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and manga holds a similar group of titles considered to be essential classics. Many of these series include Dragon Ball by Akira Toriyama, YuYu Hakusho by Yoshihiro Togashi, Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue, and Sailor Moon by Naoko Takeuchi. Classic titles like these will serve as a stable foundation to grow a manga collection and popular manga titles will appeal to those who are interested in the genre, but don’t know where to start.

Ordering and Weeding Titles

Manga is challenging to collect due to the high total of long-running series. For instance, 105 English language-translated volumes of the series One Piece by Eiichiro Oda have been released in America. This should not deter you from ordering long-running series, as a series wouldn’t be long-running if it wasn’t popular. Yet there are two things to consider if your library decides to collect a long-running series: cost and shelf space. Collecting a long-running series will affect your budget. Is your budget substantial enough to collect every volume of the series? Is your budget big enough to also order other series? Collecting a long-running series will also affect shelf space for your manga collection.

The most crucial tip for weeding is to avoid selectively removing volumes from a long-running series. Doing so can leave readers with an incomplete experience. Instead, consider whether other libraries in your system hold certain titles before making any decisions.

Short Stories

Short story collections are a great addition to any manga library because they require minimal commitment from readers. Each story can usually be enjoyed independently, allowing readers to skip around without missing key plot points. Additionally, since these collections are not part of continuous series, you won’t risk having incomplete sets if you choose to stop ordering them.

Beast Complex by Paru Itagaki is a series of standalone short stories that bring together different carnivore and herbivore animals as they try to overcome conflict. These unique situations vary from a crocodile and a gazelle cohosting a cooking show in “The Crocodile and the Gazelle” to a snow leopard finding out that her movie co-star, a Japanese deer, had a hunger for method acting in “The Japanese Deer and the Snow Leopard.” Itagaki’s blending of different characters with unique moral situations brings to mind Krzysztof Kieslowski’s television series Dekalog, which dramatized moral conflicts of the Ten Commandments.

Junji Ito is a prolific author of horror short stories, a unique storyteller whose work doesn’t shy away from certain themes such as collecting or idol worship. Ito also doesn’t shy away from incorporating an assortment of objects into his stories. Two noteworthy stories incorporating a unique theme and object are “Hanging Blimp” and “Used Record.” “Hanging Blimp” is a deflating tale about balloons that appear with people’s faces on them, while “Used Record” is a story about a vinyl record with a deadly sound. These series can serve as a gateway to the authors’ longer works, such as BeaStars by Paru Itagaki and Uzumaki by Junji Ito.

Genres

Manga is an art style that serves its readers in various genres. The slice-of-life genre, for example, focuses on everyday life. Prominent titles include the comedy manga series Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san by Honda, which is about working in a bookstore, and The Way of the Househusband by Kousuke Oono, which follows a former Japanese mafia member who enters the dangerous world of homemaking. There are also sports manga series such as Eyeshield 21 by Riichiro Inagaki, which focuses on the American game of football. A unique series in another popular genre, action, is Gunsmith Cats by Kenichi Sonoda, which follows two female gunsmiths who fight crime in Chicago.

Reprints

Another useful collection tip is that older manga series like Eyeshield 21 can be difficult to acquire. Many older series are out-of-print in English, making them limited on the secondhand market and bearing high costs. Manga also doesn’t have a classics series in the English language, like Barnes and Noble Classics, which reprints popular older titles to make them accessible for a broad, contemporary audience. Despite these challenges, manga reprints occasionally occur, so I’d advise you to check publishers’ or booksellers’ websites consistently to check for reprinted manga.

The post Building and Curating a Manga Collection to Meet Growing Community Demand first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

I really loved reading this book, yet I found I had a hard time describing it when friends asked me about it. How do you describe the book?

I think that makes sense that you maybe had some trouble, because I think the book has a sort of unusual form. The way that I describe it, I like the words “relationship multiverse.” I think of it as a relationship multiverse in which each chapter offers an alternate outcome to this queer relationship between Myriam and Allison. The earlier article chapters reflect the dreamier or optimistic state of being in a relationship. As you get to know the characters, things get a bit more complicated and a little less rose-tinted.

Each chapter shows us a different perspective on Allison and Myriam’s personalities and causes us to rethink certain things that we thought we knew about them. How did you go about tracing the arc of this relationship going from, as you say, the optimistic stages of an early relationship to the end of a relationship?

I think the answer is a bit less writerly and a bit more real-worldly. Some of the earlier hypotheticals that I wrote when I was actually in the beginning of a relationship, they were these small microfictions. It was my first queer relationship, I was really in love, and so I came up with all these dreamy scenarios. As the relationship didn’t go quite how I had expected, I came back to those dreamy hypotheticals and added on new ones. Eventually, the relationship started disintegrating. So in real time, through each hypothetical, I was analyzing what was going on or what had been going on in the relationship and trying to make sense of it. The relationship had a natural arc, so that made the arc the book.

This might be an obvious question, but was a relationship you had the genesis of the book?

Yeah, I would say it was the genesis. Anyone who reads the book can clearly tell that it’s fiction. Also, there was definitely some emotional truth propelling me to write it and some kind of existential questions about love. But also I am a writer. I was trying to write a good book and trying to develop my craft. I really was not focusing on making it true.

The book is so exciting to read because you really have the sense that anything can happen. Some of the chapters play with different genres. I was curious about who were the writers that were meaningful to you as you were growing up, but then also in your writing career?

An early influence when I was a teenager was Leonard Cohen, but specifically his fiction, which definitely gets pretty weird and surreal sometimes, and poetic and dark. Beautiful Losers was one of the first books that I read that really floored me when I was in high school. Similarly, at that time, I read Katherine Dunne’s Geek Love, which was also surreal, horrifying, hilarious and so beautifully written and unlike anything that I had read. Later in life, in my twenties, I felt this literary revolution when I discovered the works of people writing surreal stuff that was hilarious and kind of out there. I’m thinking of Helen Oyemi, George Saunders, and Miranda July. I shouldn’t say “surreal” as a blanket statement for all of those writers, but people who were taking risks. I ended up actually studying with George Saunders. I just love the way that he does these kind of weird things with such a high level of craft and this unwavering vulnerability.

I love that you also referenced Leonard Cohen, because I think there’s a real playfulness with language that you have, specifically your figurative language. Can you talk about your approach to playing with phrases or language?

I think the Leonard Cohen comparison fits because in his fiction, he’s such a poet. I grew up writing mostly poetry. I think having the perfect metaphor, simile, or sound to a phrase was the ultimate exciting thing for me and what brought me to writing in the first place. I was doing that in high school and in my early twenties, and then I realized that I wanted more in some ways. I would write these things that had cool sounds and cool images, and that was kind of it for me. I’m not dissing poetry, because people take it to the next level. But for me, taking it to the next level was starting to write fiction and being like, “Wow, I have no idea how to do this. This is so hard!” (laughs) That gave me a challenge that was stimulating and made me really push myself.

The whole idea of pushing yourself as a writer seems to really come through with this book. I’m thinking in terms of how you’re almost relentless in how you examine Allison and Myriam. A big moment for me was the first time a chapter was told from Allison’s point of view and we saw how Allison viewed Myriam. What was it like for you to switch perspectives throughout the novel and be able to examine a character in a different way than we had maybe seen her before?

I think it was both extremely fun and extremely difficult. For me, one of the perks of writing autofiction and writing a character with my own name is I have such permission to be mean to that character or make fun of her as much as I want. Usually with fiction you have to be really compassionate to all of your characters, but if it’s you, you can kind of get away with anything. (laughs) That was the part where I had fun, because I could be so hyperbolic in making fun of Myriam. If people read the book, they’ll see things go pretty awry with her and it’s kind of a big farce. So that was the fun part. The difficult part and the necessary part was examining other people’s perceptions of me—or maybe the way that I felt perceived by other people—especially in a relationship that really shook my sense of self in a way that was hard to recover from. I feel like I had to go through all the ways that I thought I might be bad or culpable. I had to examine the things that were brought up for me in this difficult relationship really closely to make sense of them. It made sense to use the Allison perspective to do that. And I don’t literally think that my ex was thinking all these horrible things about me. I think she actually loved me, but I think it was something that I needed to explore.

As a reader I always felt very taken care of, in terms of how you were maintaining the emotional truth of these characters while still taking the reader to all these different, wild worlds. Could you talk about how you approached the tone of the novel?

I had “reader perception” at the front of my consciousness the whole time. If I’m honest, I don’t think I would have gone quite so far in certain places if it wasn’t for entertainment’s sake, you know? I worked really hard on this book. And if I worked really hard, it’s not necessarily because I had things that I absolutely needed to process on the page, because I have therapy for that. I worked really hard on the book because I love literature and I love reading. I always wanted to make it as enjoyable as possible for people to read in terms of setting the stakes really high and making people turn pages really fast. I have examined every single sentence a million times to make sure that it was completely evocative and fluid. In literature, I really like when people are bold and pushing boundaries. I felt like I was doing that for readers, too. In some ways, it was difficult to have the emotional truth in there. Even though a lot of people are reading this book [thinking], “It’s so fun and hilarious. It’s a wild ride,” the layers underneath were very difficult experiences for me. But as a reader that’s why I read. It’s for that vulnerability and human connection, and so I think I was doing those hard things for readers.

The book is so compact, about 215 pages, yet still feels very dense in terms of how much ground you’re able to cover in such a brief span of time. How did you decide what length this book should be?

If it isn’t clear, the book is a novel because it has a greater arc and it follows the same characters. It’s a multiverse, but each chapter also stands on its own because I was a young writer and I came into writing through the short story. I think if I write a more traditional novel next, I wonder if it will be that same kind of very compact, dense experience. With the short story form, it’s so important that every single sentence moves the story [forward] and escalates. I think I did fit a lot of lyricism in there, but there’s not as many moments to ponder, as in a more traditional novel.

That seems to be of a piece with your background as a poet too, in terms of every line being so crucial to the greater work.

I think it’s also wonderful when people take a whole chapter to reflect or something like that. I love when writers do that too, and I might experiment with a slightly slower pace in the future. But also because it’s my first book, I think you need to need to earn readers’ trust if you’re going to go a little slower. I just wanted to be like, “Okay, I’m going to write this thing and I’m not going to let anyone put it down  for one second.”

Another really delightful thing about this book is how Myriam, Alison, and other characters express themselves creatively in different ways. We see them as musicians, self-help authors, and even amateur wrestlers at one point. What was appealing to you about exploring these two characters through all their different creative exploits in the different multiverses?

I’m not saying it wasn’t totally intentional, but it wasn’t fully intentional in the sense that’s just kind of my life, you know? It was also a part of that relationship that I was in at the time, this kind of fixation with different kinds of creative expression. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a little bit too common to have a writer in the piece of art, because I feel like writers are always writing everything, right?  So you watch a movie and oh, there just happens to be a writer, because the writer’s just projecting themself in that [character].  But I think also if you’re making art it creates this opportunity for meta-analysis to have an artist in there.

Some of those parts I feel like I should give credit to my community, which is pretty much the Vancouver queer community. There’s just so much incredible art, especially performance art, going on here. Vancouver was a very groundbreaking scene for drag. Having seen it evolve over the past decade or so, it has just turned into some of the wildest performance art that I’ve seen. Definitely a lot of the performance that I wrote in the book was inspired by all the great art around me.

You’re French Canadian and you write in English. I was wondering if you could talk about if your French Canadian identity has any impact on your writing?

I think in some ways—I don’t want to be a snobby French person—but I think the lyricism and poetry of my writing might come from that. I’m also a translator between English and French, so I feel like I can speak on this with some authority, but when you translate something from French to English, the English is often so much shorter, because French is just so dense. It has so many layers of meaning that have to be explicit in the sentence, and things that you can just skip over completely in English, if that makes sense. I think that love of really rich, multi-layered language has impacted my writing. Also, I’m French Canadian. We do have a very specific culture that’s a little bit less restrained, say, than in North American Anglophone culture. We’re very direct and there’s definitely a crude sense of humor that’s very common, and I think that my sense of humor is fairly cultural.

You created Out-Front, an LGBTQIA+ writing group. Can you talk about how that group came to be?

As far as Out-Front goes, that’s defunct for the moment unfortunately. Out-Front was a queer writing group that I started when I was at school at Syracuse, and its goal was more or less to question the role that we were being given as queer writers and explore all the different possible things that we can write. I think partly it came from being in an MFA program and being in an environment that felt very unfamiliar to me. The Syracuse University MFA program is very hard to get into, so once I got in, it felt more competitive and honestly more ambitious than I was used to being, if that makes sense. There were a lot of people from Ivy League [universities] with important connections, and I had just been writing in this way that was completely disconnected from any academic environment or any famous writers. I was completely shocked when I got into that MFA program, because I just didn’t see myself as that kind of person. I wanted to be in it and I believed in what I was doing, but it was definitely a different environment for me.  I think I just wanted a little piece of home. For me, that meant making this queer community that was there to just mess around and be really supportive of each other and clap really loud when anyone did anything. That felt more nourishing and important to my art practice than the more intense MFA thing.

And finally, what role has the public library played in your life?

I have very early formative memories of the library. One of the more telling anecdotes kind of explains how I did not become a YA writer. When I was in elementary school, we would go to the library once a month and we were allowed to get comic books instead of traditional books. It was so controversial that I passed on that option. Everyone [else] would be in the kids and YA section and, being a little weirdo, I would go hide with old, dusty books and read things that were completely outside of my comprehension level. (laughs) I also had my first writers talk in a library when I was in elementary school. I was eight-years-old and I still remember it perfectly. It made such an impact on me, I was on the edge of my chair. Going throughout my whole writing career, libraries have been important, but that’s maybe my origin story.

The post Myriam Lacroix On Her Spectacular Debut Novel first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

This book tackles so many big themes—gender, racism, politics. Is there a specific aspect you want to begin the interview talking about?

One of the things that is really important to me—and you’ll see this as a thread throughout all my novels—but the thread I’m really passionate about exploring is what it means to be a yellow body in America. With the exception of my first book that had a white protagonist, I’ve been really specific about casting Japanese and Japanese Americans at the forefront of my novels. Sometimes it comes across as exploring identity, but other times that’s not so much the focus. That’s what I wanted to do with The Return of Ellie Black. We have a Japanese American detective who’s a heroine, but her identity is not the issue in the book.

Chelsey is such a compelling character. Can you talk about how she’s uniquely situated to be the ideal detective for this case?

She’s a detective in a very small town and most of the community is white. She’s one of maybe one or two women who work in the precinct. And because of her family history—she’s been adopted into this white family, she had a sister that was the biological child of her parents who disappeared and died at the hands of a violent boyfriend—Chelsey is called to do this work on behalf of her sister. Not only that, but also on behalf of her adoptive father, who was a police chief. Her race and the fact that she’s a woman play a vital part in the novel in the sense that she deeply empathizes with these victims, with these women, and women who are put into corners and aren’t always paid attention to. She goes through in her narration about how when a girl goes missing, there’s this calculation where they use wealth and race to determine how many resources are going to be put forth to find this girl, which is a true thing that we find when girls go missing in the United States. There are certain women who make headlines, and there are certain women who don’t. I think Chelsey can very much see herself as one of those women who probably wouldn’t make a headline.

On the other end, we have Ellie, who’s seventeen when she’s kidnapped. Can you talk about what went into creating her?

So as you know, the novel has multiple perspectives and it uses the past present narration. Ellie’s perspective is first person and it’s told from a past perspective. She was actually the first character that I wrote. Usually I write a novel from beginning to end and all the chapters in sequential order, but Ellie’s voice was so strong in my head that I wrote all of her past chapters first. Then I was like, “What am I going to do now?” (laughs) I wanted to bring her into the present. Then I wrote the novel from her voice in the present too, so there is a version of this that exists where it’s Ellie’s perspective throughout the whole book. But that didn’t work in terms of plotting a thriller, twists, and everything like that. It just really dragged the narrative down.

But she was the first character that I thought of. The first image I had of Ellie was a girl who had been missing. She was presumed dead, running through this forest, finding these hikers and saying, “I think I’m missing.” I’ve always been really interested in true crime. And I’ve always specifically been interested in stories about kidnap victims who’ve returned, like Jaycee Duggar, Elizabeth Smart, and Amanda Berry. It actually kind of worried me because I was like, why am I so fascinated by these stories? You kind of worry about yourself, you’re like, “What does this mean?” But I’ve unpacked it a little bit and I think what drew me to that is the endurance of the human spirit.  How do we survive these things that might have otherwise killed us?

I’m fascinated by you talking about how you wrote all of Ellie’s stuff first, because the book is so deftly and intricately plotted. I’m just curious about what the writing process was for you with this. Was it something that you heavily outlined?

This was actually a book that I drafted way back in 2016 when I sold my first young adult novel. This was supposed to be the second book in a young adult thriller series. I wrote it, handed it into my editor, and she did not like it for a very good reason: it was way too dark. (laughs) It was way too gritty for the young adult market. I was really devastated because I thought that it was a good book. For some reason when she said she passed on it, that equaled, “Oh, I guess it’s not a good book,” which isn’t necessarily true. I put it on a shelf and I wrote something drastically different, but the characters stayed with me. I would go back and forth to it. When I published my adult novel, Mika In Real Life, it opened the door for me. It crystallized that this should be an adult novel, and that it should include adult characters. I wrote those other perspectives like Jimmy, the father, and Kat, Ellie’s mom, and Chelsey Calhoun, probably in a period of like three months. It broke the story wide open for me. Chelsey was always a detective in the novel, she was always doggedly chasing Ellie, but once I figured out that she needed to really be the main character of the novel, that’s when it all came to fruition.

The setting of the book is so important. The town where Ellie and Chelsey live is such an isolated community, where everyone’s lives are on top of each other and interconnected.

It’s actually based on a real place in Washington called Long Beach. I have relatives who live on Long Beach, so I grew up visiting there. If you look at the map of Washington, you’ll see there’s this very thin strip of land that juts out into the ocean, Long Beach. There’s only one way in and one way out. Quite a few years ago, there was a big New York Times article about how the Pacific Northwest is going to have a massive earthquake sometime in the next 100 years. It was quite terrifying. I live on the West Coast, so it was a really big deal when that came out, especially for places like Long Beach. That whole strip of land would be underwater if this happens. There’s kind of this existential threat looming over the town. Someday a tsunami is going to come in and wash it all away, and the roads will be washed away too if this massive tsunami hits. I thought that paired well with the survival theme in the novel.

One of the really compelling relationships in the book is between Ellie and her psychiatrist. Their scenes seem to be handled with a lot of care. Could talk about what went into creating that relationship?

Trauma is something that I’m really interested in looking at. I looked at intergenerational trauma in another novel, and trauma is something that I’ve experienced too. When I had my kids, my daughter had a very severe febrile seizure. She had to be intubated and we weren’t sure if she was going to come back. When I was working on this novel, I was also seeing a therapist for that experience, and we did a lot of EMDR work. We actually had a lot of side conversations about how she would have treated someone like this [who had been kidnapped]. She helped me form the relationship between Ellie and her psychiatrist. But what I learned from my own trauma and from talking to my counselor is how we carry trauma in our body and how it chemically alters someone. It changes you on a cellular level. I’ve always thought that was fascinating.

I also wanted the psychiatrist to play a role in Ellie’s character arc in that there is hope for Ellie. That was really the main purpose of having this psychiatrist there. There’s a line at the end of the book about how Ellie is going to learn how to carry the grief in one hand and hope in the other. That was really the purpose of having those scenes. I feel like they end a dark story on a hopeful note. At least, I hope so.

I’ve read some reviews about the gritty nature of the book. I would want people to know that was intentional. There’s a tendency to gentle violence against women sometimes. I thought it was important for this book to really give Ellie her voice back in telling her whole story, however gruesome it is and hard to hear.

You’ve written so widely across a bunch of different genres, but I was just curious to hear who were the writers that were influential to you, both growing up and then also as a writer yourself?

I read a lot when I was little, which is probably no surprise because I feel like every writer’s like, “I read a lot when I was little.” (laughs) I read all the stuff that little girls read. I read Ella Enchanted and stuff like that, but I don’t remember reading a Japanese American author or seeing a Japanese American character in any of the literature that I consumed. I actually didn’t see an Asian character in film in a positive portrayal until I was sixteen, and that was when Mulan came out.

I think that for me, it kind of shut off that valve, that belief that I could be a writer. I loved reading, but I never really believed that I could be a writer because I had never seen any writers who looked like me or any characters who looked like me in books. So I went along this path. I became a teacher and I continued to read. I read anything from young adult to romance to thrillers. Most recently some of the writers that I’ve been reading is because I’ve been into thrillers but We Begin At The End by Chris Whitaker, I read Notes On An Execution by Tanya Kafka, which is a brilliant book. It’s so smart. But then in between those I read Annie Bot by Sierra Greer. It was a really smart take on artificial intelligence.

The book moves so quickly and is really a page-turner. What went into creating that sense of pace? You’re spinning a lot of plates in terms of the character development, getting out backstory, and giving the reader time to catch their breath in between.

It turned out to be a roller coaster. There needs to be peaks and valleys, places where you want the reader to be holding their breath, but then you want them to be exhaling too. And so again, with those counselor chapters, those are kind of the exhale of the novel.

But if I were to think about it in a visual way, it’s like you have all these threads that are loose at the beginning, and then you’re trying to braid them all together so you have something that’s really tightly knit by the end of the novel. That was probably the most challenging thing for me, to keep all those threads alive and make sure that they all were part of that braid by the end. Because sometimes when you read a thriller, there can be something that’s dangling, and then you don’t feel like the twist has been earned.

I’m curious about your career as a teacher prior to becoming a writer. How has the time spent teaching informed your writing career?

As I reflect now on the books that I’ve written, I realize how much I’ve picked up things along the way that leant themselves to novels. I didn’t know that I was supposed to be a writer for a long time. I did other jobs too. I was a teacher, a florist, and a candle maker. I was an entomologist for a while. I just kept hopping around these different things to try to figure out what I wanted to do. When I was teaching, I worked at a low-income school that had quite a few foster kids and kids from troubled homes. The first book that I wrote had these kids who were in foster care and lost in the system. That’s one of the direct things that I can think of how my teaching career informed my writing, but you know, as I as I go on, it seems even more and more obvious. I’m going to start a new book right now that’s about motherhood and it’s about the bond between children and their parents. I became a parent like a couple years ago, so all of these things are reflections of my life. I think they’re also cathartic too because they help me process things that I have questions about or things that I want to explore more.

All of the high school characters are so vibrant, and not the kind of kids you necessarily see represented in culture.

I was a bad kid. I was one of those girls who no one really thought was going to make much of myself. I flunked my first year of high school so they sent me to this magnet school, which was kind of a holding place for kids until we graduated. Instead of taking tests, they just let us like write reports and stuff like that, just shuffle us through. I think that came through when I was drafting Ellie. I could have been one of those girls too that did the things that you shouldn’t do, that went to parties, that made “bad decisions,” even though they’re just kids.

Finally, what role have libraries played in your life?

Libraries have been vital in my life. I grew up as the youngest of four kids. My family didn’t have a lot of money, which meant we didn’t buy books. I remember very vividly going to the library with my mom, who was a reading specialist. You could check out as many books as you could carry. I remember the feel of those big stacks of books as I carried them out of the library. We would go every weekend, and it was always something that I looked forward to. That’s really where my love of reading began, with my mom being a reading specialist and taking me to the library. I don’t think that I would be where I am now without librarians ushering me into this world.

The post Emiko Jean On The Role Of Hope In Her Riveting New Thriller first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

I wanted to start by talking about the role of music in your life. It starts with you listening to Jill Scott and music plays a huge part throughout the book. Can you talk about your relationship with music?

My parents always listened to music—just like every other Black family, cleaning the house and listening to Anita Baker, Patti LaBelle and Sadé. My love of music really comes from my parents. As you’ve read the book, you know I love theme songs of shows. I just always thought they were so catchy and fun. 

When I got older, I was always very much into the lyrics. I’d be the person that would record a song on the radio and then keep playing it to write the lyrics out for no reason. I just found an escape in music. Like in my Fiona Apple time, if I was going through a breakup, I’d be like, “Yeah! She’s speaking for me!” (laughs)

I’ve always been into hip hop, but I think that my love of hip hop really started and was cultivated when I discovered breakdancing and graffiti. I got deeper into it once I realized that women were not recognized as pioneers in the game.  They were all underground or behind the mic, and I was like, “No, we need to figure out a way to highlight them.”

Is that what prompted you to work as a music journalist when you were in your twenties?

It definitely is. Every element of hip hop—from breakdancing to beatboxing to being a DJ to being an MC to being a graffiti artist—I was not talented enough to do any of those things professionally or even as an artist. But I didn’t see that as a bad thing, because it was like, “I’m a fan,” you know? And I think that there’s a space for fans. But what I did know how to do was write. I just reached out to a friend and was like, “I’d love to start writing more about the culture—the women in the culture, the underground culture.”  And it was when everybody was coming out with their little websites with forums in the day. So that’s what started it, being able to take two things I love—writing and hip hop—and combining them.

The reader goes on such a journey with you. We start with you as a community college student finding out you got an internship at the White House and end where you are now, running your own company. Can you talk about how you chose to structure your memoir?

I had to remember that a memoir is not your whole life. I’m educated in a lot of things, but I’m very clear when I need to say, “I don’t know how to do this.” I’ll admit that I don’t know! (laughs) It was very scary writing a memoir, because I had to pick a certain time in my life. But that’s so revealing. I had this really cool job and I went through this really excruciating impostor syndrome thing. I wanted to grab the reader in the beginning by describing what my internship and that process looked like. As soon as I did that, I was like, “Okay, now I want to take people back to the time where I first started feeling like I wasn’t worthy,” which was as a child. I wanted to set that up so people saw the different worlds. I didn’t want it to just be, “Okay, she had this thing at the White House, great. Now, let’s go through her whole career.”  I’d be doing myself and everyone else a disservice if I decided to say, “I have impostor syndrome and I had this job. I didn’t know where [the imposter syndrome] came from.” No, I knew where it came from.

I tried to structure it in a way so people saw the evolution of me through the book, so they didn’t get to the glory days of like, “I went to therapy and am now doing better, blah blah blah.” I didn’t want to skip the hard parts. I tried to put [the hard parts] throughout, and it was very important for me to put it there in the beginning.

As a reader, I definitely had the sense of watching someone learn and grow throughout the course of not only a lifetime but also the eight or so years that you focus on at the White House. What went into deciding what stories to include and what stories to leave out?

I think a lot of deciding was my own fear of how people would receive some of the things that ultimately could have been in there. I think although it’s my own truth—and I was walking my truth, I believe in my truth—I’m still not inconsiderate of people’s feelings. Even if they did me wrong, it does no good for me to put out this energy of “this person effed me over.” It doesn’t solve anything. That’s not what I’m trying to do, right? I decided to leave out those stories, but I also decided to leave out a lot of the more traumatic or triggering things. I believe that if you lived through something you’re allowed to talk about it. I don’t feel like we should be policing when people need to talk about their trauma or not. If you don’t want to read it, don’t read it. But for me, this memoir is focused on my White House time and so that’s what I wanted to highlight. I knew that people wanted to hear the fun stories and I knew they wanted to hear the insider stuff. I tried to put stuff in there that would catch the reader’s eye, make them laugh, or go behind the scenes. Something like, “she lives in this world,” but also for [readers] to say, “Wow, she was on top of the world with these amazing, fun stories, but she still felt this way.” I wanted to humanize it a little bit because if I just stuck to White House stories all the time, come on! “Oh, wow, this privileged person! Look at her writing a book about parties!” No, I wanted to be humanized, because I feel like if I share real experiences and real stories from my life then people can relate to me more. They can maybe see themselves finding more confidence in themselves and reverse this imposter syndrome that so many people feel.

One of the really poignant parts of your book is when you write about an experience you had while working at an Au Bon Pain as a teenager. For me, I was able to draw parallels to your experience as a high school student to similar experiences you would have had in later work environments.

Exactly. I think that that’s the thing. I also wanted to make sure people knew that I didn’t walk out the womb to the White House. I worked at a mall, you know what I mean? I say that because I wanted to show the different levels that exist when it comes to Black women in the workplace, or somebody who’s more bold or somebody that speaks a lot. I wanted to show that it’s on all levels. When I worked there, we didn’t have social media, so we didn’t know anybody else was going through this.

I want to get back to talking about applying for the White House internship, because that chapter specifically is so crucial to the book. You write, “I wasn’t what I would call the ideal candidate, but I was the right one.” Can you talk about what you meant by that?

I feel like I was not the person who, if you were putting [together a list of] who wants a White House Internship, like no one was coming to find Deesha Dyer in West Philadelphia, you know? Nobody was looking for this lack-of-formal-education-kind of person who had been evicted and had no money. That wasn’t ideal, right? But I say I was the right one because those qualities absolutely made me the right candidate for it. I had this community background. I was thirty-one when applying for the internship. I feel like I was right for that job. There was a mystique that surrounds White House internships and it’s just like, “Let’s get our ideal candidate because that’s what people want.” It’s the normalcy of it all. And that’s the Harvard grad or so-and-so’s daughter. No, actually, that’s your ideal candidate, but that’s not the right one, because you perhaps need somebody who’s had some life experience or somebody who has a different take on the political world. We had a Black President for the first time and a Black First Lady. So maybe you don’t need the ideal person. Maybe you need a person who will look at it and say, “This is new, this is something different, and I want to approach this in a different way because we’re actually dealing with a different President, a different First Lady and a different agenda.”

When you explore your time after the internship and you’re back in Philly, you write, “It was safer to stay in a box I knew instead of constructing one with an unknown outcome from scratch.” It seems that so much of this book is how you learned to become comfortable with taking the leap into unknown outcomes. What shifted in to allow you to begin doing that?

Honestly, I think some of it was age and maturity. At that point I had a list of things I had accomplished, really big things and really hard things. I was just like, “I have a roster of evidence that when I take a chance, it works or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t work, I don’t die.”  It’s hard—I’m not going to minimize that when you get disappointed, it’s hard. But it was fine!  Life kept going after I had mourned it or grieved it. When people ask me, “How did you get there?,” I almost felt like I had no choice. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money. I had to work or I would have been homeless, you know what I mean? There was no fallback plan ever. So I was like, “Well, why not take a risk? What’s going to happen? Great, I’m not going to get the internship and still be going to school and doing what I’m doing.” It wasn’t a bad thing. I feel like I take risks because that’s one thing I’m not afraid of, because I’m just like, “Why not? What’s the consequence of me not doing this?” The consequence is I’m in the same place I was, which most of the time is not a bad place. It’s not. Once I took the risk, applied for the internship, and got it, I also became really addicted to like, “What else can I do?” I was like a mad scientist. (laughs) I was like, “Oh my God, what else can I do? Oh my God, I can get promoted. Oh my God, I can travel the world. I can go to Harvard.” It became an addiction of like, “This is kind of fun!” So that’s how I looked at it. And you know, I’ve slowed down a little bit in the risk factor, but I still do that even today.

That carries throughout the book. Without spoiling anything, towards the end you share an experience of being disappointed by something that didn’t work out. That’s such a powerful moment, because even after all your amazing accomplishments we see there are still disappointments. You seem to be saying, “There are still setbacks, and I’m still going through them.”

Yeah, definitely. I wanted to be honest and real about that because there is—again, I use the word mystique a lot—but there is a mystique of like, “Oh, I worked at the White House and I was a fellow at Harvard and I did all this stuff so the world is at my hands. Like duh, who wouldn’t hire me? Who wouldn’t want to have you as a fellow? Who wouldn’t want to give you all these opportunities?” I wanted to be honest about that because it isn’t our accomplishments that give us confidence, it’s about who we are at the foundation that can’t be shaken. Yes, I tried to build something on that foundation, which was getting a new job, right? I was like, “Okay, I know who I am,” and then it didn’t work. But when it didn’t work the house falls, but the foundation is sturdy. You have to have a foundation of who you are and your worth outside of your accomplishments, because things come and go. Things really come and go. I really wanted to humanize myself because I was like, “These people out here thinking I’m eating caviar for breakfast!” People think the weirdest things about the White House Social Secretary, because it usually is a very crème de la creme role. I’m like, “Yeah, I brought a different crème de la creme to the table.” (laughs)

When you write about taking on the role of the Social Secretary, you talk about how you made the conscious decision that you weren’t going to seek external validation, but really focus on internal validation. Can you talk about the skills that you brought to that role that allowed you to thrive?

I’ll be completely honest, I think that all started off with my community. The role that I had as White House Social Secretary was convening, gatherings, events, and making people feel welcomed. The President and First Lady—the First Lady especially—their thing was opening up the house. “How can we open it up so it can be the people’s house?” Again going back to the foundation, that is someone I was before I even knew who Barack Obama was. I always was an inclusive person. I always had gatherings, whether it was with no money or with a lot of people. I always was like, “Let’s bring people together.” I was always about that life. Once I went to the White House, I think that was a strength of mine that helped me. I think the other part was that we had a Black President and First Lady. I think that having a Black President and First Lady who were cool, who were cultured, who were organizers from Chicago, all of that gave me a confidence to be like, “I can do this job, because I feel like these are people I would have met in my life. I’ve met people like this in my life at other points in time, so this is just like we’re community-building together. We’re problem solving together like we were at a small organization.” I think I had the ability to see them as Barack and Michelle Obama from Chicago, which is how I encountered them when they first came on my television.

I never lost that.  I never lost the wonder of these two people. Even though we’re at the White House, and they were the President and First Lady, and obviously there was the diplomacy and all that stuff, I think in the end because I always saw them these are two people who wanted to change the world—the same feeling I had in 2007, when I heard the first speech right? That ability to see them in that way was such a unique thing for me, because I was able to be like, “Oh, all right, I got this. This is what I used to do. This is who I am.” There was stuff I had to learn of course, right? But I think that was the basis of why I was able to do my job so well.

You write in the book about how you did all this volunteering and community outreach in your twenties with different organizations, but you also continued to do volunteer work during your time at the White House, right? Why was that important to you to still maintain that aspect of your life even when you had this incredibly prestigious position?

You know, it was important for me because that was my family. That was my home. That was when I felt most like myself. That is where I belonged. The White House—I belonged there too, obviously. But I would go to Carpenter’s Shelter and I’d serve dinner and sit around and play checkers or play with the kids. It was a sense of normalcy for me. They didn’t know I worked at the White House, they didn’t know who I was. I was a volunteer coming in. I was also giving back for selfish reasons of making sure that I felt like I never left my community. I felt welcomed and loved and I had a great time and I was able to help serve people. It was important for me to maintain that part of myself, because I wanted to stay in touch with the community. The White House is an amazing place. We definitely welcomed in community, but to go somewhere and meet someone on the level where they are—to go in their house, to go in their home, to go in their shelter, to speak to them like a human being—that’s my gift. It was very important for me to maintain that and to never lose sight of that. And to have fun! I had a great time. You know, I had a great time. I would go volunteer with women who were formerly incarcerated. Just listening to them and hearing them made me better at my job, because it made me never forget why I’m there. I can’t change their life, but I can invite them in for a tour. How amazing is that? That was something I felt like I had to do and I loved that, you know? So that’s why it was important.

A huge part of the book is you writing candidly about your experience with impostor syndrome throughout your life. Can you talk about what imposter syndrome is? Could you share some of the strategies that have worked for you dealing with it?

So imposter syndrome is a term that basically says you feel like a fraud. It makes people feel like they don’t deserve things, that people are going to find out that they’re imposters in the workplace or their professional life. They don’t feel deserving of their promotions or opportunities. They’re always questioning, “Do I deserve this” or “do I belong?” My relationship with impostor syndrome has evolved. In the book, it basically says that now in my present body at forty-six, I’m like, “This is a sham.” It’s a sham, because who told us that we were not qualified? Any messages we got from people saying that or insinuating that or microaggressions/aggressions, those are all systems that play to keep us where we are. It affects mainly those who have been historically oppressed—Black folks, LGBTQ folks, people with disabilities—we’re the ones who suffer the most from impostor syndrome, because this world is not meant for us to be in power, to be equal. I started having this realization, “Wait a minute, this is not my fault or my responsibility, because I know that I’m qualified. I just did eight years at the White House. I got hired and moved up.” Once I realized that, I had to do the deep work of reversing it. I had to get my confidence that I never knew was there. Where do I find it? Because I didn’t know. Now that I’ve moved this weight off my chest—of impostor syndrome being my fault—where do I find the confidence? I think the book really takes you through the evolution of that.

It would have been really easy for me to write the book in the present body in which I am where it’s just like, “I’m healed! Praise the Lord!” Instead I wanted to take you through the evolution, because most people are not where I am. I talk to so many people who come up to me after speaking gigs. They all are in this place of, “I don’t think I deserve it.” It does me no good to give you the ending. Let me let you see how I went through it.

One tip is realizing that it’s a sham and accepting that it was not your fault. Then going back from there and saying to yourself, “Look at all that I accomplished. Look at all that I am. I did this because of who I am. I deserve these things. I curated these opportunities.” People should look at their roster of what they’ve done and what it took to get there to make it happen. But then also going back and digging up the root of when you started feeling this way. At what point did you start feeling like an imposter? Was it when you went to college or high school? When you didn’t make a sports team? That’s stuff you have to work through. I feel like we have to go back and dig it up. Whether it’s therapy—however people want to deal with some of the things that happened in their young life—deal with that. It doesn’t have to be a big trauma, but deal with it. Then learn to walk with your head up and your shoulders back. Talk to yourself better, get people around you who think you’re a big deal. You don’t know how many people are in your corner until you remove yourself out of your own way.

The book plunges you into your life, and you capture these really specific moments—whether it’s in your job interview with the First Lady or getting ready for a visit from the Pope—that make the reader feel they’re right alongside with you. What went into figuring out what details to include to make those scenes come alive?

For me what went into it was how can I not break the trust and privacy of the Obamas. I’m very intentional. I don’t talk about anything personal. That’s not my business, that’s not my life. That was really top of line for me. I really wanted to focus on my story, but my editor would tell me, “People want to smell what’s in the room.” I remember reading a book called Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford. I love that book so much. She was so vivid about her grandmother’s room and the doilies and the way it smelled. I swear to you, I felt like I was in my grandmother’s room. For me, I wanted readers to think in their mind, “I can picture this room.” It sounds so nuts, but that’s why I tried to describe everything in detail. I want you to picture what it was like, I want you to feel what it’s like, I want you to see it. If I just said “the Blue Room in the White House,” people would be like, “What do you mean? Is it blue furniture? What are you talking about?” Most people won’t go inside the White House. Most people won’t look up what the rooms looked like. I wanted people to have that feeling that they could be in the story. That really was important for me.

Something that you’ve shared on social media is how you’re part of this cohort of 2024 debut authors, where you’re all very intentional about sharing and promoting each other’s work. That seems to be another piece of the importance of community for you. Can you talk about your involvement with that group and how that came about?

It came about because I was having a hard time writing. I needed help in the sense of community. I just felt so alone and I didn’t know who to ask. I have friends who are writers and I would ask them questions, but I needed a support group. I need community, and I think whenever I try to do something by myself without community, it’s so hard. I reached out to my agency. They have an author, Karen Tang, and they said, “I think she’s part of a group.” She added me to a Slack group called 2024 Debuts. I don’t know how many people are in the group, but it’s broken down by announcements and there’s a BIPOC channel and there’s a DC/Maryland/Virginia channel and there’s an LGBTQ channel. It’s so supportive because you can ask the question, people answer, but you realize we all are going through the same thing. Part of what we do is that we try to lift each other up with the books. But we share this because it’s hard. I’ll do whatever I can to be in community. Audre Lord’s ninetieth birthday was last month. I gathered a bunch of Black women who either wrote books or are coming out with books for a dinner. We need to be there for each other because it’s really hard. Harder than I ever thought.

Wasn’t that an event where you didn’t necessarily know everybody ahead of time?

I slid into people’s DMs, child, I slid into people’s DMs. (laughs) I was just like, “I know you don’t know me,” and I would send them a link to my stuff so I didn’t seem out there. “This is my website, you can Google me, and I’m having this dinner.” I tried to focus on Black women who also were writing comics, fantasy, romance, YA and thrillers because I feel like we don’t give them as much support, because the genres for Black women steer so much in the self-help and memoir lane. There are these dope women that are doing fantasy novels, right? Let’s bring everyone together. That’s what I do.

Finally, what role has the library played in your life?

For me, it’s almost like CandyLand, you know what I mean? I love candy, and it’s like walking into one of the stores that has penny candy with so many selections, and they’re all satisfying. You’re like, “What can I get today?” The library’s where I got my love of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I loved those books because I feel like they took me to a different place, you could escape to anywhere, and it was free. I’m old enough for the Dewey Decimal System, and I remember being so excited when I would write down the numbers and go to the shelf and find that book. It was almost like a treasure hunt. For me, the libraries provided a solace. They provided me a way to escape and discover literature, and also music as I got older.  I’m dating myself with CDs, but I would check out CDs I couldn’t afford. Before I got a computer, I’d go to the Cincinnati library all the time and use the computers. It was only a half hour slot, and I would just go to the first floor, then go to the second floor, and just sign up for all of them. They weren’t connected so nobody knew that I was already on the first floor. (laughs) It really helped me just get on the computer. I had my first tech experiences at a library. It makes me sad the state of where it is now, because the librarians I’ve always encountered, including my really great friend Tim in Ohio, they just want people to read. They’re people who are there just for the love of reading. 

The post “You Don’t Know How Many People Are In Your Corner Until You Remove Yourself Out Of Your Own Way” – Deesha Dyer On Taking Risks and Tackling Imposter Syndrome first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

You’ve written that while the book is not autobiographical, it’s deeply personal. Can you talk about what you mean by that?

When I came to the U.S., I came with my mom and my mother’s parents. Then my dad’s parents ended up moving to the U.S. as well, so I was surrounded by grandparents growing up. There’s sort of two things that happened. One was my grandmother on my dad’s side left me these memoirs. I had them for a really long time, but I didn’t start reading them until after she died—actually the night of her funeral is when I started reading them. I had a complicated relationship with her, because she was very conservative. In Russia, in order to leave at the time that we left, it was very difficult. My dad’s parents had sort of blocked him from being able to leave with us. [My dad’s mother] and I weren’t particularly close, but after she died, I started reading her memoirs. I had this feeling like I was in conversation with her after she was dead in a way that I hadn’t been able to when she was alive. It was a very strange sort of project I was doing, where I was translating her memoirs and I was annotating them. It felt like I was in conversation with her after she died, which, you know, my book is about somebody talking to the dead.

When my grandfather was dying, I was with him on his deathbed, and he was dictating his memoirs to me. It definitely felt like these older generations really wanted me to carry their stories. This book was really inspired by that. It was inspired by that feeling of receiving an elder’s story, but how there’s a certain weight that comes with that too. With my grandfather in his last days, it felt very heavy to be a receptacle for the story, to bear witness in this way. That really informed the book, the way that telling the story warps the people who are receiving it. For Paul, he’s deeply affected by being the medium. Physically, it takes a toll on him. That felt to me too like a very physically exhausting process of empathizing and fully listening to somebody’s story. It’s my ancestors, so that story is also just in me physically. It’s in my DNA.

That concept of the weight of hearing someone’s story is so interesting to hear you talk about. It makes me think of how at one point, Irina chastises Zhenia about how it’s not enough for Zhenia to listen to the story, but she also has to write it down.

As a writer, I feel like I only process things when I write them down. When my thoughts are just free floating in my head, they kind of loop around and repeat themselves. But when I get it down on paper, that’s when I can see what I’m thinking. I don’t know what I’m going write until I start writing it. It’s really in the process of putting it down that I understand anything.

What was the writing process for this book like? Did you have a strict outline or were there discoveries you made along the way?

I made them along the way. I outline constantly when I’m writing. As I’m writing, I outline, and then it transforms as I go. I don’t outline ahead of time, because things just evolve as I go. I can’t remember what writer it was who said that you only have to see what’s in front of your headlights to keep going, but I think that’s very wise. You have to have a sense of a destination. I knew the shape of the story, if that makes sense. I feel things very physically in my body when I’m writing. If something is right or wrong, if I’m going in the right direction or the wrong direction, it’s a very intuitive, physical feeling. But I knew the general shape, that this is a story of Zhenia’s transformation because of her understanding her ancestral baggage.

That’s fascinating about the physical sensation you get when you’re going in the right or wrong direction. Can you talk more about that?

It’s funny, because I took mediumship classes in order to write this. I feel like that kind of embodied feeling of writing is similar to the way I describe channeling. For me, writing often feels like channeling. It’s a physical sensation that’s kind of in my abdomen. It’s very woo-woo to describe it that way. (laughs) It’s not like I can immediately drop into that feeling, but when I am in that feeling, it’s like the flow state and I know I’m on the right track. It’s not like anything I write, I feel physically. In fact, I usually don’t. It takes a while to get to that place, because it has to go deeper and deeper. Once I’m there, I know that I can use my body as a guide, to figure out whether something I’m writing is going in the right direction or the wrong direction, or is true or not true.

Was there any direction that you went in telling the story that you realized you had to back off from because you were getting a message that it wasn’t the right path to go down?

If you’re feeling disconnected on the micro level, you often end up in a cul-de-sac. I wrote the book during the pandemic, and I feel like so much of the revision was more about balancing the two storylines. It was more about integrating the two stories so that they affected each other more. I was in this strange space because it was lockdown and I was working on it. I have a small kid too. That’s not necessarily the most conducive thing, to be working on a project when you’re locked up at home with a small child, but I feel like I was already in a strange, altered space when I was working on it. It came out more or less in the form that it is in. [Revision] had more to do with me moving some parts around to make it feel balanced. Especially with the Irina storyline, it required a lot of research. I was doing the research as I was writing it, but it felt more channeled, I would say, than the Zhenia storyline.

The process of writing just felt like it was coming out of me. It was during this time that I was also with my grandfather, and he was dying. It was very strange because I had been very close with him growing up. We lived like in the same house. Wanting to talk to the dead went from an abstract notion to a very real thing in my life, of wanting to be able to continue talking to him.

Zhenia is so funny and clever, but she can also be self-absorbed and even self-sabotaging. I wanted to ask about how you arrived at her as the focal point for this book.

She’s young, so I feel like a lot of her being a mess is kind of forgivable. (laughs) It’s about her discovering what it is she really wants. I mean, she’s not me. Maybe she’s some aspect of myself from when I was in my early twenties, but she’s not autobiographical in any way. She’s an interesting character to me because I feel like she’s frozen in some ways. I think it’s a result of these kinds of traumas that happened to her family, so this book is about her thawing and figuring out what it is she wants rather than doing what is expected of her. Yes, she’s a mess and she’s petty, but I think she’s also kind. I didn’t think of her as an antihero or something like that, but I do have a lot of empathy for her because she does make these decisions and then justifies them. (laughs) I think in my worst moments, I can relate to that process. I don’t think she sees herself as having agency or being able to really like affect those around her. She sees herself as blameless, because she doesn’t see how she can hurt other people.

It’s such a big expansive book, but it’s also only about 300 pages. We also get to dive into Paul’s relationship with his husband and Zhenia’s relationship with her co-worker Anton and his wife, Chloe.

With Paul, I feel like he was a character that really came alive as I was writing. Initially, he had felt like a minor character, but as I was revising, I kept adding more and more about his life because he was so interesting to me. His relationship with Sergio and what he had lived through in New York in the eighties, this connection to death, the trauma of witnessing so many people that you care about dying. I felt very connected to his storyline.

With Anton and Chloe, their relationship seemed complicated. They evolved from a short story I had written about them, about how she became pregnant. It was from Chloe’s point of view. They were already people who existed with their own backstory and full lives to me. In a way this whole book grew out of that relationship, which is funny because they are such a smaller part of the book than the main storyline.

Yet with those characters, we have some sense of what happened but you still give the reader space to fill in the blanks and create their own narrative. I was curious about how you decided what was enough information for the reader to know versus what would be too much information?

I didn’t want the narrative to get too bogged down with too much backstory for all the various characters. I wanted it to feel swift as it moved forward, but I wanted depth at the same time. It was really about including as little or as much as possible to keep things moving, but not bog the storyline down. It’s like you’re seeing that things are happening in your peripheral vision. You see a scene taking place, but you’re continuing to move forward. It’s like it’s enough information for you to get a sense [of what’s going on] without turning your head and walking in a different direction, if that makes sense.

One of the most intriguing parts of the novel are the scenes where Paul is channeling Irina to Zhenia on the telephone. Those scenes cover so much emotional territory and are beautifully balanced among the three characters. Can you talk about the pacing of those scenes in terms of the back and forth that happens among the three people?

Zhenia is listening, but she’s also resentful of Irina. She loves her grandmother so much, and she knows that Irina abandoned her. I think there’s a curiosity in wanting to understand her grandmother better by understanding her grandmother’s mother. But there’s also a hostility that she feels, because she feels protective of her grandmother. She doesn’t want to get too close to the story, or Irina, or to feel too much empathy. There’s this distance and this tension between them of Irina wanting to pour herself out to Zhenia and Zhenia not fully wanting that. And then Paul is facilitating all of it. Zhenia’s not a fully willing listener. She has her own life and this is an imposition, you know?

To say the least, with everything that’s going on in her world.

She has her own problems, for sure. I can relate to that feeling of resistance if somebody’s just unloading on you. You don’t want to necessarily absorb everything that’s been given to you.

Irina’s not the kind of person who’s going to check in first and say, “Is now a good time?”

Irina does not give a shit. (laughs) She’s just there to tell her story. You were also asking about Irina in New York and her backstory. When I was thinking about this, I was thinking about this idea that we think of ourselves as these unified selves, but there are so many parts to ourselves. This [spiritual form] is just a part of Irina. This is the part of Irina that did these things and then another part of her continued on in New York and had this other life. She has access to her biographical details, she knows what the other parts of her did, but this is a very specific aspect of her.

I think one of the many beautiful aspects of the book is how Zhenia’s grandmother, Vera, is able to have the relationship with Zhenia that Vera maybe wasn’t able to have with her own daughter. I feel like all the mother-daughter relationships in the book are extremely complicated, but there’s something so pure with the relationship between Vera and Zhenia. How did you approach the grandparent-grandchild relationship versus the mother-daughter relationships?

I feel like [with Vera and Zhenia] it was sort of an opportunity to do over. I think for some grandparents, just being a parent is so taxing and difficult and their life is just really hard. They don’t necessarily have the emotional capacity, especially when they’re having children young, to also be an emotionally present parent. In Russia especially, it was very common for people to have kids in their early twenties, or even late teens, and for the kids to be raised by their grandparents and for there to be that really close relationship. It’s not autobiographical for me. I have a very close relationship with my mother, and I am a mother myself. I just could imagine really enjoying being a grandmother. (laughs) You don’t have to do all the discipline and your responsibility is to just give love as a grandparent.

This is an L.A. book too, and you make such good use of the city with memorable scenes at the Magic Castle and Echo Park Lake. What made you want to have L.A. the setting for the Zhenia part of the storyline?

Zhenia immigrated as a child to Boston, went to college in New York, and then moved to Los Angeles, and that actually is my story too. L.A. is such a weird place. People are very open to woo-woo stuff and also there’s a lot of striving here. It’s a very strange energy, because people come here with big dreams. It’s never entirely clear if they’re delusional or not, because it just seems like sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s so much about luck and other things that you can’t predict. I think it’s a fascinating place and it’s also very far from where Zhenia comes from. I love it out here, but I feel such a deep sadness being far away from my family and raising a child far away from her grandparents. I think that feeling is definitely in the book.

I always think about how I came to the U.S. as a small kid and then I just kept moving. I lived in New York, New Orleans, St. Louis, and now I’ve been in L.A. for the longest I’ve been anywhere in my adult life. But I was thinking about it like if the initial immigration was a trauma, then I just keep repeating it, but trying to own it somehow, if that makes sense. I love moving, and I know that that’s not a common feeling. (laughs) There’s just nothing I love more than a fresh start and the possibility of somehow becoming a different person in a new space. I think there’s something of that in [the book] too. Her mother’s so sad to be far away from her when she’s about to have a grandchild, because I think the mother is hoping to have the same kind of relationship with her grandchild that Zhenia had with her grandmother.

I wanted to ask about the research process. It seems you would have had to have done a lot of research to get the details of everyone’s life during the revolution, but I’m also intrigued by this mediumship class that you took.

For the mediumship class, I took a couple with a couple different teachers. There’s this place that I don’t know if it still exists, but it was a meditation studio, and they have this psychic meditation class. Some of the guided meditation journeys definitely informed the afterlife and the way I describe it looking [in the book]. Then there was a mediumship class that I was taking online because it was during COVID. It feels a lot a guided meditation where you’re visualizing things. It is kind of a physical sensation in the body that’s similar to a feeling that I sometimes get when I’m writing, so it was very interesting. It was very useful.

I think when writing is going well, it doesn’t feel like it’s coming from my own brain. It feels like I’m just receiving information that I’m writing down. I think a lot of writers describe it that way. There’s no “I” really, you’re in a flow state. It’s like an egoless state or something, you’re just in it. That’s kind of what mediumship or meditation also feel like.

As for researching for Irina, I did a lot of researching for many years. The things that were most helpful were these oral histories, as well as literature that was written at the time that this is taking place, around the time of the revolution. But I did also read several books that were helpful, in terms of just putting that time period into context. Not novels, but you know, nonfiction.

I found the Irina sections so moving. Was it difficult not to overlay your contemporary perspective onto what was happening in Irina’s world? It feels like it would be very challenging to just let Irina speak her point of view without editorializing.

I think that’s why it was particularly helpful to read memoirs that were written soon after the events. I also read memoirs that were written by elderly people looking back, and also books that were written around that time and set around that time. But I think when I would just go into Irina, I really tried to see things through her. I mean, I couldn’t do it perfectly, but I think it really helps to do very deep research and look at photographs, so that I could really picture her physical surroundings as much as possible. I don’t think people and their psychology has changed that much in 100 years. I tried to just get as much of the physical surroundings as possible through my research so that I could feel like I was embodying her, rather than I’m looking at her with my own values, ideas, knowledge, and technology and stuff like that.

Finally, what role has the public library played in your life?

An enormous role. Just from childhood, there’s this library in Brookline, Massachusetts. That was such a highlight of my life every week to go there. My dad would let me take out anything I wanted; my mom was kind of a literary snob. I liked going there with my dad more, because I loved reading just like the pulpiest books. (laughs) Doing research for this book required going to the L.A. Public Library. I just went so deep and they had so much material that I needed. I like going to the library to work as well. It’s nice to be in public spaces while I’m working. Sometimes it’s nice to be at home, but I like going to libraries a lot to do my work. And then also the L.A. Public Library has a great reading series too, so I feel like I’ve seen so many of my favorite writers come through the main branch.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post Katya Apekina On Mediums, Complicated Family Relationships, And The Weight Of Storytelling first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The book follows Alistair in his last year at New York University as he embarks on a relationship with a slightly older couple, Mark and Elijah. What was the origin of the book? Was it a specific character or the dynamics of the relationship among the three men?

I wrote half of a short story in college about a character with the same situation: finance student at NYU; very bright and confident, but also deeply anxious because he’s in this mysterious quasi-criminal trouble; and he was also involved with an older couple. That setup has been with me for a long time, but it was several years before I started the book in earnest. I think that character appealed to me for maybe mysterious reasons when I first wrote him. By the time I started the novel—I was in my late twenties by that point, I’d obviously gotten older—things had gone on in the world that helped me flesh out the thematic context for his story, what made his story interesting and important and worth telling. I began to see his story as a striving finance student from the rust belt who is forced into increasingly contorted and dark situations in his quest to lift himself out of debt and help his mother. It started to seem like a story about the American class system at that point. So it started with the character and then the world and the questions of the book built up around him over the course of a few years.

I was struck by how many of the characters really struggle with loneliness. Alistair leads a solitary existence in college and Elijah and Mark don’t have a real community of friends, despite seeming to have everything going for them. Even two very different characters on the periphery of the action, Maura and Herve, don’t seem to have a social life of any kind. Can you talk how that aspect of loneliness emerged in the novel?

I’m probably just naturally drawn to characters experiencing alienation, because I think that’s an inherently rich, dramatic starting point. It’s true of the characters that I cherish the most and books I’ve read, but I also think it may have flowed naturally from my setting the novel in a time in which economic concerns and material desires are supplanting genuine emotional connection. Maura and Alistair are very close to each other. They’re closer to each other than he is to anyone else in the world. But there’s this great divide between them that alienates both of them and puts a wedge in their relationship. It has to do with their very different view of the world and what it means to create a meaningful life for yourself. Mark, Elijah and Alistair are all obviously sexually involved and, to different degrees, romantically involved with one another. For Mark and Elijah, there’s a sort of toxicity in their relationship having to do with their economic imbalance, the sense that Elijah’s mooching off Mark and his love for Mark is sustained somewhat by Mark’s wealth, which gradually disappears. So I was interested in the ways in which the social, economic, and even political realities that we are experiencing at all times in an increasingly bizarre and frenzied way in the world of this book can open up gaps between people and isolate them.

The book takes place in 2016 and really confronts not only the political issues that people in the U.S. were facing but also the financial ones as well. What was appealing to you about diving headfirst into a time that some readers might find uncomfortable to revisit?

Yeah, I was very conscious of that potential discomfort. I find that there is sort of a trend in contemporary fiction about the contemporary era, or going back a few years, to really sideline the political realities that we were experiencing. While I get it, I think that there can and should be ways to address those political realities in fiction. I don’t think the solution is always to just sort of skip over them. I didn’t want the book to be about the Trump era, but I did think that election provided a rich thematic context for the book’s concerns. I wanted to cut it off right before the election, because I was writing it during the Trump presidency, which if you can remember, it was like every day the world completely changed with another tweet. I couldn’t imagine trying to keep up with the present I was living through, so I cut it off before the election. But that also felt like a dynamic and sort of perilous moment in time that made sense for what the characters were going through.

It felt like that was the beginning of the end of a certain kind of American innocence. Alistair goes to college and takes on a lot of debt in the assurance that the American and world economy that he’s grown up in will remain stable and powerful. The American political system that he’s always known, the sort of neoliberal order that that he’s always known—he has every assurance that will continue with the election of Clinton. Those things come to an end very soon. Because the story is a little bit about the end of a certain kind of meritocratic fantasy for Alistair, it made sense to set it at a time when that fantasy was ending for a lot of people more generally. I think that election really brought to more people’s attention, the ways in which the economy is weighted against people who are not born wealthy. Opportunities are increasingly drying up. Our narrative of class mobility in this country is optimistic at best and delusional at worst. His story is kind of taking him through that realization. I think that time in American history was when a lot of people had that realization too. I’ll just say, on a much more personal level, most of my life I’ve been dogged by economic anxieties of one sort or the other. I think it was my strange impulse to write into that rather than away from it.

Many of these characters are artists or writers and we get to see their struggle with the creative process. Mark has been toiling away at a novel for eight years, Elijah hasn’t painted since college, while Elijah’s friend Jay doggedly pursues his own project. What was intriguing about writing these characters who are all facing different creative blocks in one way or another?

When I originally conceived of this book, I didn’t want to write a book about a writer. I didn’t want to turn my attention back on the creative process as I was in the midst of the creative process. There’s lots of books like that and I love lots of books like that, but I didn’t want to do it. I really wanted to step outside of my own experience. I did all this research into finance. I really wanted to push these characters out into the world and get them near the levers of power, and that wasn’t my experience of artmaking at that point in time. But I think the more I developed the book, the more I realized that art for many of these characters is their way of processing the financial, political, and cultural worlds that the book is set in. It can be an antidote to some of the malevolent or just stressful forces out there, or it can be an exacerbation of them. For Jay, he certainly takes delight in the cruelties of the world. Whereas for Mark, I think it’s more of an escape from his family, his family’s wealth, and the iniquities of that wealth. It was interesting to think about different ways that art can respond to the systems in the book.

One of the real pleasures of the book is seeing how the three characters respond or avoid their creative process in a very relatable way.

I mean, the prospect of, in Mark’s case, an eight-year writer’s block. It’s just delicious, you know? I just couldn’t escape the comedy of that.

I wanted to talk more about Mark, because there’s a poignant moment where he’s in his dad’s office, looking at the John Grisham books on the shelf. Mark’s reflecting on his own novel and how he’s grown to hate it. He finds it derivative of E.M. Forester and other writers, and he has this insight that if he ever writes in the book, it should lean more into the John Grisham territory. That scene seems to almost be commenting on the book itself, especially considering that the book confidently moves in and out of genres and has this thriller element to it. I was curious to hear you talk about it that scene.

It makes me so happy to hear that moment in the book jumped out at you, because I really see that moment as the artist statement of the book. I am in no way like Mark. I’m not from a mobile home fortune in New Jersey, and I am not like him in really any other meaningful ways. But his experience as a writer plays parallel with mine. When I was first starting to write seriously I was extremely under the influence of Henry James and E.M. Forster. I was obsessed with Henry James. I was writing stories set in the contemporary period, but I was just imbibing Henry James so much that I was writing like him. it produced this very strange writing style where people were moving around the world with iPhones but sort of thinking and to some extent talking like they were in a Henry James novel. In retrospect, I had my fun and it was probably necessary to get that out of my system, but it was very strange.

As I was beginning this novel, finding my voice took the form of breaking away from that and allowing myself to bring in a type of writing and a type of narrative approach that I might have turned my nose at previously. Something like John Grisham, whose books I love, but I just didn’t see myself as writing like him. I found that the alloy between those things—taking what I’ve learned from Henry James and E.M. Forster and combining it with something that you would never expect to see it with—I found that to be very generative. That’s really the fusion of influences that the book emerged from, so I definitely had to have a scene in the book where that was nodded at.

You really dive into the lives of the supporting characters in a way that seems very generous. I’m thinking specifically about Maura, because you can see a version of this book where she would be not as fleshed out as she is here. How did you make the decision about what space you were going to devote to characters and which characters were not necessarily going to get that same spotlight?

Maura is obviously important in the book because she has an outsized influence on Alistair. She’s his reason for doing everything that he does, but as Maura points out later, maybe he’s wrong in [thinking] that. Maybe he’s actually more selfish than he thinks he is. It made sense to kind of explicate her pretty thoroughly from that perspective, but also I wanted to give a meaningful amount of space in the book to a person who was very unlike the other characters. Maura is older than most of the characters. She’s a woman and she doesn’t live in the city. She doesn’t want things that the other characters want. The character she’s probably most similar to is Mark, except they have very different economic circumstances, so their refusal to participate in fame-seeking and fortune-seeking looks very different. I saw her as the spiritual antidote to a lot of the other energies in the book. The book would not feel whole to me without that. It’s definitely a risk when you give a lot of attention to a character who’s not always playing an active part in the plot, but I felt that the book would have less heart without something about her life. So that’s where that decision came from.

My instinct is to give every character that kind of attention, but obviously, that becomes unwieldy. For example, Herve. You hear a little bit about his background, but not very much. Again, speaking to the genre elements of this book, I thought that he would be a more forbidding character if you knew less about him. I think that often the tendency when developing a villainous character is to find some sort of exculpatory backstory—this is why [he’s like this], he was traumatized as a child or whatnot. I didn’t want to do that with him. I just wanted to let him be who he was and own his ideas, and not necessarily have some sort of psychological excuse to have them.

And finally, what role has the public library has played in your life?

At every stage of my life as a writer and reader I’ve used the library. My parents took me to the library often as a kid. This is true of bookstores to some extent, but I think even more so for libraries, but it’s a space of play, even for adults. You get to roam and follow your instincts. What pops out at you? What do you want to take home? What do you not? And that’s how you develop your sensibility. You’re learning what interests you. There are so few places where you can explore your interests and knowledge and literary tastes as freely as the library.

I have a sort of funny story about a library, which is that when I was in high school, I wasn’t really into gym class. We were in some section where we’d be doing a certain sport for a few weeks. I don’t remember what the sport was, I think it was maybe basketball, but I really didn’t want to do it. So I pleaded with my gym teacher and said, “Is there any other work I can do so that I don’t have to participate in the sport?” And bless this gym teacher, he let me do a research report on the one sport that I did play, which was tennis, instead of going to gym class. So for a few weeks instead of going to gym class I would go to the library and research and write about tennis. I just remember thinking, “Well, Daniel, this is who you are you. You cried and moaned until your gym teacher let you spend this period in the library.” (laughs) So in that instance, absolutely, but then throughout my life and even now, the library is very much a refuge for me.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The post Daniel Lefferts On The Surprising Fusion Of Influences On His Exhilarating Debut Novel first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

I wanted to start by asking what sparked the idea for Hot Springs Drive. Did you begin with a character or a specific relationship?

I’m just going to go ahead and use spoilers because it’s hard to talk about it otherwise. it was definitely the relationship between Jackie, the main character, and her son Douglas. This book is based on a real murder that I heard about on a “Dateline NBC” episode that completely shocked me, because I couldn’t imagine a son killing for his mother and, you know, probably prompted by her in some way. I had been thinking a lot about codependent relationships between parents and children. I thought, “Oh, this is an opportunity for me to write about that, to see how far I can push it and try to understand it better. And to try to understand what in the world happened in this home with this mother and her son that led to him violently killing his mother’s best friend.” So it started with that relationship. The murder was secondhand in the first draft I was really just interested in that [relationship) and who Jackie was. In revision, it became more about the central act of violence and everything leading up to it and everything that comes after. But yeah, it was Jackie and her strange relationship with her son.

Thinking about that there’s so much of the book is like characters observing each other whether it and I guess it comes into play with kind of like this symphony of voices that that narrate the book. How did that part come into it? Did you always know that you wanted to have the story, told by this huge swath of people?

Yeah, I did. I wanted to give people everything all at once, because that’s how I felt when I was done listening to the [“Dateline”] episode, trying to process what I had just heard. I was thinking of everything all at once. I was thinking of the family. I was thinking of the victim and her family. I was thinking of the relationship. I was thinking of the violence itself. I was thinking of the community. I was thinking of the neighborhood. I wanted people to be able to grasp that all at once.

Another thing is that Jackie is honest with you as much as she’s able, but we need other glimpses of her, because she’s not telling the actual truth—and people rarely do. (laughs) I wanted to give as much of [the story] as I could by offering perspectives to everyone involved, even if they’re fourth in line—not secondary, not tertiary, but completely outside everything. Because I think those are really informative viewpoints. I think those can add to this feeling of collective humanity, and that was the feeling I was trying to create.

I’m fascinated by how you play with time in the book. The second chapter gives us this very concise, sweeping description of Theresa’s life the reader frequently gets these glimpses into the future of different characters’ lives. How did the element of playing with time come into the book?

In my initial draft, I was jumping around in time a lot more so. Theresa would be alive, she’d be dead, she’d be alive again. The boys would be grown up, they’d be boys again. What I thought it was doing was showing you how time can collapse. That’s something that I think about a lot. Prior to this I had written what I thought was my motherhood novel and what I was also calling was my collage novel. I’m not sure if this was just aging or if it was becoming a parent, but time had started to change for me. I could feel myself being a child at the same moment that I’m a mother at the same moment that I’m suddenly able to access my future self, looking back. And all of it was happening all at once. It was this uncanny, meaningful, sometimes terrifying feeling. So I had this this novel that I had written that moved forward in time for two of the characters and backward in time for the other character. Time and our perception of time was just really interesting to me. When I moved on to this novel, I was still really processing that. I wanted to be able to capture that feeling, that our perception of time is limited. It’s much deeper than then we know. These little feelings we get sometimes—and I think we all get them—they matter and they’re informative.

But in the first draft, it was much less chronological. I honestly thought at times, “Oh, people can just shuffle the pages together and reread it in a different order.” In revision, it wasn’t as meaningful. After having some time and space away from the book and coming back to it and reading it in a more objective way, I was like, “Oh, this is actually distancing me from what the core of this narrative is.” So I had to go back and rework it in a more chronological way. But I always want to give this feeling—like those little glimpses into the future that you mentioned—that what’s happening now is meaningful now and it’s going to be meaningful later.

That makes me think of how the reader knows  early on that Theresa will be brutally murdered, and then you spend time in the first half of the book interacting with her and for me, at least, just falling in love with her. I think that creates an immediacy that’s counter to that distancing you were talking about.

Yeah, and that chapter that you referenced—the chapter of Theresa’s life in, I don’t know, five pages—that came about in the revision. It wasn’t there at first. I think it was my feeling that counter to my intention of moving away from like the sort of tropey, formulaic true crime episode, I had put her into this sort of stereotypical silent victim [role]. And so I thought, “I don’t even know as much about her as I want to.” That was my way of giving that to myself and giving that to the book.

Stylistically, that chapter reminded me of your first collection of stories and your background in flash fiction. Is that something that you’re still playing with in in the novel form?

Definitely. I think that my skills in flash fiction help me in every novel, because it’s forced me to be as efficient as possible and to get the heart of what I’m trying to write. That doesn’t always work. I mean, there’s a lot of times when I’m writing and I’m just spinning my wheels. Later, I see, “Oh, it was actually this one sentence that I was trying to get out and there’s 1000 words here.” (laughs) But it’s helped me write these longer things in small achievable bites. It’s helped me take confidence in the fact that I can do this. I do have a method. I definitely use my flash fiction background all the time when I’m writing. Now, having said that, I haven’t been able to write a very short story in so long. (laughs) The last short story I wrote was 1000 words. I just lost that skill. I need to teach myself again, because I do miss it.

In your acknowledgments you talk about how you wrote this book during the pandemic, and that meant writing in your car or while one of your kids was in virtual school. You also mention that this is the first book that you’ve written in your forties. Can you talk more about what the process was like and what it means to you to write this novel at this moment in your life?

It’s everything. It’s a miracle, is what I feel. When I first started pursuing a writing career, I thought, “I’ve got to write a novel and publish it before I’m twenty-five or I’m a failure.” I remember I even had like a blogspot that I titled, “Trying To Finish Before I’m Twenty-Five.” I would challenge myself to write a chapter and you could watch me write my novel in real time. With that writing, I got into grad school, so at least it wasn’t a waste, but I’ve always felt this pressure of producing and making. There has always felt like there’s these arbitrary age goals. I think that’s because there’s so much publicity for young writers, there’s so many awards for young writers. It’s this weird thing that we really laud in the in the publishing industry, youth and beauty. I beat myself up about that all the time. I’m forty-three and I tell myself that I’m going to have to fight tooth and nail to stay relevant.

Those are things that come from inside my own self-doubt. They come from my interpretation of the industry. They come from my brain lying to me, my brain telling me the truth, it’s all of it. But when I sit down and just focus on making something, all of that goes away. The pandemic was a really scary, sad time and at the time, I couldn’t even process how sad and scary it was. All those feelings are coming back now and realizing how sad and scary it was. But if I could carve out an hour—if it was early, early, early in the morning, if it was sitting in the car pretending to use the bathroom, whatever it was—if I could keep working on this thing I was making that meant a lot to me, then I was holding on to this really essential part of myself.

I’ve come to realize as an adult—and that’s funny that I’m saying I’m an adult as if I wasn’t in my twenties, but I do think I was kind of an idiot then—I’ve come to realize that as much as it’s important for me to move my body and work on my strength for my mental health, it’s really important for me to write. Because if I’m not writing, that stuff starts to build up in me like kidney stones. So that’s how I care for myself, by making sure that I’m honoring that part of myself.

Given the vantage point that the book has in terms of looking back on people’s lives and the relationship that these two women have, does this feel like a book you could only have written now? 

I mean, I hate admitting that. I never want to say, “So-and-so can’t write from whatever perspective.” I was just thinking about Rumaan Alam’s That Kind Of Mother. I remember reading his description of childbirth and thinking, “I’ve never read someone who understands it so fully,” and he’s a man! He’s never given birth. He does have children, but I would never want to say, “Well, he’s a man so he shouldn’t write that,” right? Or “I shouldn’t have tried to write this when I was in my twenties. But I do think that there has been some seasoning. (laughs) I remember telling one of my professors way back when I was in grad school, “I know that I can write, I just don’t feel like I have something.” And he was like, “You don’t have the chops yet.” And I thought, “Yes, exactly. I need the chops.” (laughs) I think those are what you get when you live and you challenge yourself and you have to continually convince yourself to do it and that you can do it. So I would say it would have been a very different book if I had tried to write this in my twenties.

I look back on my first collection Daddy’s. There are a lot of monstrous babies in that book.  I must have really been thinking about having children in a way that I wasn’t aware of. I would never probably write babies like that now that I’m a mother, but I also hate admitting that because again, I don’t ever want to say, “Oh, you’re not a fully formed person until XYZ,” right? But yeah, I think it just would have been really different.

The first half of the novel leads us up  to the murder and then the second half explores all the characters’ lives afterwards. Can you talk about how that structure  emerged? 

I think that’s what’s really interesting to me about events like this. Of course, in the moment and in the immediate afterward, it’s traumatizing and chaotic and horrible and confusing, but I wanted to know what the lasting effects are. I wanted to stay with these characters as much as possible. Like I said, in my first draft, there were those jumps forward in time but they were in different orders. When I smoothed it out in revision and put everything chronologically, that’s when it kind of fell into that part one, part two, and there’s a part three that has a present and it also goes back into the past, right around the time for violence happens.

I just wanted to give everything. I wanted to give the crime and the affair. I wanted to give how it affected everybody later. I knew people would want to see what Jackie was up to. They would want to know what the boys were up to, what Cece was up to. It was hard for me to accept that it was okay for it to be chronological, because it felt like I was giving up something. But actually, as I started to shape it that way, [I found] it was really enhancing it and opening up these other opportunities for characters to speak in the future. I’ve heard from some readers that they love part one and they don’t understand part two, or they love part two and part one was too slow. It’s fun to see it be all over the board like that. But I think the overall effects that I was going for was just this intense view of the consequences.

This book made me think about our culture’s fascination with true crime, especially how the second half really seems to be examining the realities of these events that are featured in podcasts or a “Dateline” episode.

And, you know, there are some really, really great true crime podcasts that do that. they kind of like it’s something you have the podcasts that that are reexamining unsolved crimes, and some of those are real garbage because it’s just like a dude driving around and being like, “I guess I’ll pull up to the trailer. Let’s see if they’ll let me in.” And then the person doesn’t let him in. It’s a lot of that, but there’s also these other really great ones that show you who the person is now and then reveal who they were at the time of the crime. And I love that. I really love that.

I love the notion in any form of literature, or any form of art, that the end is not the end, that it’s going to linger. As a reader, you’re going to be thinking about these things and going back over them. Even getting frustrated, I think, is a very valuable feeling as a reader. I know I’m not in the majority there, but I think it offers a chance to stay a little longer with the story.

Based on reactions that you’ve posted on Instagram, a lot of readers seem to be talking about the sex scenes. Especially in a time where we talk about how sex scenes are not being shown in movies or TV as much anymore, what was it like for you to explore how these characters are revealing about themselves in the sex scenes?

I always love this question, because did you listen to You Must Remember This — Erotic 80s and Erotic 90s?

Yes!

Karina Longworth’s amazing. I had never really pondered that sex or eroticism is kind of disappearing [from pop culture] and trying to figure out why or the political reasons for it. I know there’s been some talk about how the younger generation is kind of icked by sex scenes, and why that might be. But this is a book very much about bodies, like a literal dead body and then just bodies. I think one of the most informative tools a writer has is a sex scene. You can really show where the character is, what the character is trying to come off like, what the character is searching for, what the character needs, what they’re demanding, what the characters are together.

Also the kind of affair that Jackie and Adam have, it can scramble your brain. That was an important part of Jackie’s arc: she was in this very physical, torrid affair and she was getting something important out of it, but it was also changing into this other thing. It was crucial for us to see that so that we could understand what comes later. Theresa finds them and they’re tearing at each other. They don’t really want it anymore, but they don’t know how to back out of it. I just I think those are really important, base human interesting things to explore in literature and film.

Also, those scenes illuminate their world. There’s something so visceral about them.

My editor Roxane Gay when she read the first draft—poor Roxane, it was very rough, very raw, and it was not finished, so God bless her for still wanting to buy it. But that scene [where Jackie and Adam are] in the front seat, it’s one of the grossest, most carnal of the sex scenes. They’ve just had it with each other, but they also still really want each other. She just highlighted that and was like, “More of this.” I mean, Roxane herself is a very good writer of sex scenes, but just she got it. She understood.

I recently interviewed Laura Sims, and while How Can I Help You and Hot Springs Drive are totally different books, they are both compact, economical novels. When I interviewed her she talked about her love of the “short, weird novel,.” I wanted to hear from you about what you enjoy about working in such an economical frame?

I am also a big proponent of short novels. There are a lot of long books that I enjoy, but I think you can do less and make more. It goes hand in hand with that feeling I’m trying to create where not every question is answered, not every door is closed. I’ve heard from so many readers who were like, “But what about [these two characters]? Did they end up together?” I don’t want to answer that. I want you to think about it. I want to give you just enough. I want your imagination to work. I want your life experience to be working hand in hand with what you’re reading. I just think it can create a more efficient sense of ambivalence almost. I know that’s got a negative connotation, but I think it’s so great when a book sticks with you like that, and I think short books often do because they don’t give you everything.

I think it makes the reader work harder in terms of,filling in the gaps based on what’s been presented.

I think also, in some cases, when a book is really polished, I can see too clearly the writer’s contrivances. I think that’s because of being in the industry for so long. I remember when I was a theater kid and taking classes, they said, “You’ll never be able to watch a movie again in a normal way, because you’ll constantly be thinking about the choices that everyone made.” And they were right. (laughs) And that’s how it is to become a writer. Even though reading is my life and I read all the time, I’m always thinking of those kinds of things. I want there to be space for me. I know that lots of readers don’t feel that way. But that’s what feeds me, and that’s what I’m thinking of when I’m writing.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

The post “The End Is Not The End, It’s Going To Linger” — Lindsay Hunter On Her Heartbreaking New Novel first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The book bounces back and forth between the perspectives of Margo and Patricia. I was wondering if one of them was the entry point to the book for you or did they both kind of arrive together?

Margo was definitely my entry point. I had heard this podcast episode about this woman named Jane Toppan, who was called “Jolly Jane.” She was this serial killer nurse from the 1800s in Massachusetts. Like Margot, she was very cheerful, efficient, and actually a really good nurse and very popular with patients and colleagues. But she was also injecting her patients with morphine and atropine, and then she would climb on top of them and watch them die in a state of ecstasy. I found her instantly fascinating and I made a note about her where I keep ideas for books. I had been wanting to write a female serial killer and when I looked at my file one day, I was like, “Oh right, I want to write about her.” So I used her as the model for Margo. Of course, she’s not exactly like her in many ways, but that was the starting point. I started writing in Margo’s voice and really enjoyed it. It wasn’t until I don’t know how many pages in that I realized, “Oh, I think she needs a foil or a weird friend to add texture to the story,” and that’s when Patricia came in.

How did you develop the voice for Margo? She seems to have almost an out-of-time quality in terms of the formality of how she speaks and some of her colloquialisms. Did that just spring fully formed or was it something that emerged over time?

Pretty much. I feel like this happened with [my first book] Looker too where I had the first lines of the book and that voice came to me pretty easily. Then it was just a matter of continuing it. Maybe she has that quality because she is based on this woman from the 1800s? She’s sort of old fashioned in weird ways. I don’t know, it just kind of came out. (laughs)

You really pull the reader into the darkness of Margo’s psyche. It feels like you must have done a lot of research to step into someone who would make the choices that Margo does.

I mean, I really didn’t! (laughs) I don’t love doing really conscious research when I’m working on fiction. I’ve read a lot about serial killers through the years, because they’ve always fascinated me, particularly women who are serial killers or who are Munchausen by proxy. Women who kill really interest me in the in the way that they overturn the societal expectations of women in this really violent way. I find that really fascinating, so I’ve read a lot through the years about women like that. I did ultimately read a book about Jane, there’s one biography called Fatal by Harold Schecter. I didn’t really do concentrated research to get into her head. It was quite easy for me, whatever that says. (laughs)

One thing I really loved about the book is how you don’t really spell everything out for the reader. We get glimpses of Margo’s past but it’s never black and white about what specifically happened. Can you talk about what you included versus what you omitted in the book?

I love to talk about this, because what you loved in the book is what really annoys a lot of readers. I think there are some readers who want everything spelled out and want there to be a reason for her behavior. Listen, that was a lot of background for me. (laughs) I do not like giving the kind of background for my characters that’s like, “Oh, she had this happen to her so she’s this way.” I find it too easy. I don’t think humans are that easily understandable. Of course I think Margo is a psychopath and yes, she maybe had a difficult childhood with an alcoholic mother. But I don’t want to put so much in that you’re able to say this was why she did this. I wanted her to be kind of a pure psychopath. This is going to sound really weird, but I don’t think that women psychopaths or women killers are given the freedom to just be who they are and do what they do without some kind of motive ascribed to them. Like, “Oh, they did it because their husband left them or they wanted revenge or they wanted money or whatever.” I just wanted to let her be pure in this very creepy way. I think it’s scarier that way too, or less comforting, right?

I think coming from poetry the way I do is also part of it. That’s how I write. I think of it more as a collaboration between the reader and the writer, so I don’t love giving people everything.  I want there to be room for the reader’s imagination because that’s part of the fun of reading, for me anyway.

I want to ask you about that as like your background as a poet. How does that inform your approach to fiction?

I’m still motivated by the same things that I was in writing poetry: voice, imagery, feeling, emotion. I’m not a natural when it comes to plot or setting, those are things I really have to work on when I’m writing fiction. I have to have to really consciously layer them in. But I still come from this place of I get an idea or I hear a voice or a line and it motivates me and inspires me to write. In those ways, it’s very similar to writing poetry for me. Of course, it’s very different because it’s so long and such a slog and things like plot stuff has to happen, you have to have a setting to some extent. (laughs) I always have pretty minimal settings, so that’s different. Also, I pay a lot of attention to language. Not in the way that most people think of the poet-novelist, right? Because I don’t write flowery prose. I don’t think I write in the super lyrical mode. In my fiction, I’m pretty spare, which I also was in my poetry. But I do pay a lot of attention to the sound of the line and the rhythm and how it sounds when you read it out loud, so I’m still doing stuff like that.

I’m surprised to hear you say that about setting, because this book has such a strong sense of place, both in terms of the library and also the apartment complex where Margo and Patricia live. Was that something that was in the original draft or was that something you layered in subsequently?

The library was like a gift to me. Part of the inspiration for the book was the setting of the library. In that way, I didn’t have to work that hard for a main setting because one of the main focuses of the book was the library. I don’t like writing setting. It’s more I can focus on a small specific. I like really contained settings for my novels and then I can really dig into them. I don’t think I’m the type of writer who could do like a big sweeping novel that takes you from one country to the next or something. Maybe someday, who knows? (laughs) I really like contained and specific settings and the library is so perfect for that.

You work as a reference librarian, and I think what will be fun for people who either love the library or who work in libraries is to see how the library is portrayed. You capture a grittier side of a small town library and also the mundanity of any kind of public facing job.

I work part time at my local library, but I had started working more frequently during the pandemic. People were not feeling comfortable enough to return to work, so that was when I really started to get to know patrons and have more interactions with people. I started to keep a notebook much like Patricia does, although mine was I would jot down notes when I had interesting conversations either on the phone or in person. I started to think—and this is also like Patricia—I was really surprised by the difference between what the focus had been on in graduate school in preparing us for library work, of course really essential things like planning programs, discussing equity issues. But we didn’t spend a lot of time on what will it actually be like to work at a public library day to day And some of the issues that librarians are focusing on now. I was really struck by the difference between my idea of what a reference librarian would be doing all day and the reality of answering those calls, like Patricia gets, like what’s the weather in Saudi Arabia today, or what time is my favorite TV show on? I wanted to capture that. I also feel like there aren’t many shows or movies or books that show the library in that way. There are a lot of romanticized versions that we see or read. I kind of wanted to just blow those up. (laughs)

The book moves so quickly, and it seems like a book you read very fast because you want to know what’s going to happen next. How did you arrive at the pacing of the story?

I tend to overwrite when I’m first draft-ing. In revision I definitely had to hone the pacing and figure out how to balance it. I kind of like that it has an irregular pacing to it. People have called it a slow burn, either in a positive way or a negative way. (laughs) I am a fan of the slow burn. I think the first couple of sections of the book are probably slower, but it hopefully builds to this really rapid movement towards the end. I wanted that feeling of things moving steadily, slowly increasing, and then the dominoes fall and everything happens fast. I like capturing that kind of pacing, which I do think happens in life. When things go badly, things fall apart very quickly.

The book is so compact at 240 pages. Is that a scope that you enjoy working in?

I love weird short novels. That’s like my favorite thing to read. Probably I have absorbed that into my own writing, and then replicated it. It probably also comes from that transition from poetry to fiction. This book is a little bit longer than Looker was, and the book I’m working on now is a little bit longer than How Can I Help You I’m gradually getting a bit longer, but they’ll probably still be relatively short. I don’t really think that many books need to be anywhere over 300 pages. I love a long book that needs to be long—and there are some—but there are so many more that I’ve read that I just want to take a red pencil to. I don’t know if I should say that. (laughs)

I like the idea of there being a table in a bookstore or library with a sign, “Weird, Short Novels.”

Wouldn’t that be great? I would go right to it. Oh my gosh, I just love them. I love like the tightness of them. I just feel when you are putting that much energy into this compact little form, everything is spot on.

The book is also really funny. The supporting characters are so sharply drawn and so fun whenever they appear. This is a very dark story with a lot of really grim things that you handle respectfully, but the book the book has a definite humorous streak, and I’m curious about how you arrived at the tone.

I feel like it grew naturally out of Margo herself, and how she is this cheerful, jolly person, this person with many contradictions to her, and she has a great sense of humor. It kind of came out of itself, coming from her especially, not so much Patricia. I love dark comedy. I love the kind of sharp observations that can come from that darkly comic tone. Those are really appealing to me.

A lot of critics have compared this book to Shirley Jackson, plus We Have Always Lived In The Castle plays such a huge part, where Patricia and Margo have such a specific relationship with that book. I was curious about the authors who are meaningful for you, either growing up or as a writer?

Definitely Shirley Jackson. She’s definitely very inspiring to me. While I was writing the book, I was having a hard time finding a book that I loved. I picked up We Have Always Lived In The Castle to read it again and I just adored it for the second time. I thought it would be fun to stick it in the book and have this nurse serial killer who doesn’t read fall in love with it. Patricia Highsmith is a big influence. I love the oddness of her story lines, just the psychological depth of her stories. I’ve always been amazed by her.

Finally, what role has the library played in your life?

I’m kind of a cliché.  As a young reader and writer, I spent a lot of time at the library. I remember my divorced dad would take me. He didn’t quite know what to do with me when he had me on Saturdays, so we would go to the library for hours. I already loved to read but I think it really emphasized and increased my love of books and reading. I would just sit down there and read books and talk to the librarian. It was always a very safe, wonderful, comforting place for me. It was a huge influence on my reading and writing life from very early times.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post “I Want There To Be Room For The Reader’s Imagination” – Laura Sims On Her Terrifying New Novel first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The book focuses on the lives of three women. Was there a particular character who was the starting off point for the novel?

It was actually Lolo. When I was writing her story, I was really asking question that I wished I was able to ask my own mom. She passed away when I was thirty-four, six weeks after I had my second daughter. My mom was from the generation where kids are to be seen and not heard. So I didn’t really get to talk to her about her life, the choices that she made, her relationships, what it was like to be a woman bumping up against all of these different barriers, particularly for Black women in America. I didn’t get to ask her that when I was kid because it wasn’t an option to ask her. By the time that I had my own kids, our relationship changed. She was way more open and willing to share herself with me, woman to woman instead of mother to daughter. I was so consumed with raising babies, being a mother and figuring out how to juggle a marriage with being a mom and a career and book writing. I just didn’t get the chance after our relationship took that turn to talk to her in a meaningful way about womanhood and what it meant to move through the world almost as if you are invisible, but making sure that you grab what little bit of agency that you can. I wish that I could have talked to her about those things, and so the questions that I had for her are really the questions I asked of Lolo. Though the story is very much a figment of my imagination, the choices that Lolo make are steeped in some of the things that I believe my mother had to go through as a Black woman, being born an American in 1940 and going through the Great Migration up to New York, and trying to find her way in a society that didn’t try to make a way for her.

Grace is such a vital presence in the book and I feel like she’s a character who readers will really fall in love with. One of the descriptions of Grace that really stood out to me is, “Grace who always followed questions with more questions until her brain had its fill.” Can you talk about how you created Grace?

So Grace is the birth mom, and Grace is—how do I explain this? I’m a child of adoption. Very much like Rae, I found out when I was twelve. I never said anything and never revealed that I knew until my mom passed away. Then my dad and I had that conversation and he gave me a little background into what he knew of my origin story. My entire life—and I’ll be fifty-five in a couple of weeks—I had to make up stories about who my birth mother was. Those stories were steeped in this very much American narrative that birth mothers had babies and gave them up because they weren’t strong. They had babies not out of love, but because they made a mistake. Those children are mistakes that weren’t loved, and that’s why they got sent away, right? And that the real love comes from the parents who adopted the child and opened their home to them, and those children are forever grateful to the adoptive parents and don’t necessarily care about the birth parents, right? That’s been the narrative that I’ve known all my life as an adopted child.

With Grace I wanted to do exactly what her name is, which is to show her grace, show birth mothers grace. Even with the narrative that birth mothers give up their babies and made them as mistakes and not out of love. I wanted to flip that narrative on its head, because that’s never the way that I’ve ever thought about my birth mother. I’ve always painted the narrative about her with positivity, grace, and understanding. Having carried two babies in my own belly, giving a child away is not an easy thing to do, no matter how that child was made, no matter what the circumstances that child is born into, no matter how easy or hard it would be for the mother to raise that child or not. The simple matter of it is to carry a human being in your belly and give birth to them [and then put the baby up for adoption], it cannot be an easy decision.

I wanted to show Grace the way that I always saw my birth mother, as someone who was in love with the person who she made the baby with, that she wanted this baby, that she didn’t have control over where that baby ultimately went and what ultimately came of that baby, and that people unfairly forgot about who she was in the narrative of her daughter. I hear a lot of people complaining that Grace’s book ends so abruptly and then we don’t know what happened to her or [her grandmother] Maw Maw. “It’s really unfair that you did that In the book of Grace!” It’s like, I did that on purpose, because that’s what we tend to do to birth mothers, right? We see their narrative, we make up whatever the story is that we need to make up about them, and then we demand that society forget them. And we demand that they forget their children. And that an adopted child’s story begins not at the moment of conception or even the moment of birth, but the signing of the adoption papers. I find that deeply unfair to us as adoptive children, and that does not take away from my love for my parents. They’re my parents, and I’m forever a part of the fabric of the Millner clan, but I have an origin story just like everybody else. And that began with a woman who’s very much like Grace.

The book is paced so beautifully. The first 100 pages moves so fluidly and I was always flipping the pages wanting to know what would happen next. I was curious about how you approached the pacing of the novel, especially the first part?

This is going to sound extremely weird, but it is the truth, that book was damn near written in my subconscious. There would be times when I would just put my head down for two or three hours and then lift my head back up and I didn’t know where the heck that story came from, or where it went or why it went where it went. It was not planned. I did not have a detailed outline. I just literally would jot down a few notes. Some of those notes came in dreams. Some of those notes came to me from imagining what those women would have gone through.

I knew that the beginning would be that this girl was in a beautiful family who loved her, that they were a family of Black midwives in the South, and that they came from a strong line of healers that stretched back to Africa. I knew that I wanted it to end with Grace’s baby taken away. That was it. I am a firm believer that our ancestors are constantly around us and that they speak to us, through us. That book, more so than the other two, was very much a book that came through the ancestors. I feel like when I put my head down and then picked it back up there was just beauty on that page. It was just kismet that it happened the way that it did, that it wrote itself the way that it wrote itself. Particularly the first forty-four pages, which is what my agent sold to eight different countries. It was spirit that helped me write those pages. I have no other way to describe it,  because I read it even today and I’m just like my God, did you do that? (laughs)

A lot of it was written steeped with emotion. Rae is emotional. I look at [the Rae section] like an homage to the Black women writers of the 1990s, which is when I started writing my books. It’s very much Terry McMillan, Bebe Moore Campbell, Bernice McFadden. It’s those women that I’m paying homage to with that book, because it’s set in the 90s but also because the general feel of the way that Black women were asked to look at relationships came directly from those books, pop culture, movies of the time. The conversation that was being had about Black women and their relationships, which was you are to have a high powered career and you are to make a good amount of money for yourself, but you also should find your dark prince on the white horse. That person is supposed to rock your world, be your everything, and be able to treat you like the princess that you are. How realistic that was is a whole other proposition, which is what Rae faces in that book. But Grace, I had to do research on who she was and where she came from. A lot of it was spirit-led and emotion-led.

It just happened that way, and there was a lot of research that I did. For instance, there is the chapter that begins with “no one has respect for pregnant teen girls.” Sixteen-year-olds are to shut the hell up, do what they’re told, and if they end up pregnant, well, the scourge of the Earth they are. That piece that opens that chapter comes from me doing research the night before I wrote it. I had Googled at one o’clock in the morning “what was it like to be a sixteen-year-old unwed mother-to-be in 1968?” Literally, that’s what I Googled. I kept coming across these message boards for what are called Booth babies. Those are kids that were born in Booth Memorial Hospital, which was a consortium of homes for unwed mothers, created and run by the Salvation Army. I had never seen these before, but despite that I’d never seen them before, I was born in a Booth Memorial Hospital. That’s what’s on my abbreviated birth certificate—Booth Memorial Hospital in Queens. So I’m looking at these message boards and I’m like, “What the hell is a Booth baby? And why are all of these hospitals in Compton, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Queens, where I was born? Why are there so many of them? I thought the hospital that I was born in was just a regular old hospital that underwent a name change at some point. It’s now called Queens Memorial Hospital. I just didn’t know until one o’clock in the morning while coming across all of those people looking for their mothers and all of those mothers looking for their babies—all of whom were born in Booth Memorial hospitals—that I was born in a Booth Memorial Hospital and most likely taken from my mother, not given up. So after I finished bawling for hours, figuring out through my research what most likely happened with my mom and me, I turned around and I wrote that piece. So “The Book of Grace” is more about emotion. It’s more about my feelings for my birth mother, and my compassion for her, and the compassion that I wish that people had for birth mothers. That pacing is more emotion than anything else, emotion and spirit led.

You bring so many different times in history alive in the book. I was really drawn into the political conversations that the characters get into, especially Grace and her boyfriend Dale debating life in the south versus the north. I feel like those kinds of really lively debates spring up throughout the book. Can you talk about how you allowed for those kinds of conversations to occur throughout the book?

Well, I thought it was important. Those kinds of conversations happen in the book because they’re very real to me and my family, right? That specific conversation that you just referenced is borne of conversations that I constantly have with my eighty-eight-year-old dad, who is from Virginia. This man has seen so much, and talked about so little and talked about so much at the same time, right? We go to Virginia now to visit him and he’s constantly pointing out, “Okay, over there is where the bus with the white kids passed by us when we were walking in the snow to our one-room shack of a school. That was the only thing that we had. We had to get there early to set the fire so that we would be warm while they were riding on the bus, waving at us because they were our friends. That was the difference. They were on the bus going to the big school. We were on foot going to the small school and trying to make it comfortable for ourselves. Yeah, we were aware of civil rights. But we lived in a self-sufficient community where we owned our own things and we didn’t really think about white people like that. We just didn’t.”

I’m always fascinated by the idea that this Black man could be in the South, go through things that folks were clearly fighting for, but it not necessarily be the bane of his existence. My dad and his family did not wake up in the morning thinking about freedom. In their mind, they were free, right? They shopped for their groceries, they grew their own food. They tended their own chickens and cows. The community came together.

I was just with my dad in St. Maarten for a couple of weeks. We went on vacation. He was telling me about Hog Killing Day and I was like, “What the hell was Hog Killing Day? What are you talking about?” And he’s like, “You know, the whole community would get together, we would kill the hogs at the same time, we would have a big bonfire, and we would eat. Then we would all assist each other in creating what we needed to create to make that meat last through the winter. So we all came together on the Hog Killing Day and that’s what we did.”

But those are the kinds of stories that I get from my dad, the idea that they fought back. I come from a family of men and women who believe in carrying guns and who believe in protecting themselves and their family. That was infinitely more important to them than—I won’t say than civil rights, because that’s not the case, right? They wanted rights, they wanted to be able to live equal lives, but they lived lives where they were an insular community that loved one another and just handled issues day to day. I wanted that to come out in that conversation between Dale and Grace in this fundamental misunderstanding that some folks have on Southerners and how they live their lives.

I want to talk about your Denene Millner imprint. Can you talk about how you started it?

Oh my goodness, Denene Millner Books is my heart’s joy. It really is. I love being able to create stories that feature Black children and families in a way that stretches beyond the idea that the only worthy story to be told about the Black experience is about slavery, the civil rights movement, or “Black firsts.” I love those books. I think that those books are necessary. They are teaching us about American history and the world. But I also knew that as a mother of two daughters that I didn’t want to read those stories to my children when I was putting them to sleep at night. To read something other than kids being run over by dogs or stealing away from slavery. I wanted them to see themselves in their current iteration. What does it mean to be afraid of the tooth fairy but still want her money? To get on the bus for the first time and be scared about kindergarten? What does it mean to have parents who absolutely love you and adore you? There were some books that were an inspiration for how I saw the kinds of books that I wanted to write and the kinds of books I wanted to publish, namely Faith Ringgold’s Tar Beach, bell hooks’ Homemade Love, and Debbie Allen’s Dancing in the Wings. To this day, they are three of my favorite children’s books. I just knew that I wanted to write those kinds of books, but I wasn’t getting the kind of reception—or even the offers—that I thought I should get for books that explored the everyday humanity of Black children.

I was an author and I was pitching children’s books and nobody was feeling them at all. The reasoning that I kept getting was, “This isn’t realistic,” or “No one will buy this because who wants to buy a book about a little girl singing her first church solo in school?” Or “who wants to buy a book about a little boy getting a haircut, loving his haircut and feeling good when he gets out of the barber’s chair?” And this was happening to more than just me. This was happening to Black authors who are friends of mine who just could not find an audience with editors at these publishing companies. My then husband at the time, he had written a book for Agate Publishing in Chicago. I thought, “Well, if I can’t get past the gatekeepers, maybe I should build my own gate, create my own yard, and invite folks in.” So I talked myself into a dinner with his publisher, Doug Seibold. I showed up to that dinner with the idea that I would pitch a children’s book imprint to Doug, and Doug showed up to that same dinner with the idea that he would pitch a Black children’s book imprint to me. So we showed up to table with the same idea. (laughs)

At the time, I was running a parenting blog called My Brown Baby, so I had a pretty huge audience. I knew that I could count on that audience to really love the kinds of books that I had in mind. We got together, we partnered, we created this imprint, and it enjoyed a huge, huge debut with Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut by Derrick Barnes and illustrated by Gordon C. James.

Finally, what role the library has played in your life?

Oh my gosh. So I was the nerdiest, no-friends-having, always-in-the-house, in-my-bedroom-with-my-dolls-and-my books kid you could ever meet at night in the 1970s and 80s. The library was my very best friend—the Brentwood Public Library in Brentwood, New York. I grew up in Bayshore, but we were right on the border of Brentwood. The walk to the library was about a mile and a half and I always had a knapsack. To this day, I walk a little crooked! My dad swears it’s because I carried too many books from the library in my knapsack. (laughs) One leg is a little shorter than the other because I was walking for that mile and a half. But going to the library, being able to disappear into the shelves, find books that took me to other worlds and let me see the way that other people lived and thought, how that got to be the entry for me—I’m getting teary just thinking about it. It was the entry for me as a little nerdy girl who was studious, an A plus student, and intent on following the rules. For this girl to be able to see the world in a different way from my bedroom in Bayshore, New York—The Little Princess, The Secret Garden, the Judy Blume books, the Ramona books were books that just gave me wings, that just gave me life, that just made me giggle. For a little Black girl who felt invisible, the library allowed me to live a life that I didn’t see myself being able to live and I am forever grateful for that.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

The post Denene Millner On Her Tender Family Saga And Discovering “Beauty On The Page” first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Can you talk about how the how this book came about? How did your relationship with your mother inspire the writing of this book?

Absolutely. I never expected to write a novel and I’ve always been a huge reader, particularly a huge murder mystery reader. It started when I was a little kid going with my mom to the Buena Vista branch of the LA County library. I’ve always loved murder mysteries, but never thought I would be anything other than a fiction reader. And then, three years ago, my mom got really sick. She was diagnosed with stage four cancer spread throughout her body. It was just one of those wake-up call moments where I did not want to do anything but be with her. At the time I was working with libraries and museums and theaters and parks around the world on inclusive and relevant practices. I just had to take a pause and be with her. I rushed to Los Angeles to be with my mom and fortunately was able to work with the board of this nonprofit to transition out and just focus on her. A lot of my friends at the time said to me, “You’ll never regret the time you’re spending with your mom right now,” which was absolutely true, but what they didn’t say is that time—and I don’t know if you’ve experienced this—it’s not always fun or easy or joyful.

I think that for us, we were so lucky to get to be together, but it was really a stressful and scary time. I was desperately seeking some kind of distraction, something that we could escape into, and find some joy in during that hard time. Because we both always loved murder mysteries, I started taking old favorites off the shelf to read with her. Then one day I just turned to my mom and said, “What if I tried writing a murder mystery with someone like you as the lead detective?” And that’s where Mother Daughter Murder Night was born. It really started as this very intimate, personal project and opportunity for my mom and I to sit in the hospital waiting room or in her bed and just brainstorm about these characters.

As you know, because you’ve read the book, the premise starts from something very similar to my own story, a tough LA Jewish businesswoman gets cancer and is forced to move in with her daughter and granddaughter in their ramshackle cottage in the Monterey Bay. I was really rooting in this idea of what if someone not exactly like my mom, but inspired by her, got sick and had to move up to where I live? What if one night when she was bored and stuck in bed, she saw something suspicious outside her window? What if her granddaughter got caught up with a dead body and a murder investigation? How would a woman who is feeling a lack of loss of not just health, but of power and agency, seek a new path to assert herself and to be visible and have power in this new life and in this new set of circumstances she’s dealing with?

It’s such a beautiful tribute to your mom and, I should say, I hope that your mom is in good health now.

She is! I realize I always forget to say that part. We’ve been super lucky and she has just continued to get stronger and stronger. It’s been so beautiful how this book—first the creation of it and now the sharing of it—has been something that she and I can really find joy in and talk about every single day, whether we’re talking about edits and her opinion about certain things that are happening in the story, or whether we’re talking about how readers are responding now. It’s just been such a gift to get to share that with her.

I was wondering if you could share some of the mysteries that you and your mom read, either during her treatment or when you were growing up?

We were always big fans of Janet Evanovich and Sue Grafton and Faye Kellerman, who wrote these Jewish inflected LA-based mysteries. Anything with a strong woman, anything with that traditional mystery element of some comfort—we were not going for the grizzly or the noir—and then also some lightheartedness. I think a lot about Janet Evanovich when I think about where some of the humor energy comes from. It’s funny, because today my mom and I still read a ton of murder mysteries, and there are some series and books we really agree on, and some we just don’t see eye to eye on. For example, I’m a huge Louise Penny fan. I think that her particular brand of weaving comfort and warmth into the world of murder mysteries is so powerful, but my mom thinks they’re kind of boring. (laughs)

Recently we both loved Dial A for Aunties and Thursday Murder Club. I think that Mother-Daughter Murder Night falls into this category that we’re seeing now with authors like Jesse Q. Sutanto or even with authors like Anita Prose in The Maid, where you have a murder mystery, but alongside it you also have this really bighearted family or found family story of people—and in the case of Mother-Daughter Murder Night, women—coming together. I would say this book is as much a family drama as it is a murder mystery, and that was very intentional.

The relationships that Lana, Beth, and Jack have are very complicated and different dynamics emerge depending on the different pairings. Could you talk about what went into creating those different dynamics?

One of the things I’m really trying to explore in this book is just what it means to be a strong woman and what it means to be a strong woman at different ages. As I wrote this book, I was really grappling with my own definitions of strength. At the time that my mom got sick, both she and I were CEOs of organizations. In my case, it was a nonprofit. In her case, it was a business. I felt really proud to be strong in this way that’s very much about being the leader, charging ahead. I really learned from my mom and it was really modeled to me. I definitely wrote that kind of strength into Lana Rubicon, who is the outrageous grandma and kind of the star of the show in this story.

But a lot of this writing was about me grappling with redefining strength as I got in touch with the caregiver inside of me, who is of course Beth, the daughter in this story. She’s in that squeeze generation—she’s both raising a child and caregiving for her parent. Beth’s strength really comes in interdependence and in care, which is something that Lana at first does not respect or fully understand, although she certainly benefits from it. A lot of the writing of this story was about my own journey, from identifying as a Lana, to learning to love and admire what it can mean to be a strong person who’s strong in relation to others. So learning to love the Beth.

Then of course, you have Jack, the teenager, who is strong in a whole other way, which is about being adventurous and being outdoorsy. That’s certainly a component of my life, but also I have a daughter who is much younger than Jack. When I was writing Jack, I was writing the kind of young woman that I hope my daughter will become.

I would also say that I think that there are so many different ways to be strong in this world, and for a woman or for anybody who’s marginalized, there’s the way you define your own strength and there’s also the way that the world identifies your strengths. For all three of these women and also for the police detective, Teresa Ramirez, who they work with, all four women are negotiating and navigating their own strength but also how the world observes them. They all have different opinions based on their circumstances and their generation about how they should be engaging with that. I meet so many women, whether it’s older women like Lana who are starting to feel invisible-alized or whether it’s women of color, like Teresa Ramirez, who are always seen in a very specific light, regardless of their actions. I wanted to really explore that push-pull of the strength you have inside of you and the way you are perceived by others, and how people and how women engage with that.

That’s such a compelling part of the book. So many of the characters have moments when they are reevaluating how they perceive one another or appreciating what the other person has to go through.

I’m proud to be from a family of strong women. I think that often in books and in pop culture, maybe there will be one strong woman, or maybe there’ll be a queen bee and then some followers. I really wanted to portray this idea that you can have many strong women together and when you do, it’s not about them changing or one of them becoming dominant. It’s about them negotiating. How are we going to be a team and how are we going to work together—in this case to solve a murder—to tackle hard things together?

The beginning of the book really focuses on the relationships among the three main characters, and we really don’t meet a lot of the suspects until later on. I was curious about how you approached the structure of the book?

This is something I worked a lot with my editor, Liz Stein at William Morrow, about. One of the reasons I was so excited to work with her is that from the very beginning, she had a vision for this book doing both things. I got a lot of feedback early on that it’s hard to write a book that does two things, in this case, family drama and murder mystery. There were a lot of people encouraging me to go for one lane or the other. One of the things I love about Liz is from the very beginning she said, “No, let’s do both.”

I was so aware, in every revision, how many pages till the dead body? How many pages till there’s a there’s this party at the ranch where you meet a lot of the suspects? I was so nervous about where that happened. But I would say also, this is a book that has two inciting incidents, because it has three main characters. The first inciting incident, which is really for Lana and Beth, is when Lana gets sick. Her life is uprooted and she’s forced back together with the daughter who she’s been largely estranged from for years. Then the second inciting incident is when Jack, the granddaughter, comes upon this dead body. I think that we needed some time in the beginning to sink into that first inciting incident while still getting to the dead body. I’m still proud it happens before the fifty page mark, but boy, I was very mindful of this. I’ve heard from some people who say, “I was in it for the mystery, but I liked the women too,” or vice versa. I’ve heard from people who say, “For me, it was really about these women and their relationships and then the mystery kept me turning pages.” So I hope it is both and I hope that there’s enough to sink into with these characters to really get there.

The other thing that was a change we made in the edits was originally this book was really centered on Lana and on her point of view. In working with my editor, we balanced it out to have all three of the Rubicon women have a strong role, both in the mystery but also in their own lives. I think that helped make it a richer story. To be honest, Lana is so outrageous that I think she’s very fun to read about and watch, but she may not be the easiest for everybody to identify with. I think that doing some of that balancing lets you not just root for these women, but also find yourself among these women as a reader as you’re going along through the mystery with them.

I want to talk about the setting of the book because it seems so crucial for the story. Can you talk about how you settled on Elkhorn Slough?

There were a couple of things that played into the setting for me. It’s my debut novel, and I felt more confident setting it somewhere that I know well, that’s easy for me to visit and do research in, but I didn’t want to put it right in my backyard. I’m here in Santa Cruz, so Elkhorn Slough is about thirty minutes south of where I live. It’s a place that I’m very familiar with. It’s a place I love to go. It’s a place where I know a lot of people who are connected there, but it’s not like I’m talking about my neighborhood where I live. That felt like an appropriate amount of distance while also giving me a lot of access.

I also just love Elkhorn Slough, and it’s a place that actually my mom introduced me to. When we were in those early days of her being sick, I spent a lot of my time in Los Angeles with her, but sometimes I came back up here to the Monterey Bay to be with my family. I found myself really gravitating towards going paddleboarding in Elkhorn Slough. I just felt this calm and this other-worldliness that was very special to me, so when I was writing, I wanted to go there.

I’ll also say that it’s a place that has these really interesting contradictions. It’s both this incredible marine preserve with all kinds of wildlife, but it’s also smashed right up against a lot of industrial activity. There’s a working marina. There’s a highway that goes through it. There’s a railroad with a train that goes through every day. You have this sort of border between the natural and the wild, and the urban and the industrial. In my experience, any place where you’re at a border, there’s going to be conflict. As I’m sure you know, in California today, there probably is no bigger conflict than the conflict over land—who owns it, who controls it? I loved the idea of setting the mystery within this place that is both beautiful and eerie,  both urban and wild, and also that could grapple with some of these real issues around land management and land ownership that we’re facing in California today.

How has the book been received by people there?

It’s been terrific. We’ve had so much local support and just so much enthusiasm about it. I think Elkhorn Slough is a place that’s just a little less visible than some other marine preserves or incredible natural places in the greater Monterey Bay. I’m just so grateful that this is shining a light on this extraordinary natural resource. I hope it means more people will go out and go on a kayak tour, go for a hike, and see the incredible wildlife that’s there.

It is a place that is both very beautiful and very spooky. One of my favorite memories when I was doing research is I would go paddleboarding out there. My daughter, who was about seven or eight at the time, would kneel on the front of my paddleboard. We’d be seeing all these otters and pelicans and then she’d point at some falling down shack on the side of the bank and  be like, “Mom, you should kill somebody right there!” (laughs) It was both like very cute and very creepy.

I’m sure you’ve gotten this question a ton of times, but are there plans for future mysteries with the Rubicon women?

I think at this point, that’s in some ways up to readers. The book has just been out a couple of weeks. It’s been amazing to see all the responses. Personally, I am of two minds of it. On the one hand, I would love to write more adventures with these women. I have more mysteries I would love for them to solve. On the other hand, I wrote this book for a very idiosyncratic and personal reason. I also feel like it’s the first novel I’ve written and I’m so excited to explore other women and other settings and other ways to kill people. (laughs) I’m hopeful that there will be a lot of novels in my future. If these characters are part of some of them, that would be amazing. But at this point, we’re enjoying the connection and getting to finally share this book out in the world.

Oh, I love that. So would you be interested in sticking with the mystery genre?

Definitely. I think that my interest is in the broad world of crime fiction and strong women. I feel confident that there will be some dead bodies and there will be some smart women working together and kicking butt. But beyond that, I think that I’ve really been enjoying exploring a lot of different ideas for what might come next.

Finally, what role the public library has played in your life?

Oh, my gosh, I mean, public libraries have been a huge part of my life, both personally and professionally. I am one of those kids who went to the library and went to the nonfiction section. It started at 000 and I was like, “I’m gonna do all of this.” I don’t know if the Dewey Decimal people were aware of this or not, but it starts with these very thick philosophy books. I was in fourth grade bringing home the collected works of Aristotle. (laughs) It did slow my ardor for that initial impulse, but I’ve always been a huge library user.

I admit that in elementary school, I was that nerdy, weird kid who spent lunch in the school library. Then as an adult, I started working in museums. I was working with museums and public libraries around this question of how can we invite people from all walks of life, all races, all backgrounds, to really feel welcome and to feel that this is a resource for them? When I was a museum director, I would often say to my team that my dream is for us to make museums as open and welcoming and democratic as public libraries are. I really believe in that idea that especially today in the United States, it is a radical, beautiful thing to have this public resource. I do not take it for granted. A lot of the work I’ve done professionally over the last ten years has been with public librarians around this very serious question about how we continue to ensure that these incredible places stay public and can be for everyone. That’s so important to me.

Also just on a personal level, you know how some people, their personal mission is to introduce everybody to their favorite pizza place or whatever? It is my personal mission, especially when I meet friends who are in their twenties, who are new to town, to get them a library card. I cannot tell you how many friends I’ve met who think it costs money or that it’s going to be hard or whatever. And I love, love, love when friends tell me, “Now I’m using Libby” or “Do you know you can reserve books in advance and pick them up?” I’m a huge public library user and honestly, one of my biggest dreams for Mother-Daughter Murder Night is that someday it’ll be on the Lucky Day shelf at my local Santa Cruz Public Library.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post Nina Simon On How Her Bighearted Mystery Helped Her Redefine Strength first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

I had never heard about Mary Lasker and I think that’s probably true for a lot of people who aren’t associated with the medical community. How did you first learn about her? 

Well, and just as an edit, even people in the medical community don’t know who she is, so you’re certainly not alone. My last book came out in March of 2021, From Shadows To Life, A Biography Of The Cancer Survivorship Movement. As a result of doing research for that, Mary Lasker made an appearance in the very first chapter, so her biography is actually the prequel to that book. I feel a little bit like George Lucas here. (laughs) In researching her some more, I realized that she was not only a big deal, but she was exactly the kind of subject that I so adore writing about.

What were those qualities that made her so compelling to research and write about? 

One of the first things I always ask myself as I’m researching potential book subjects is what was their motivation? Why did they do what they did? I’m thoroughly interested in human courage and why people persevere down avenues that seem impossible, and–thankfully not in Mary’s case–but sometimes even dangerous, and they go at it anyway. So learning that Mary was so wealthy as a result of marrying Albert, and had such a social swirl around her, why on earth would she spend five decades of her life pounding the halls of Congress? 

She had a very good reason: mostly because she just felt so sorry for people who were suffering. Her first introduction to cancer was when she was just a child, like five or six, and her mother took her to visit the family laundress who had breast cancer and had just had a mastectomy. This would have been in the first decade of the 20th century, so the surgery was pretty awful. Mary remembered this clearly and she repeated this [story] over and over again in different instances in her oral history. She remembered this woman lying on this low cot with all these children standing around her and how dreadful the scene was. On the way over, her mother was preparing her and when she said, “She had her breasts removed.” Mary said,”Like cut off?” And her mother said, “Yeah, like cut off.” That really stuck with her. That was the biggest thing. Then sadly, both of her parents died of heart and blood-pressure related diseases. She just could not accept that all of that was God’s will.

Reading the book, I was really struck by how compassionate and empathetic her mother was. What were the kind of foundational lessons that Mary learned from her mother that she brought to her later work?

It’s interesting because several of my books’ subjects have had very progressive or forward-thinking parents, or at least one parent who was very forward and progressive thinking, and they seem to drive my subjects along. In Mary’s case, her mother’s family was a very large family. Mary’s grandfather had three wives. The first two died and with each wife he had more children. This was all in Ireland. Mary’s mother was Sarah, and Sarah just didn’t want that. She didn’t want to have a bushel full of kids, she wanted to have some kind of interesting life. So she packed her bags, left Ireland at the age of eighteen in the late 19th century, and came to the US. In less than a decade she became the highest paid woman in Chicago as the head dressmaker for Carson Pirie Scott. She just had the drive to follow through on things. At the same time, she loved the beauty of the world around her. She loved flowers, loved parks, and she was very civic minded. So all of those things that drive the love of beauty and the civic mindedness just became the perfect storm for Mary’s life.

Can you talk about what was the state of cancer and heart disease research when Mary’s advocacy first started? How were those diseases perceived by the general public and also the medical community?

In the early 19th century, the human body became more and more understood. Let’s even go back a little bit further. The human body was becoming more and more understood, and for all  America’s industrial might–and later, our military might–we were incredibly behind in medical education. Of course, today that blows everybody’s mind. But we were and as a matter of fact, doctors would actually go to France and Germany and go study medicine there. Medical schools as we know them today didn’t exist. Doctors would sometimes graduate from college with a bachelor’s degree, and sometimes they wouldn’t go to college at all, but they were going to medical training in Europe. 

Of course, 100 plus years ago, there wasn’t a great deal understood about heart disease and cancer. Cancer still, and this is no big surprise, has a lot of mystery surrounding it. Heart disease we’ve got a much better handle on. But the interesting thing was that it’s sort of this self-fulfilling prophecy. Since there was no research being done, there were no good results for people who had high blood pressure or cancer. And since there was really very little a doctor could say other than, “You’re going to die,” they just said very little at all. People always died and it was usually–particularly in the case of cancer–a very long, painful death. 

So without research being done, people died. Because people were dying, it sort of felt like, “Why should we research something that’s always going to be fatal?” Again, it went back to the belief, regardless of what faith people were, that it was God’s will. “I’ve got X number of years left, this is my lot, I’m going to die.” Mary said, “That’s ridiculous.” Actually her early interest was in mental health and psychology and trying to understand why people were depressed or, as her first husband was, alcoholic and what caused all of these things. That was coupled with the fact that Mary and Albert learned that–and this blows my mind–40% of the people enlisting for World War II, so that would have been from December of 1941 forward, 40% of those people enlisting were rejected for simple medical issues. [These were issues] that would have been really easy to take care of if their Primary care physicians or the local family doctor just said, “Oh, you know what? You should stop eating red meat. You should stop smoking.” 

I was blown away that you make the point that it was kind of the de facto policy in the mid-twentieth century not to talk about cancer on TV or radio.

It was. Again, it was because it was just such a death sentence. Up until the 1980s, cancer was still thought in some circles to be contagious. Humans had learned that diseases that kill people are most often contagious, so why wouldn’t cancer be the same way? If people knew that you had a cancer diagnosis–or even if you were cancer free–and you were invited to someone’s house for a dinner party or a cocktail party, they didn’t want you eating on their plates or drinking from their glasses, because what if they couldn’t get your nasty cancer germs out? You could be asked on a job application if you’d ever had cancer, because people really were wigged out in offices and factories working next to somebody who could spread their disease. 

What were the specific skills and talents that Mary brought to her advocacy and this tenacious battle that she waged in order to fund research for these diseases? 

Beyond the things that I spoke of earlier, Mary’s mother was also very education focused. There was no question that her daughters were not only going to get a high school degree, but they were going to go to college as well. Mary was educated, smart, and she was incredibly resourceful. When she graduated from college as an art history major she got a job in New York City in an art gallery that belonged to a man who ultimately became her first husband. They had a great couple of years together. He had been drinking and she told him before they were married that if he stopped drinking, she would get married. He stopped for a year, she married him, and they had a great time. 

Sort of simultaneously he began drinking again, the stock market crashed, and the depression set in. There weren’t a lot of people buying art during those really horrible years. His drinking got worse. She said, “First of all, I need to get myself out of this situation. But then, how am I going to earn a living?” Well, the movies were incredibly important for people then because they were an escape. At the same time women couldn’t afford to shop in stores, so they were making their own clothing. Mary came up with the idea of “Hollywood Patterns.” She got celebrities–Irene Dunne, Fay Wray–to endorse these patterns so women could make dresses that made them look like movie stars. She made a really good living,like a half a cent per pattern, and she did really well. 

That resourcefulness is just really important too, because even though later on in her life, it wasn’t a question of “how am I going to make money,” because as I said she was extremely wealthy because of Albert’s success. But that resourcefulness, that “never say die” attitude, and her persistence were what helped her to keep marching forward to increase the medical research funding coffers.

You just mentioned Albert. Theirs is such an incredible love story, and it seems very modern in terms of how they really encouraged each other to be their best self. Can you talk about their relationship and what each person learned from the other?

They were like teenagers in love. They were just so sweet. He was about twenty years older than she was, which worried her mother who had already seen that not work out so well in the first marriage. But their interest and curiosity in the world around them was really what drew them together. They were both very interested in politics, although Albert at the time was a rabid Republican and Mary was a Democrat. They were able to have great political discussions, great business discussions. He too loved flowers, but he didn’t know very much about them, so she was able to teach him those things, as well as share with him her interest in art. He really knew nothing about art. He had sort of the same opinion that my darling husband does, that you have to have some magical education to appreciate art and that’s not true at all. Their art collecting escapades were quite fun, but the bottom line was that together they built one of the largest private art collections in the country ever. It was really fascinating. 

Albert also had an interest in health and had contributed frequently to the American Society for the Control of Cancer, which the two of them rebranded into the American Cancer Society. They had this joint quest for wanting to not only enjoy their own lives that their riches allowed them to do, but also to better their fellow men and women.

Something that really jumped off the page for me was Albert’s lack of vanity in terms of when he didn’t know something and how he was totally willing to admit that and happy to learn as much as possible from whomever.

Right, and for someone as accomplished as he was in business and successful as he was, with that typically comes a very pompous, closed-off attitude. I hope I’m not insulting anyone, but sometimes that’s the case. (laughs) So yes, his curiosity and willingness to learn about anything. In fact, his friends said that Mary was the best thing to happen to him after his first wife died and that he actually got younger as he got older. I just celebrated a birthday yesterday. I said to all my friends last night, that’s my new mantra. I’m going to get  younger as I get older. (laughs)

Mary had these incredible friendships with other women throughout the 20th century, specifically Anna Rosenberg Hoffman, who was this extraordinary public official who eventually was the Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Truman administration. Can you talk about their friendship?

Absolutely, and I’m pleased to say that a biography about Anna came out as well in March, so that author and I have friended each other. We’re going to do a joint event early next year. It’s really very interesting because Mary makes appearances in his book and vice versa. Anna was another one who just wouldn’t take no for an answer. I think that’s part of why she and Mary got along so well. Plus, much like Mary’s relationship with Albert, they had similarities and then they also had strengths that the other could draw from. 

In Anna’s case, she was a Hungarian immigrant who just really plowed forward in young adulthood as a publicist in New York City. She soon had a state congressman who wanted her assistance, then the mayor hired her, and then pretty soon she moved into national political publicity. Her New York connections brought her onto the radar of Governor Franklin Roosevelt, then later President. Roosevelt tapped her to be a part of the Defense Department and they became very close. By the time Mary met her it was around 1941. Anna already very much had the president’s ear. She introduced Mary to the Roosevelts. Mary spent the night in the White House for the very first time when Franklin was the president, and that was not the last time because she realized the importance of having a president as a friend and also the importance of having friends in high places.

Her friendship with Lady Bird Johnson was so significant to her also, wasn’t it?

It was, it really was. Again, it came from Mary understanding that then Senator Johnson was very important for some of the things that she was doing, [like] the additional funding she was seeking for the different institutes. Before Mary Lasker, the National Institute of Health was singular. Mary said, “This is crazy. We need more research funding, we need the government to start researching,” because Albert had said to her, “It doesn’t matter how much money we have. You don’t need my kind of money. There is money in the federal government and I’ll show you how to get it.” So Mary started this crusade, thus the title, to increase funding. She needed Senators and Representatives, along with presidents, who would be sympathetic to that. By knowing Lyndon she got to know Lady Bird. She realized that Mary was her friend and Mary was thrilled when Johnson was elected. And Lady Bird was looking for something to make her project. She too loved flowers. So together, the two of them launched the “Beautify America” campaign.

It’s important to point out that even though she was friends with all these very influential and powerful people, it wasn’t like a craven grab for power. She really did have a deep and substantial friendship with each of them.

She did. I have to say I get very defensive of my book subjects because I live with them for a long time, both during the writing and then through the publication for as long as the book is in print, which I’m happy to say all of mine still are. I get very defensive because so often I rely heavily on a newspaper database, which is wonderful because I can read what was being written and printed at the time. But there were a great many people who were not so keen on Mary’s drive, and they varied from people in government to journalists questioning why she would be marching and be so insistent in her crusade. Obviously it wasn’t that she wanted the money, because it was government money. She wasn’t getting a kickback from anyone. Nor as you said, did she need the power. She wasn’t interested. She could have sat home and had a pretty fabulous eating bonbons in her seven-story townhouse.

I think this might be self-evident based on the conversation we’ve already had. But what do you hope readers take away from Mary Lasker’s life story?

One of my very favorite quotes of all time that seems to apply often was by cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” The number one thing that I hope readers take away as a learning point is that you are never too small or too impotent to make a change, because even a small change in any industry, in any situation, has many many  ripples. And Mary did indeed have great wealth, great privilege, great contacts, so her changes were bigger than small. 

The second thing is that I think we tend to forget and become blasé about what we have today, in our world, in our country, in terms of medical treatment and medical miracles, really. Now, because of every step Mary took, which produced more money for more researchers, in 2023 we have cancer treatments where the body itself learns to seek out cancer cells and destroy them like Pac-Man. Your own immune system goes after cancer cells! You probably would have been institutionalized for saying that 100 years ago, that the body could actually cure itself from cancer.

That’s amazing. And finally, what role has the library played in your life?

I’d like librarians everywhere to know that I’m happy to do a Zoom book club presentation, anytime, anywhere. I am so very fortunate living in Phoenix, we have a fabulous main library downtown that has an extensive collection of magazines that are bound, going back as far as [their first] publications. So the first “Time” magazines, the first “Life” magazines. Very often, when I would read about “as she was quoted in ‘Time’ or ‘US News and World Report,’” I would make lists of these and trot myself down to the Burton Barr library and there they would all be. Secondly, I have extensively used collegiate libraries. What I’ve come to find out is that if you live near a college or university, it doesn’t really matter what size, and they have a library, chances are pretty good you could go in there, whether you were researching for a book, for genealogy, or you just want to see what the kids are reading these days. It’s a really cool place to be. 

The last really wonderful library that I continue to use is the National Library of Medicine, which is located on the National Institutes of Health Campus. Again, you have to do a little bit of work to get yourself in, but we as citizens fund NIH and the library, and so we too can access it. It has marvelous, marvelous pieces of medical history.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post Judith L. Pearson On Mary Lasker, The “Catalytic Agent” Who Revolutionized U.S. Medical Research first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

How did you first hear about Walt Disney’s interest in developing Mineral King into a resort?

Kathryn Mayer: I heard a little bit, a couple of mentions, very briefly over the years. I hadn’t really thought about it much until Greg and I had gone to San Francisco in 2018 and we visited the Walt Disney Family Museum. The museum mentioned the fact that Walt Disney had once tried to build a ski resort in California in the 1960s. It also mentioned that Walt had partnered with a man named Willie Schaeffler, who was a famous skier and spent many years in Colorado. We’re Coloradans so we were very interested in that fact. He was the head ski coach for many years at the University of Denver, and that’s my alma mater. It’s actually where Greg and I both worked and met. We were so fascinated by the fact that there was a connection to our history and to Colorado. As journalists, we tend to be a curious bunch of people. So we just  obsessively started looking into this and finding little nuggets here and there, but realizing that there wasn’t much [published] about it, even though there was so much to the story. It wasn’t simply the fact that Walt Disney once tried to build a ski resort and it didn’t work out. It was a decades long battle. It really spurred, in some ways, this modern environmental movement. It was just super fascinating. We realized that no one had told the full story before and we were excited to try to accomplish that.

I think a lot of people might be surprised that Walt Disney had ever been interested in developing a ski resort. Can you talk about what drew him to creating something that seems, from the outside, so different from his theme parks?

Greg Glasgow: Yeah, that was interesting to us as well. Basically he was a skier and had skied since the 30s. He wasn’t great at it, as you would say, but he really enjoyed it. He and his wife took lessons in the Badger Pass area of California. He also had this big love of nature, of wildlife, that you could see in movies like Bambi. He already started this true-life adventure series of wildlife documentaries in the 40s that ran for about twelve years. What lit the spark was in 1960, he was asked to serve as Chairman of Pageantry at the Winter Olympics, which were in California that year for the first time. He really got involved in doing the opening and closing ceremonies. That’s kind of what he was tasked with doing, but he also got really involved in the entertainment for the athletes. The athletes were all together in these dormitories, which was a rarity for the Olympics at that time. Of course Walt, with all his Hollywood connections, was bringing up singers and actors. He brought up a Wild West show from Disneyland one night, plus that’s also where he met Willie Schaffler, like Catherine was saying. This was five years after Disneyland had opened, and all those things put together spurred him to start thinking about what if Disney had a ski resort as their next big experiential project? He wanted to bring this to life because of his love of skiing and also because of his love of nature and the outdoors.

What his vision for Mineral King? How was it going to be different from not only typical ski resorts but also from his theme parks?

KM: So the ski resorts of the day were tailored to very athletic types. It wasn’t family-friendly oriented. People at that time didn’t really go to a ski resort for days; it wasn’t exactly a vacation destination. So Walt was planning to really reimagine this. Of course, we talk about it being a ski resort, but it was actually going to be this year-round recreation destination where they could go ice skating, sledding, and skiing in the winter months, but they could also go hiking in the summer months. There was going to be a movie theater that obviously was going to play Disney movies. There was going to be a lot of restaurants and shopping. It was really going to be this fun place for both skiers and non-skiers.

That was another thing that he was going to plan which was different: he was attracting all sorts of people of all different athletic abilities. Of course, he was very focused on families as well. An interesting tidbit is he kept saying that it wasn’t going to be a Disneyland amusement-type destination. He did reiterate this fact, because he really wanted it to focus on the natural wonderland that surrounded this area, to have people be excited about that and appreciate it.

A fun fact for fans of the Disney parks, when they were starting to plan, Walt started to create an audio animatronic attraction which would feature bears that would be singing, dancing, and playing instruments for the guests. That ended up being the Country Bear Jamboree, which was featured at the Disney parks. Certainly with planning, I’m sure [the resort] would have become something so much bigger than we can even imagine.

It was fun to read about all the things that were designed for the Mineral King resort that fans of Disney Parks might recognize, like the Country Bear Jamboree. The People Mover was another thing that started there, right? That was their original plan to cut down on road traffic for the resort.

GG: Yeah, they had developed that partially for the World’s Fair in 1964, and they were sort of modifying that. It would basically take people from the parking structure, which was going to be partially underground, because they really wanted to camouflage as much of this stuff and keep the natural beauty as much as possible. But the People Mover then would move people onto different tracks. At one time, the plan was that they would shuttle the people that were just there for the day directly to the slopes. The people who were coming to stay for a few days would go on a different track up to the hotels and their skis and their suitcases would be waiting in their room.

A lot of areas in California and Colorado had been developed into ski resorts seemingly without any controversy. What made the development of Mineral King so contentious?

KM: A big part of the reason was where this area was. Mineral King is right on the edge of Sequoia National Park. If they were to develop it, a big contentious point was that they would have to construct this all-weather highway to get people to be able to visit this area. Essentially the road would have had to cut right through Sequoia National Park, which was a big point of contention.

More than that too, I think, was a perfect storm of events. Certainly the time that this is taking place plays into that. This was the 60s and then the 70s and we’re seeing a lot of movements. We’re seeing a lot of environmental activism and we’re seeing women’s rights activism and civil rights. At the time, a lot of people were starting to get nervous about areas being developed. They wanted to keep some areas essentially open and wild. The Sierra Club, who at the time and still to this day is one of the biggest environmental organizations, really opposed this [development], because this was a favorite area of the group as well. They didn’t want it to be marred by burly machinery and thousands of people and tons of traffic.

The development also attracted the attention of a lot of boots-on-the-grounds activists, like Jean Koch. Her work played a key role in the story and she really leaps off the page for the reader. Can you talk about her and her involvement?

KM: This activism was so important to her. We were so excited to see a female leader lead some of this cause. This was extremely important to her because she actually had a cabin at Mineral King. She was worried about what was going to happen to her home, essentially, because she wasn’t sure if her cabin was going to be torn down. That certainly would seem to have been the likely case for that.

She did such amazing grassroots activism. She funded a documentary actually about Mineral King which, believe it or not, is actually available on Amazon. It’s a thirty-minute film and is fantastic. She led a bunch of different protests, including one at Disneyland. She wrote thousands of letters. She actually donated all this information to USC. We visited her archives and read through her letters. It was unbelievable. She was just such a fabulous example of someone straddling both these lines of environmental activism and women’s rights activism. We talked to her several times, believe it or not. She sadly passed away just a couple of months ago at the age of 100, if you can believe it.

She was really amazing. She actually emailed us at length because she was hard of hearing, as you could imagine, so she [preferred] email. It was so funny. She would write, “Oh, this was so long ago. I don’t always remember” and then she would have the most unbelievable details. I don’t remember stuff like that! We couldn’t even believe it. She was amazing.

What do you see as like the long lasting impact of the court case? How does this affect us today?

GG: It’s interesting, because, you would think in this whole story that somehow the Sierra Club won, and that’s why there’s no Disney Resort at Mineral King. In fact, the Supreme Court actually ruled against the Sierra Club. They ruled in favor of the government and in favor of this development getting built, but it kept getting tied up in other legal limbo. This was right around the time that the National Environmental Policy Act had been passed, which required any public project like this had to have these environmental impact statements written. That was a lengthy, years-long process. But really, the lasting impact that came out of this, more than the decision, were the dissents. In particular William Douglas had a famous dissent that was connected with a legal paper by a law professor named Christopher Stone called “Should Trees Have Standing?” Basically it was this idea that you could sue to protect the environment purely based on the aesthetic value of the environment. Prior to that, you had to show how you would be affected by this. If a development like Mineral King was going to be built, in order to stop it, you would have to show how you were going to be financially affected or personally put out by this, which the Sierra Club deliberately didn’t do, and that was why they lost the case. But really, as this dissent started to take hold, the prevailing attitude became these places shouldn’t have to show how someone is affected in order to say don’t build a ski resort on this beautiful plot of land. That was really the lasting effect that we have today, that these areas have agency, in a sense, on their own.

After spending so much time with the story, where do you fall on the side of Mineral King? Do you think it should have been left alone or could it have been developed into a ski property?

KM: That’s something that we’ve asked ourselves so many times. For us to have researched both sides, to have talked to people on both sides of this argument, and to try to do it in such a thorough way, it’s kind of impossible for us to pick a side. I know that sounds like a cop out, but our goal was really switching points of view, and again, giving merit to both sides of the argument. Both sides really have merit, you know? It was super important on the environmental side, especially just what it meant during that time. On the other hand, Disney’s intentions, as far as we’re concerned, seemed very genuine. It wasn’t really this money-making venture as much as it was Walt really wanting to create something that he was passionate about, and that was nature and the great outdoors and wanting to share that love with people. So we’re certainly excited for people to read this and come away with an opinion, and we would certainly love to hear what people think and whose side they’re on?

I’m also curious about how you wrote this book together. Can you talk about what your writing process was like to write this book?

GG: In some ways we’ve looked back and wondered how did we even do this or who wrote this part? Who did this part? We worked on it together and one of us would take the lead on one chapter and write part of it. Then we’d sort of workshop it together. We’d read it out loud back and forth and try to polish it up. Both of us were doing research and so someone would find a cool fact that we could insert into one of the chapters. It definitely was very collaborative.

I love the idea of you looking back at your work and not being able to remember which one of you wrote it.

KM: We’ve honestly done that, which is crazy. It’s been really fun and interesting, obviously as a couple. I’m sure we wanted to kill each other at some point. We talked about this too, but for people who have writing partners, obviously they’re not usually living together and in the same space. They probably carve out certain hours of the day where they’re collaborating or whatever they do. But sometimes we would go on walks with our dog, or we’d be making dinner, and then that’s kind of when we started. Even in the moments that we weren’t, quote unquote, working on our book or writing, that’s when our best ideas came out.

And finally, what role has the library played in your life?

GG: I mean, honestly, just with this book, the library was so huge as far as getting access to articles and things like that online. More than that, just having like the interlibrary loan system here in Colorado, they call it Prospector. There are so many random books that we would read about. Just these little books that came out on an obscure press in 1976 or something, and we’d be able to find it through interlibrary loan. At one point, we had a whole shelf in our house just stacked up with books from the library, so it was super invaluable. More than that, as a kid, I would go to the library with my mom and bring home an armload of books. It just sort of instilled this lifelong love of reading and then later writing that I think definitely led to my career as a writer. We absolutely love the library.

KM: We really do. Like we’re not just saying this! On the weekend, sometimes like that’s like our fun outing. It’s like,  “Let’s go to a different library around here and walk around and get our books!” We both read a ton too. Both of us have stacks of books from the library and certainly get e-books for reading on our iPads or from our latest library download.

GG: Our dream now is to walk into the library, you know, in a few weeks and see it on a shelf. That would be amazing.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post Greg Glasgow And Kathryn Mayer On The Environmental Battle Behind Walt Disney’s Final Project first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The book is inspired by real life events and the extraordinary lengths that librarians and other people took to save books that were slated for destruction by the Nazis. Can you talk about how you first found out about this movement to oppose the book banning in Poland during World War II?

One of the things that was interesting as I first started reading was about the books that were being pulped. I was like, “Pulped? That’s so weird.” We’re all so familiar with the book burning that happened in Berlin, so it was weird that they would actually be pulped. But apparently, they were not only banning these books, they were also completely destroying them.

When the Nazis first came and occupied Warsaw, their ultimate goal for Poland was to completely kill off 85% of the Poles, keep the remaining 15% for slave labor, and pretty much turn Poland into a new Germany, another place for Germans to settle into. One of the first things they attacked was the culture. They wanted to get rid of the music, the books. They really wanted to dig the Polish culture out by its roots and completely demoralize everybody. Books were a major part of that. When they did the first round of banning—because there were several rounds of it—they ironically had books that they published that contained the names and titles of books they wanted to have banned. Generally these were people who were writing about topics and ideals that Hitler did not agree with. Of course, there were Jews who were on that list, there were Poles that were on that list. Anything that they felt could essentially detract from a Polish-German relationship, which is ridiculous because obviously their very cruel and aggressive oppression did more damage than any books possibly could. Essentially, it was attacking ideals that they didn’t believe in.

Not only was it that, but I feel like when you read books, you get to really walk in somebody else’s shoes, especially with lives that you will never have the opportunity to live. Oftentimes that gives a face to something that would otherwise feel faceless. That gives us an open mindedness and an acceptance of others that I feel like people who don’t necessarily read a lot of books have the ability to feel. To be honest, I really think that was a big part of the reason why book banning was so huge. Essentially Hitler was getting rid of this opportunity for people to know other people in a way that they would never have the opportunity to, to walk in their footsteps.

Initially they were just sending these books to be pulped. Then they found out that the drivers would actually pull over, steal the books back, and sell them on the black market because people still wanted to read these books. When that started happening, they had the Hitler Youth Movement come into libraries and manually rip these books in half, so that they wouldn’t have any more street value. They threw them into a pile and then those were sent for pulping. It was a complete eradication of this reading material that they felt was so harmful for essentially building empathy in people, in my opinion.

Zofia and her friends starting this book club where they’re going to be read banned books is such an act of defiance. Can you talk what these young women risked by starting this club, especially in 1939?

In the very beginning, they weren’t necessarily risking anything. When I create my characters, I look at the entire history of the country, rather than just looking at the time period that I’m writing in. With Poland, they’ve had a very tumultuous history, one that has really been filled with the fight for freedom. They were occupied by Russia for over 120 years before finally being granted their independence after the Great War and the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. They had just celebrated twenty years of independence when the Nazi occupation rolled in. Even after the Nazi occupation, the Soviet Union really had control over them until 1990.

So you had this pocket of essentially twenty years of freedom. Twenty years after generations and generations of fighting for it, and Sophia and her friends were born in this tiny little pocket of freedom, this little bubble. When I was initially thinking about her character, I was thinking what kind of a person would she be? I thought, “She’s going to be rebellious. She’s going to be a fighter, because [her generation’s] been raised their entire lives hearing about how brave everybody has been to get them to the point where they are.” When she’s hearing about Hitler—and, of course, they’re hearing about all of these things that are happening against their country— it’s like the writing’s on the wall, that they know it’s coming. Her little act of defiance, especially as a reader, is to read these books that Hitler’s banning. When the club first starts off, there’s really no danger to them whatsoever, but it’s basically them staking a claim and saying, “Even though this is happening in another country, we’re going to read these books in solidarity.”

The book takes place from 1939 to 1945 and Zofia and Janina are on the verge of graduating from high school when the book begins. How did you approach the changes that your characters would undergo, not only because of the war, but also because of growing up?

I have to say, first of all, it was really hard to write the teenage years because teenagers, unfortunately, can be very mercurial. I love to read YA and when I read YA, sometimes I get frustrated with the characters. I have to remind myself, “Madeline, they’re teenagers. They’re acting exactly how teenagers act.” But I also know that I’m writing for an adult audience. So while YA readers are a little bit more forgiving of that [temperamentality], I knew that adult readers wouldn’t be. I had to have Zofia avoid a lot of the teenage roller coaster ups and downs and getting mad for no reason kind of thing. And I say this as a mother of two teenage daughters, by the way. (laughs)

There really was just such a range of emotions that these characters experienced while they were going through all of this. In writing this book, I had to let myself experience those ranges. One of the hardest things for me to wrap my brain around—and it almost it felt like trying to think in 4D—was what it would be like to be born into freedom and stripped of that freedom after you’d had it your whole life. That was really one of the biggest things in Zofia’s life as she’s going through this book. First of all, they think, “We are definitely going to win this war. We have the best army in the world. There’s no way Germany can defeat us.” And then, not only do they get defeated, but all of these horrible atrocities start to happen. When they do stand up and fight back, they’re not just brushed aside, they’re crushed.

When you think about that, that’s when the realization of your freedom being completely stripped away really hits. It’s just all consuming, because what do you do when you’re one voice and everybody else around you is so scared that they won’t fight. How are you supposed to fight for what’s right? Especially when they see their culture start to disappear under the heel of a jackboot, that’s when they start doing little things like continuing with the book club, or trying to make sure that the books that are being destroyed are hidden away. As these experiences happen, every little victory that you have also starts to be a little bit more empowering. “What can I do next time, what can we eventually do together?” Ultimately that leads up to August 1944, when after five years of oppression, they finally get to stand up against the Nazis and fight back with the uprising.

I just have to say a little thing about that. [The uprising] happened on August 1^st at 5pm, which was W hour. To this day, on August 1st at 5pm In Warsaw, the entire city goes completely silent, except for all of the alarms and sirens that blare in honor of the Poles who fought back against the Nazis in World War II. The fact that my book comes out on August 1st is honestly such a special, special thing for me.

Was that by design?

No, ironically it was supposed to come out on the Fourth of July. The funny thing is that when I was writing this book, I had a completely different idea that I was going with. It was going to be a dual POV with Sophia and Janina. I always keep researching while I’m writing. I got halfway through writing the book when I found these amazing diaries from librarians. They were talking about their time in World War II, working with the Warsaw Public Library, and how they had these secret warehouses and ran these secret libraries. I thought, “Oh my gosh, there has to be more!” I stopped everything and I dug and I dug and I unearthed so much amazing information. I’d already been to Warsaw by that point and I was like, “I need to go back!” But, of course, I didn’t have a chance to. I threw out the entire half of the book that I had, I redid all of my character charts, I redid my entire plot, and I rewrote the entire thing. I needed an extra month to work on that. It actually ended up being sort of serendipitous because the extra month bumped me from the Fourth of July to August 1st.

Reading the book, you get the sense of being plunged into every aspect of life in Warsaw from the siege to the occupation, and especially all the granular details of the resistance movement. What was your research process to unearth all these details that really bring the book to life?

Well, as a total research nerd, thank you. (laughs) I spent about ten months thoroughly researching this and had over 100 non-fiction books that I used. One of the interesting things about that is because Poland was really controlled by the Soviet Union until 1990, if I had a book that was published in Poland, I couldn’t use what it said, because it could have been censored by the Soviet Union. I had to use publications that were done either in America from people who published after the war, or things that were published in England. The Polish government, in exile, was located in London at that time, so there were a lot of publications coming out.

I have this massive, massive collection, and I bought them all because I love to keep them. I’m one of those people who’s like, “I knew it was in that one book on this one page!” I can find it and see exactly what I need. (laughs) There was over 100 nonfiction books. I didn’t read all of those cover to cover—I wish I was that good. A lot of times I’ll need it for just a paragraph, but it will have such a powerful piece of information that it’s worth it.

Like I said, I did get to go to Warsaw. I went for two weeks and I stayed in Old Town. One of my favorite things to do when I get to a new location is go to my maps, type in museums, and see how many museums pop up near me. There were a dozen museums that were less than a mile away, so it really was the perfect location. I hired a private tour guide who had a laundry list of things that I wanted to get more information on. Her tours went anywhere from eight to sixteen hours, and she talked almost the entire time, just this just wealth of knowledge. Any questions I had, she had answers. I even sent her questions after the fact. She really was such an invaluable source of information as well.

I didn’t get a chance to visit the library because unfortunately I’d already visited Warsaw when I decided to go that route. The Warsaw Public Library has this amazing [online] collection of historical photographs. I went through and printed out every picture that was from 1938 to 1945. I actually put together a map for myself where I had every single floor [displayed], so that while I was writing the scenes in the library, I could stay true to the actual layout even though I didn’t get a chance to visit.

I wanted to get back to it to the friendship that propels the book between Janina and Zofia. Can you talk about what went into creating Janina?

Initially when I was going to do a dual POV with this book, I was going to have Janina’s POV and I was going to have Zofia’s POV. Going from 1939 to 1945 was already like trying to put lightning in a jar. Once I realized I had all the information about the library, adding in the additional elements of the library was too big for two POVs. I had done significant amount of work on Janina’s character, including doing research not only on Jewish life before the war, but also during the war in the ghetto and after. I actually have one book that details out all of the different vending stalls—who owned what and what they sold the goods for. It was just amazing.

With Janina’s character, it’s interesting because after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, there were supposed to be pure equality through Poland. By pure equality, I mean between Poles and Jews. I’m trying to think now, but I think 30% of the population of Warsaw was Jewish. Even still, there was a lot of antisemitism that they faced. They had pogroms, which is why I had Janina’s uncle having been in one. That’s really why her parents assimilated a little bit more. They have a toe in the Jewish community, but ultimately, for the most part had assimilated. As I did my research, I found that even though you could have some friends who were Jewish and Polish, it really very segregated unless there was assimilation.

Another significant relationship Zofia has is with her favorite author, Marta Krakowska. I’m sorry for asking such an ignorant question, but is she a real person?

No, she’s not. With Marta Krakowska, I really wanted to have a mentor for Zofia when it came to her writing. The goal of it was always for her to find her way and finally write this book of her heart, being the book that I basically wrote for her. I wanted her to have an author who was a mentor to guide her in that direction. I knew from the very beginning that [Marta’s theory of writing that] you have to die 1000 deaths was ultimately going to be you have to live 1000 lives. I wanted Marta to be a little bit harder and a little bit skeptical. I didn’t ever want to impose that kind of personality on any other authors who were in existence, especially an author who had lived during World War II who would have fought for being able to publish books and for the freedom of others. It just felt like that’d be wrong, so I made up my own character. That way I could do whatever I wanted with her and it didn’t feel like I was soiling anybody’s memory. It was just a safer route to go.

Finally, what role has the library played in your life?

The role of libraries for me has been huge. Honestly, librarians are my superheroes. I was an Army brat growing up, and that meant that we had to move every four years. It was especially hard when we would movie in America because you would go to American schools where everybody had been best friends since they’d been born. It was really hard for a painfully shy little girl. I’ve gotten a lot more outgoing—I feel like the military kind of forced me in that role—but as a little girl, I was very, very shy. I was not the type of person to walk up to a table full of girls and ask if I could be their friend, so I always found myself in the library at every new school. As a result, I got to know the librarians more than I got to know my classmates when I first moved, because I would read about a book a day. I’d go back in there with my next book, ask what should I read next, and they would guide me toward another book. In the pages of those books, that’s where I really found acceptance. All those wonderful librarians and school librarians really helped guide me through some of the more difficult parts of my childhood with all the moving that we did. I think that’s something for librarians to keep in mind, that when they are helping these kids pick books, you never know what they’re going through and what an impact it can make on their lives. So, thank you, on behalf of all little kids.

The post Madeline Martin On The Unexpected Discovery That Made Her Change Course Midway Through Her Novel first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Seth is such a fascinating character and seems like some somebody who readers will have a lot of fun discussing and analyzing. Can you talk about how you approached creating him?

Part of what is interesting to me about Seth is that he is incredibly narcissistic. He’s very self-conscious, but he’s self-conscious without having any ability to see himself. I think that is something that’s frankly not all that unique to him, on some level. I think about that meme from a couple of years ago about “men would rather do XYZ than go to therapy.” Seth is so desperately in need of that sort of reflection on himself and his own actions, but he’s unwilling to go there. For me, that is what made him such a compelling character, the kind of character that I want to spend the ten years that I spent on this book, sort of working with and examining [him]. That was the genesis of his creation as a character, what happens when you take a very driven, very obsessive person and set him at a distance from his own awareness?

He’s often oblivious to how his actions are received by those around him. What was it like processing the world of the novel through his very limited perspective?

It was fun. (laughs)  Part of how we learn Seth is not through Seth himself. I recently interviewed the novelist Antoine Wilson, and he talked about when a novel is in the first person, you’re really not getting an objective account of that person’s actions. You’re getting, in effect, the PR department. They’re only telling you a very small slice of their reality, right? Everything is filtered through their eyes, it doesn’t mean that it’s objectively true. For me with my novel, it became clear that the characters who surround Seth are, on some level, the truth tellers. When his coworker Josie says something about the ad campaign that Seth created, it carries a whole lot more weight, I think, than when Seth is telling us—or really bragging to us—about his creative achievements.

One of the pleasures of reading the book is processing what’s really happening versus what’s the version Seth is presenting to the reader. How did you approach the other characters in Seth’s orbit, all of whom seem like people with equally complicated lives?

I think that’s a great compliment, because as a writer, you know who the main character is, but the supporting characters are all the main character in their own narratives. I felt responsible [to them]. Part of why I worked for so long on the book was making sure that I had done everything I could to give the supporting cast as much depth and dimension as they deserved. George Saunders talks about how in a first draft, your characters sometimes feel like cardboard cutouts. Your job through revision is to add layers and make them feel realer with each successive draft. I tried to be conscious of that. Seth is the main character, but a supporting character or foil like Moon, for example—who was probably my favorite character to write, even more so than Seth on some level—I want him to feel every bit as present on the page.

I’d love to talk about Moon, because he seems to struggle on an even greater level with some of the same issues that plague Seth, like not being self-aware. Can you talk about Moon and how you placed him in the story in contrast to Seth?

For those who maybe haven’t read the novel yet, Seth and Moon are co-workers at the agency, and both of them make a lot of bad decisions throughout the course of this book. But whereas Seth is obsessing and often plagued by the ramifications of those decisions, Moon seemingly doesn’t care. There’s just no reservation about him and his bro-iness and his frat boy behavior. That’s all fine and well and good. I know people like that. I’m sure you do, too. But I wanted to make sure that Moon wasn’t just slapstick. I think some of the lines of deeper insight in the book come from Moon, so there is something more there under the surface. Masculinity is often such a mask and we don’t get a chance to see the interior self behind men of a certain sort. I wanted to hint at the fact that there’s more here going on than almost socially, Moon allows himself to be,

Was that something that came about during the revision process in terms of how much you were going to reveal about Moon and when you were going to reveal it?

It was the revision process, but it was also just writing from the first page to the last page and discovering these characters as I went through it. One model for writing a novel—the smart model, frankly—is to map everything out and have a really crystal clear outline. The approach that I took, which is much more the E.L. Doctorow approach of you drive the car at night with only the headlights on. Eventually you’ll get somewhere, but you really have no clue where you’re going in the middle. Some of the turns that Moon’s character takes I wouldn’t have known from the first chapter, but that was part of the joy of the discovery of writing this book, sort of sitting beside the reader and saying, “Oh my God, what are they doing now?” This train wreck aspect of it was part of what kept me hooked. I don’t think the book would have held my interest as a writer for a decade if it hadn’t had those surprises.

I was sick to my stomach about some of the choices that Seth and Moon made, but I also had to keep reading to find out how they were going to get out of it. How did you balance the outrageousness of their acts with the willingness of a reader to go along for the ride?

It was important to me that it felt credible, that it feels like a work of realism. At the same time, I think folks who are desperate will go pretty far, and Seth is someone who gets laid off. When I was working as a copywriter at a branding slash advertising agency right out of college, the Great Recession hit really shortly after I started there. I personally was not laid off. I was making too little money for anyone to be interested. There was no economic incentive to lay me off, no one even knew I existed. But I did have a lot of friends who were laid off and it was a really bleak time. Someone who is invested in their work, both because they need the money to buy food, to pay rent, all those things, but also is invested in terms of their sense of self and their identity. They love their job, or at least they identify strongly by their profession. In the U.S., we do that much more so than in other cultures. “What do you do?” is often our first question when we meet one another, and that’s not often the case if you go elsewhere.

Seth does many wild, almost absurd things that you wonder, “Would someone really steal a friend’s car? Would they then sleep in that car? Would they follow an addict through their rehab process and behave like a stalker?” I don’t know. But I do know that if you are defining your life and your self-worth based on your profession, and then that all gets taken away, you’re in a state where you’re probably going to do some things that you might not have ever expected you would.

You mentioned that you worked in an ad agency and the novel is so ruthless in its depiction of the ad world. Can you talk about how your background shaped your approach to depicting Seth’s work?

I started working at the agency, as I mentioned, not long before the recession. When I took the job as a tagline copywriter, initially none of my friends really knew what that meant. It didn’t have any social capital or cache at all, and then “Mad Men” debuted. That really changed everything because suddenly Don Draper became this icon for the industry, for better or worse. In my experience, the branding, marketing, and advertising world likes to tell stories and is really good at telling stories. One of the stories that it tells about itself is that it’s a really progressive industry. With a show like “Mad Men,” we had a glimpse of what that world was like back in the 1960s. A lot of my friends and my colleagues at the agency, we would watch it and we would say that shit really hasn’t changed that much. The way that we work, the technology that we use, is obviously radically different, but in terms of the behavior, in terms of the misogyny, in terms of the toxicity, those things felt to us sort of unchanged. Once I understood that and internalized that, that was the moment in which I wanted to write this book, or at least explore what I saw as a potential hypocrisy.

In many ways, I loved working in the agency world. I especially loved working with designers. I miss that because writing can be so solitary. There was something so joyful and collaborative about working with a brilliant graphic designer. They edit the art based on what you write and then you edit the words based on what they design. That’s a really special relationship, I miss that a lot. But at the end of the day, I knew that everything that we did was in service of selling more product, whatever that product was. I had a pretty clear sense that if I could do this creative writing thing full time, whatever that looked like, that that was what I was going to be pursuing.

You’re a poet and you published your collection For The Love Of Endings a few years ago. I was curious about how writing poetry affected how you write your novels?

I think I write them slower. (laughs) I’m a slower novelist as a consequence, probably both for better and worse. There are some amazing novelists, as you know, who put out a novel every year, something like that. When I think about that, and what that would entail on the process side, I just throw up my hands. I’m trained as a poet, not as a fiction writer, so I really labor over the music, over the phrase. Even writing on the page, I became a little obsessive about line breaks, which is absurd, right? Ultimately, the publisher just flows in the text and your paragraphs, as you write them on your laptop, are not going to bear any resemblance to what they look like in the book. I know that intellectually, but it still mattered to me how the words appeared on my page. I think that’s just because when you’re trained as a poet, you appreciate that language has shape and has a kind of body. I haven’t been able to kick that. Maybe I’ll grow out of it or maybe it’s just a symptom of my education/OCD bearing itself out.

The other aspect of this is that, as a poet, I care a lot about language. This novel is about many things, I hope. It’s about masculinity, it’s about addiction. It’s about religion and Judaism. It’s about a need to have an identity and a sense of self-worth. But I think it’s also about language. Looking specifically at taglines was a way for me to think about when language says what it doesn’t really mean, or when there’s an absence of human voice behind the words. So, on some level, the whole novel is about poetry, or at least asking questions that are not that far afield from that.

You also edited Back Draft, Guernica’s interview series with writers about their revision process. Did that experience have any influence to your own personal writing style?

It had a huge influence. On some level, the idea for Back Draft came out of my own very selfish necessity. I wrote the draft for this novel really quickly, I want to say in like, two or three months. But then I had no idea what to do with it. It’s fun to go down the roller coaster without thinking, but at some point you need to polish and revise. I really felt the lack of my fiction training when it came to revising this thing. So I thought to myself, “How do writers take objectively what is a sort of mediocre first draft and turn it into something more?” The only way I could think to research that was just to talk to writers I admired and get a sense of how did they revise. Back Draft was a real education and a privilege in terms of getting close to some of my contemporary heroes, and getting a sense of their own practice so that I could incorporate some of those practices into my own work.

Finally, what role has the library played in your life?

Huge. I almost get emotional thinking about it because there are so few places in our society where you as a citizen are welcome and are given a comfortable place to sit, a comfortable place to think, and are not asked to buy anything. That is so precious and so rare. To say nothing about the access to the literary resources and the research opportunities that you can do in a library. Just to have access to that peace and silence, I think, is such a precious thing. A good percentage of this novel was written at public libraries, as well as university libraries. I can’t express enough my admiration and appreciation for what librarians do and for the role that libraries serve. I only hope that continues because I know that in many ways, libraries are under threat on a variety of fronts. It goes without saying that it would be a terrific loss. I think all writers, all readers, all citizens have an obligation to speak out about why these are such vital institutions, and why they’re worth investing in on a deeper level.

The post Ben Purkert On Masculinity, The Ad World, and The “Train Wreck” Aspect Of His Sensational Debut Novel first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

I wanted to start by talking about your mom. She’s a writer, and she wrote a newspaper column about your family growing up. What did you take from your mom as not only as a writer but also as someone who writes about their own life?

My mom’s column started out as a local feature column that was really about other people in the community. She talked to people who had brain tumors, premature babies, liver cancer—the more inoperable and dire the better. As the weeks and years went on, she turned her gaze more toward herself and her own battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and then the cast of characters that were my four siblings and my dad. I think seeing her make herself the hero of her own story—and in so many ways, the hero of my story—was really instructive. Instead of being someone who said, “I am not my cancer, this isn’t who I am,” my mom was the person who just charged straight into illness and disability, although she wouldn’t have identified at the time as disabled. She owned her narrative, she owned her story. She made her struggle funny, silly, and noble. Even though it was a lighter feature column, she did a lot of really detailed reporting about her own prognosis, about the conversations that she had with her doctors, and particularly about being a woman in the Mountain West at that time. So many of those stories would have otherwise been dismissed— she was a woman, she was a mom, she was primarily a homemaker. But she gave such import to her own struggle and was really bold about portraying even things like her anger. No topic was off the table. She would write about my leg surgeries and my recovery from leg surgeries. She wrote about my grandma Rosie, who was in a series of nursing homes and underwent shock therapy treatment and had a condition called progressive supranuclear palsy. [She wrote about] my dad diving into the ocean in Hawaii and suffering a pretty serious spinal injury. Nothing was off the table at all.

In the guise of this feel-good column, she was still a hungry reporter who fearlessly portrayed the travails of her own body. I would try to plug into her column by writing schmaltzy poetry, much of which is in the book. In so many ways, I was bolstering her narrative and her heroism, but she was also truly teaching me how to write. She always said that I was talented, that I had important things to say.

I wasn’t like this superstar brainiac kid in school. Looking back, I faced some of what I would now call ableism. I think that kids all face it in different ways, but I couldn’t spell. I didn’t do well on tests. I started school in remedial classes and it was only because of my mom’s advocacy that I got out of those classes. In junior high, she lobbied the administration using my schmaltzy poetry to get me into the gifted and talented English track, which is of course itself really problematic now that I think about it. Like, “Oh, these are the gifted kids.” I think that she kind of turned me from “special” to “gifted” just by maternal sleight of hand. She would send some of her columns to national magazines and even get some of that published. I was able to walk around feeling like I was a published author and feeling such pride, even though for my school assignments, I would get notes that were like, “See me after class. Please rewrite this. This is supposed to be a rhyming poem and you have completely not fulfilled the assignment at all.” (laughs) But my mom was like, “Well, you know, that teacher’s just jealous of your talent. You’re one-of-a-kind. You’re original. Your writing is going to change the world. What does this teacher know?” She really had a bone deep belief in my ability to tell stories, and that was very much modeled after her practice as a writer.

The slightly more complicated tension in the book is the question of what stories get valorized and told and what stories don’t? What kinds of illnesses or bodily foibles or disabilities are celebrated and which are kept secret or hidden? I see the book really as a collection of narratives. The book starts with me quoting a paragraph from my mom’s column where she says I don’t have cerebral palsy. I really see the book as going back through my childhood and inserting my own body and my own physicality into my story and into everything else that was happening in my life. And in a way maybe tacitly saying that disability should be just as shameless and human as having cancer or having Lou Gehrig’s disease. Let’s erase that stigma and put my own body and my own lived experience into this story that has so many different layers of illness and family and queerness already layered into it. That was what I was trying to do with the book. Not just tell a story, but in my own way, correct the record to include my own perspective and myself as a character.

When she would have written the column where she said that you don’t have cerebral palsy, she definitively knew you had been, correct? You had been diagnosed as a child.

Absolutely. I was diagnosed at eighteen months and those columns were when I was in the sixth grade. She would, in a very detailed way, always tell me the story of my birth, that she had done a headstand to get me off the umbilical cord. She would even include little details, like there was a water spot on the wall across from her hospital bed in the delivery ward and it was in the exact shape of the head of William Shakespeare. At that moment, she knew that I was going to be a writer. [It was like] the birthday story that parents often tell for their kids, like “your dad was late to the delivery and the doctor was an idiot” or “the doctor was so short that he had to stand on a box to get to reach the hospital bed,” just all of those little details. It was really maternal subterfuge, and kind of dazzle camouflage, because what she didn’t say was, “You have spastic cerebral palsy because of prematurity and because of complications at delivery.” It was almost this Scheherazade-like dance that she did, where it was really more about hiding that diagnosis than it was about all of these colorful details. I mean, she was also a mom who was just telling a story, but it was very, very intentional.

Your mom springs off the page, even when she’s doing these things that you might not necessarily agree with. As a reader, you can’t help but be enthralled by her.

It’s so true, and she’s that way in life, too. She just has this charisma about her and she loves people. And she loves her kids so much. She’s just a character. She’s a classic storyteller. It’s so hard for me to kind of pinpoint the charisma or the charm of my mom just because she’s my mom, so some of it was craft and some of it was just writing what happened and what she said. (laughs) She was and is a very unconventional woman who lived a very conventional life until my dad’s death. I think people have always related to how she lived her life out loud and how she kind of called herself out on her own BS a little bit. She’s just kind of a truth teller. In a culture that prized perfection and glossy surfaces, she played the role and she didn’t, so I think that there was that real tension there. Then her life after my dad died was so surprising and just so affirming for me to see. Even though her relationship with [her partner] Alice isn’t like my relationship with my husband. They’re an older couple, they still don’t live in the same state. I think they’ll never be “live in a house with a white picket fence” kind of couple, but I think seeing that my mom was free to live a radically different life and a radically different kind of existence just spoke to the life that she’d always lived as a truth teller, as someone who was going to tell her story and kind of Trojan horse smuggle stories of grief, sorrow, and hilarity under a masthead that said “Silver Linings” with a glossy picture of her.

One thing that I was surprised by when I was reading the interview with your husband was how long you’ve been working on this memoir. You started it before you discovered your diagnosis with cerebral palsy. Is that correct?

That’s true. Yeah.

What it was like to writing your memoirs changed while you were still processing this withholding of information that your parents had done?

I started writing essays about my life in 2013 after graduating from the Michener Center for Writers with an MFA in fiction. I had these funny or interesting family stories. I sort of thought of them in the vein of “The Wonder Years.” They were lighter, they were sparkly, and they were fun. They explored my identity as a gay kid coming of age, but not as much about my leg or my disability, because anytime I tried to write about that, everything just got really hazy and the trance sort of broke. The one that I started with was the essay about meeting the actor who plays a munchkin in “The Wizard of Oz,” Margaret Pellegrini. When I was first writing it, it was really about my dashed showbiz dreams. But as I was telling that story, my leg just was beating at the door, or maybe it was just sort of spastically making itself known beneath me. I wrote that one and put it aside. I wrote the chapter about meeting the HIV/AIDS speaker who came to my seventh grade life science class. I was chugging away. I think I had maybe written some of the chapter about going with my dad to France, just sort of in various states of finished or not finished. When I found out about the diagnosis in 2014 when I was applying for private health insurance for the first time in my life, it turned the stories that I had already been working on into a reckoning with my body and my identity in ways that I hadn’t seen before. Instead of just silly romps through a happy childhood, it became a confrontation with secrecy and lies and fibs and lies of omission that had always coursed through my life.

A huge part of that was the lies that I told myself and the kind of blind spot that I’ve had about my own body. I’d always walked with a limp, I’d had surgeries on my hamstrings and Achilles tendon. I’d done physical therapy for years on and off until I was sixteen and recovering from my final leg surgery. It was a perception shift that changed the way I saw my body. It really gave me a body on the page and it gave me a personhood. It sounds kind of counterintuitive to say, but having a diagnosis of cerebral palsy actually gave me the distance that I needed to write more thoroughly and in greater depth about my life. I suddenly was in command of the facts of my life in ways that I hadn’t been before. So instead of my leg and my body just being this kind of amorphous thing that I didn’t really understand and I was embarrassed by and ashamed of, I was able to really drill down into those moments. Specifically with “The Wizard of Oz” chapter, I was able to identify why meeting a wonderful, talented, disabled actor had been interesting to me or even traumatic for me, and see it as an examination of how external ableism becomes internalized over time. It wasn’t just about a kid who has show biz dreams and is obsessed with “The Wizard Of Oz,” It was also a reckoning with my body and the way that I moved through the world and questions of did I want that spotlight on me? Did I want to play Quasimodo in “The Hunchback Of Notre Dame” or was that going to be an “indictment” of myself that I simply couldn’t take on? Or was there so much cognitive dissonance there that I was just like, “Nope, I have to give up acting entirely like, there’s absolutely no way that I can do this anymore.”

As I kept working on the book, the material got more mature and more about my sexuality. My leg kind of followed me into the bedroom, to Croatia, to being a caregiver for my dad, and to Texas where I met Lucas, the man I’d marry. I think the stories got more mature and more intricate and complicated as my life went on, and I certainly couldn’t have written the more mature older stuff If I didn’t know about cerebral palsy. It’s just really interesting that I was already writing about my body. The really cool thing for me is it let me be a journalist and a reporter about my own experience. It let me give a narrative to my body and to my disability. It was more like finding a missing piece than it was this revelation. It was like the piece of the story that suddenly made all of the rest of it make sense. Once my leg was locked into place, I was so much more free to tell these other stories and see how my family and even my sex life, or my intimate and romantic partners, all kind of connected back to my body and back to my experience on this earth.

It feels like that there’s a fearlessness to your writing in terms of no topic is off limits and that seems to be something that readers have really responded to. The book has been out for a few weeks. What has it been like getting reactions from readers?

I know this sounds like a cliche thing to say, but it’s been so incredible. I guess this sounds grandiose and I don’t mean it this way, but what I’ve learned even in just the past week is how much people need stories of disability and queerness out there in the world. People need to feel seen on the page. I think they like to be spoken to honestly. Once I was able to bring my vulnerability to the page, people bring their vulnerabilities to the page. Whether you’re gay and disabled or not, everybody grapples with shame and family secrets and the legacy of storytelling. I’ve been really moved by people’s openness and unflappability. I mean, I definitely have gotten a few one star reviews on Goodreads which I do not look at anymore, but I’ve learned a lot in the last few days. (laughs)

I guess it makes me sort of believe in people’s goodness that they want to engage. People need to laugh about their families and their bodies. We take such joy in our bodies, in our families. I think so often in the conversation today, with so much peril that queer and disabled people face, we so often forget the joy part of it. We forget the pride part of Pride sometimes, just that it’s really fun to be alive. It’s fun to tell stories. It’s fun to have a body. I think, if I could put it in one sentence, it’s just rediscovering some of that queer joy and disabled joy.

I’ve also just been incredibly moved by how the disabled community has embraced me and the book. My body is so particular to me and I’m so new to speaking about disability in any kind of a public way, where anyone would even half listen to me. I’ve been struck by the level of grace and the level of intelligence that folks living with disability have shown me.  It really makes me want to keep learning and keep paying it forward.

If I had to respond as to why the book has been met that way, I think it’s just that the world is hungry for stories of disabled people who are flawed and funny and complicated and have a million other things going on, and are just true, full characters on the page. So many of the narratives that I grew up with were after school specials or stories where gay or disabled characters— and to be clear, that’s just my lens or my way into this—died at the end. They were there to serve able bodied characters on their journeys of self-discovery. They weren’t sexual. Even in books I loved, like A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Or, you know, the stories of disability ended when you turned eighteen. It’s like, “Okay, well, you’ve had all your leg surgeries. You’re done. We raised you, go off in the world.” What I noticed is those junior high, high school years are actually the easy years. Even in college— although I had a complicated college experience—are the easy years because you have so much institutional support. I think that the real coming of age for me, as a later bloomer and a person who didn’t have all the answers, a person who was still reckoning with who he was in the world, that coming of age came so much later. Just telling a coming of age story that didn’t end when I was eighteen—or twenty-one, or even thirty—but kind of continues on to this day was a really powerful revelation for me to have and hopefully for other readers out there who have a similar experience.

You make the point that when you come out, whether as gay or disabled, you’re coming out for the rest of your life.

It never ends, but it’s good. I think that the coming out process can really just be a coming into process, coming into yourself, coming into your community. I think coming out is a perfectly descriptive way to put it, but I also think that it can be so much more about what you’re stepping into, rather than, you know what you’re coming out of. I mean, Dorothy wasn’t, like, coming out of her aunt and uncle’s house, she was stepping into Oz! (laughs) I think that little perception shift where there really is a queer, disabled world waiting to claim you and who wants you out there with them. When I was first coming out as gay, especially in my younger years in Utah as a teenager, I just thought playing ping pong with a straight guy who loved Keith Richards was the best I was gonna do. I actually am still friends with that guy. (laughs) We went to a couple of concerts a couple of weekends ago and I gave him the book. But I think now knowing that there really is a Technicolor world out there for people who are different in a range of ways to explore is just really exciting. I think that’s maybe a bit why it’s scary for the Ron DeSantises of the world and why there are book bans. It’s like trying to stuff Dorothy back in her house, and she’s like, “I’m not gonna go back in the house. I’m already way down the yellow brick road.”

A big part of your book is about Utah. Can you talk about writing about Utah as someone who would be an outsider in many ways, chiefly because you’re not Mormon.

I think as a kid, I was able to pass as Mormon because I looked like a prototypical Mormon kid and I shared so many interests with my Mormon friends and classmates. I love musicals. I love Disney. I got into a whole debate with people this weekend over whether or not I was a quote unquote Disney gay as a kid. (laughs) I mean, I literally had a trophy case full of Disney dolls. They did this series of Disney villains as Barbies back in the day, so I have Glenn Close as Cruella De Vil still in the plastic wrap, kept in mint condition for all of time. But I think what Utah does, and I kind of say this in my interview with Lucas too, but Utah just skips the gay topic sentence of saying we’re a gay society where gay people exist, therefore I love Disney or therefore, The Princess Bride is my favorite movie. There’s so much love and community in Utah.

When I was growing up, there also was so much repression, and it really wouldn’t have been safe to be an out gay kid. Thank God, I think that’s changed. I think it’s easy to gloss over the impact being marginalized has on gay people because so much has changed in just the past five or ten years. But I look at a relationship like my relationship with [my ex-boyfriend] Kevin. He very much had wanted to be Mormon or wanted to be a good Mormon at times in his life. When you’re marginalized for your entire life, it actually does start to have psychological consequences and I think that gay people are susceptible to being shunned and gaslit. I think the darker side of Utah can really be, if you don’t fit the mold, what then?

I didn’t ever feel like I’m in a position to write anthropologically, or in a sweeping Joan Didion way, about Utah as a place, just because that’s not the sort of writer I am. I haven’t done the homework to make that happen. But I am proud in the book that the Utah-ness of it all really does bubble forth. I think about Gail, my boss at the DOMA Alliance. She’s such a Utah character. She’s irrepressible, cheery, ditzy, determined, but also, weirdly one of the fiercest allies that I had in my life at that time. She’s not Mormon, but her partner was raised Mormon. No one is that far from Mormonism in Utah, in a variety of ways.

You write so honestly about your own foibles and imperfections, and also about the moments you come up short with different people in your life. How did you that layer of self-reflection make its way into your book?

I think I had published the France essay in Tampa Review. At that time, I used my French teacher’s real name and my friend’s real name. I hadn’t changed a thing. I’m still friends with the character Robin and I was Facebook friends with this French professor, who really did have such a funny, kooky, special relationship with my dad, in his own way. I asked my former teacher, now mentor, Elizabeth McCracken, “Elizabeth, how do you deal with writing in the age of social media where you’re so connected to all these people from your past?” And she just said, “It can’t all be transcendence.” It was just so true. When the you on the page is on a journey, you don’t have all of the growth and the epiphanies. You gain them through the course of the book.

When I was writing essays, it was all about the killer ending and the epiphany at the end. I think when it’s a chapter in a book, inherently you want the epiphany to come at the last page. At MFA school we used to call it the complexity of afterthought. That was what made a short story a short story. It was sort of like the blank space after the last page was where you as the reader had the epiphany. Just allowing, especially as a disabled person, to be flawed, to not always say the right thing, to exhibit internalized ableism and homophobia and hopefully, by the end of the book, come to some kind of a place where you have some perspective on all of that stuff. Not to say that those things aren’t still things to think about or struggles for me, but to just try to be honest about what that journey was. I think the alternative would be to perpetuate this myth of isolation, like, “Oh, well, I was the only disabled person that I knew.” Well, that’s not true. I had a bunch of disabled kids in physical therapy, there were disabled kids in my acting troupe. I was actually in a world filled with disabled people, and so how did I treat them? How did we understand or misunderstand each other?

And finally, what role has the library played in your life?

This is an interesting bit of family lore, there’s a library in Pocatello that bears my last name. It’s the Marshall Public Library in Pocatello, Idaho, My grandparents gave money to make it happen a million years ago. I had the chance to actually go up to Pocatello two summers ago, right after I’d sold my book, and visit the Marshall Public Library. It was such an incredible space. They had all of my dad’s yearbooks from the 70s. I mean, they weren’t his yearbooks, they were his graduating class. I was able to pull them from the shelves and take pictures of all these pictures of my dad that no one in my family had seen in maybe forty years. They were pictures of him writing an article on a typewriter in his journalism class or being a member of this or that club. Just even as repositories of our own history, libraries are such an important resource.

When I was young, I did not understand the Dewey Decimal System. Looking back, I think it was very much related to some of the cognitive symptoms of cerebral palsy. It was just so foreign to me, how you could possibly find a book on the shelves, even in the era of the nineties where it was somewhat past card catalogs. At the public library in Holiday, Utah, you could type in the book title and author into a computer and then have like a blinking green screen, but it was too intimidating. I didn’t understand how to ever find books. Once I was a little bit older, I was able to put things on hold at the library. It really was this hack, where suddenly I could use the library because all I had to do was type it in my computer at home. I could take the time to figure out how to spell, I could do it at my own pace, and waiting for me there would be this cache of CDs, DVDs, and books of all kinds that I was free to read. It just let me read so much more widely and so much freely than I had when I was like a Barnes and Noble kid and everything was expensive. (laughs)

I would say I would say became an avid library user in my college years. I put a bunch of things on hold during the breaks and it let me be a very avid gay reader. It really did let me just explore all kinds of writers. I’m  a total library freak. It’s been so fun to see how the library has evolved, where now we have Libby and some of those other digital services. It’s never been easier to get your hands on library books. It’s a cliche to call libraries a safe space, but they truly are. I guess what I’m trying to say with the decimal system thing is, I think libraries are more accessible content-wise than ever, because you have digital options. You can put things on hold. It really is amazing to see just the level of curation and attention that librarians give books.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post Greg Marshall On Writing Fearlessly And Rediscovering Queer Joy first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Can you talk about the origin of your book? What made you interested in the Rockettes?

The book came about in kind of a strange way. All my books are built around these iconic New York city buildings. Usually I find a building, start diving into the history, and find something that surprises me that I think will make a great hook for a book. But with this one, I got an email through my author website from a woman who said that she had been a Rockette in the late fifties and early sixties and she’d love to share with me some of the history of Radio City Music Hall. I thought, “Well, that’s fascinating, but to be honest, the Rockettes really intimidated me.” I don’t have a dance background and it seemed like it would be a lot of research and a lot of work to get it right. But I reached out to her and we had a wonderful conversation. She was just terrific. It turns out her husband Bob had worked there as a lighting board operator—that’s how they met when they were both nineteen. I thought, “This this could be really fun.” What I didn’t realize was that behind the theater [in Radio City Music Hall] is this entire city that was set up for the Rockettes, as well as the ballet corps that was there and the choral ensemble. I was surprised to learn that it had been a movie palace for so long and that there was a stage show in between movies. There were four shows a day and these stage shows were all based on a theme. If the movie was a John Wayne movie, it would be maybe a cowboy theme, and [the dancers would] all have holsters and guns. I just thought, “Wow, this is great.”

What really struck me in terms of research was the camaraderie between the Rockettes and the way they all speak so highly of their experience. To a one, every one of them said to me, “It was just one of the best times of my life. I loved all the other women. I felt supported. I felt creative. I felt strong.” I thought that would be a wonderful world to try and capture on the page.

I was fascinated by the incredible ecosystem behind the scenes that helped the dancers work. What was your research like in terms of finding out how everything operated at Radio City seventy years ago?

There’s a wonderful archive at Rockefeller Center, so I was able to go through that and look at old programs and articles about the Rockettes. There are some wonderful photos of them on the roof, where they would hang out and play wiffleball. There are some really wonderful books out that went into great detail about the theater—that there was a cafeteria and a nurse on staff. They had a small movie theater backstage where they could watch the premieres that were coming. There was a tailor, there was a hat and a shoe department, a poster department. There’s been a lot written about Radio  City Music Hall, thank goodness, so that made it easy to learn about this city that exists behind the stage.

I left the book with a newfound appreciation for the Rockettes. You capture not only the physicality of what they’re doing, but also the precision of what they have to execute show after show. Plus, their schedule seems like a very specific challenge added on to an already challenging career in dance.

Exactly! The fact that they did four shows a day for three or four weeks straight, and then they would get a week off. Then there were days that they were performing the old routines and learning the new routines, either very early in the morning or late at night. There was a kick line in every number, so they did around 600 kicks per day. It’s just kind of unimaginable.

And Marion is constantly struggling to match everybody else and not stand out. The physical control it takes to do that is pretty unimaginable.

I was so interested in that because I think whenever you’re in a creative field, like dance or art or writing, you have this this competitive streak to do as well as you can. If you’re in a dance class, [you want] to dance higher than the other dancers and really show what you can do. With the Rockettes, it’s not that. It’s all about technique and precision. If a kick is only shoulder height, it can only be shoulder height. You can’t do it eye height or it really throws the entire thing off.

I remember doing an interview with a ballet dancer as part of my research, and she was very tall for a ballet dancer. She described what it’s like to pull your muscles back and not do the full extension so you match the corps de ballet. [I loved being able] to put that kind of thing into the book, so that people can understand what it’s like to have to completely fit in and be as precise as you can with your movements.

Marion’s someone who’s taking charge of her own life for the first time. How did you land on her as the perfect detective for your story?

I did a lot of research before and I spoke to a number of Rockettes. A lot of them mentioned that their families were thrilled that they became a Rockette, but a number also said that their parents were very worried about it, about them living in the city alone. This takes place in 1956 and so women didn’t really have the freedom that we do today. Even in terms of what you would do for a living, you could be a nurse or a doctor or a teacher. I thought that would be an interesting way to add some conflict into her life, because as you’re creating characters, you need them to have conflict. If they’re perfectly happy, that makes for a very boring book. I thought by having her father’s disapproval—and also the ghost of her mother who’s passed away, who also tried to become someone who was creative in a creative field—gave Marion a lot to work through as she pursues a field of dance that she loves dearly, and goes against her father’s wishes.

I was also very inspired by Vera-Ellen, the movie star, who apparently was a Rockette for not long because she just stood out. She just was too much, and then she went on to a great film career. I thought by combining those things with Marion—wanting to go against her father’s wishes to do what she loves, but then having a really tough time and be really challenged by it—made for an interesting character. Then, of course, there’s a lot going on where she has to basically solve a mystery. Hopefully the character is complicated enough to be able to handle all those things and bring the reader along as she goes through this journey both inside and out.

Can we talk about the mystery element of The Spectacular? I was completely ignorant of the bombings that took place during that time. How did that aspect come into the story for you?

For every book I try to do a lot of research into what happened during that decade. I’ll go through The New York Times and just see what was going on. I learned that in the in 1956, near the end of the year, there was this huge push by the police to find the Mad Bomber, and I never heard of that. I learned that there was this guy who sent pipe bombs all over the city for sixteen years at some of these locations that I’ve written about, like Grand Central, the New York Public Library. I learned that he hit Radio City Music Hall twice, which made me think, “What if there was a bit of a thriller aspect to this book, just to shake things up?” In total, he sent thirty-two bombs and injured fifteen people, some very seriously. It was just fascinating to find this major story that no one I knew had heard of and to try and bring that to light.

Had you already settled on the fifties as your time period by that point?

Yeah, mainly because Sandy, the Rockette who reached out to me at the very beginning, danced in the fifties. It’s just a great time period—it’s great fashions and the city was really vibrant. I interviewed a number of Rockettes in their eighties, and their stories are so different from the stories of someone coming to New York today. It’s almost like you’re talking about a completely different city, and that’s a fun thing to try and convey in the book.

The fifties is such a fascinating time for both of the characters to exist, given their professions. Peter seems to be at the forefront of a new field that not many people respect or understand. Can you talk about what went into creating him as kind of the perfect foil for Marion?

As I was learning about the Mad Bomber, I learned that the case was solved using the first instance of criminal profiling. There was this psychiatrist and criminologist, James Brussell, and the police brought him in to study the letters of the Mad Bomber. He came up with this amazing list of features that this man would have that really helped them solve the mystery. One of the best was he said that when the Mad Bomber’s caught, he  will be wearing a double breasted suit and it won’t be buttoned. Pretty much all of his things were spot on. I thought that’s fantastic, because I love mysteries that have forensic psychiatry in them. The fact that this was really the first instance of it fascinated me.

I had to change some things in the book. I call my bomber The Big Apple Bomber. I’ve changed some things that happen, and then explain it very clearly in the author’s note, so you know what’s true, and what’s not. In my book, Dr. Brussel really becomes the character Peter, who’s this young resident in a psychiatric ward who gets asked by the police to help solve the case. Then he and Marion really have to team up to do it because she, at that point, has a very personal interest in figuring out who the Mad Bomber is.

It seems you bounce between timelines a lot in your previous books, and you do so again in The Spectacular. This book starts in the nineties, with Marion looking back on her experience in the fifties. How did that element find its way into your book in terms of approaching these characters at very different stages in their lives?

I think it started because I’ve always loved dual timeline historical fiction novels. When I got the idea for the first one, The Dollhouse, and that  was set at the Barbizon Hotel for Women. I thought, “Oh, I’ll do a dual timeline, because, you know, how hard can that be?” (laughs) Really hard. If I had known how hard it is, I would have never done it, but I guess ignorance is bliss.

I love trying to bring a mystery together through two timelines, and making the ending be both inevitable and satisfying. It’s really interesting for me to compare how women have agency or not over two time periods. With The Lions of Fifth Avenue, it’s a woman working at the New York Public Library in the 1990s and a woman living in the New York Public Library in the 1910s and just how different their worlds are. I find it’s easy to really show that when you have two timelines going. This one isn’t quite dual timeline. I think there are five chapters in the 1990s, and that’s really Marion looking back on her experience, which was just another a different way to approach it and find something fresh and new.

You received your Master’s in journalism from Columbia, and I’m curious about how your background in journalism shapes how you approach a story.

It really does. I do about three or four months of pretty intense research before I start figuring out the plot. I have an architectural historian named Andrew Alpern. He’s in his 80s and he knows New York like the back of his hand. We meet for lunch and I pick his brain and he tells me some wonderful gems that usually end up finding their way into the book. It’s really finding people who can help me understand whatever it is, like “What’s it like to be a Rockette?” So interviewing Rockettes from the 50s to Rockettes who have danced more recently on the stage. Also just reading everything I can on it.

For me, it’s really not about sitting in front of my computer and looking for websites that are helpful. It’s finding people who are helpful, and that’s where the journalism comes in. I remember the first day of journalism school, they told us to go out into the street and interview strangers. I was just like, “What? That’s crazy.” But once you’ve done it once, you realize how valuable it is to talk to someone for a half hour on whatever subject it is, because it’s usually those last five minutes that you find something that’s just pure gold.

Have any of the Rockettes read the book yet? Have you been able to get their reaction or Sandy’s reaction?

Yeah, she loved it. She’s hopefully coming to one of the launch events in June, which will be really fun because I haven’t met her in person. She’s been living in South Carolina. A number of Rockettes have read it and really helped make it precise, because you want to make sure you have those facts right. I’m really indebted to them for taking the time to do that.

I feel a little silly asking you this next question considering you’ve written a book about the New York Public Library, but can you talk about what role the library’s played in your life?

They’ve just been incredible. When I was a kid, we would go every week. We moved around a lot, so going to the library was the one constant. My family is just all readers. Our idea of a good time was to sit in a room and everybody read silently. Coming to New York, when I needed to get out of my apartment and go write somewhere that was inspirational, I could go to the New York Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. You cross that beautiful plaza and then you’re up in this library looking out on it, which just helps keep you focused. Then of course, writing about the New York Public Library, the librarians there were so helpful and answered all of my questions. I ended up getting a desk at the Allen Room there, which is for writers with book contracts, so there I was writing a book about libraries in the library, which was just perfect.

The post Fiona Davis On Radio City Music Hall And The City Behind The Stage first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The book has been compared to the works of Charles Portis and Elmore Leonard. I was wondering who were the authors who were significant to you, both as a reader and as a writer?

The people that I was reading as I was deciding that I think I might like to try my hand at this were like Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show, some Cormac McCarthy stuff. I remember being in Chicago and really enjoying improv, but feeling like there was some muscle that I wasn’t quite stretching and I couldn’t really figure it out.  I was doing some of the basketball writing that I still do at the time. It was just on the side, in addition to answering laser hair removal questions at Groupon. I just remember reading some of [McMurtry and McCarthy’s] stuff, and then honestly, it was also reading some of the stuff at Grantland. Brian Phillips  was a big dude for me. Reading his stuff opened me up to taking chances with writing and not being afraid to have a lot of different flavors in your tone, know what I mean? Like not shying away from a good bit, even if you have some more emotional hammer coming a little bit later. Just trusting that if you keep working at it, there’s a way to do it the way that you want to do it. Sportswriters like Wright Thompson and Spencer Hall were big for that stuff too. As for the comps, they are very flattering and blasphemous. Leonard has been a bit of a blind spot for me in my reading education, a fault of mine I need to correct, but I’ve read enough to know he rules. And then yeah, Portis. I mean, that’s heresy. Guy’s a magician. He can do anything. 

The epigraph contains quotes from everyone from Edna Ferber to Hakeem Olajuwon and does such a wonderful job of preparing the reader for the different aspects of the world of the novel. How did the epigraph come about?

At first, there were just a couple. The first one I had was the Ferber [quote] from the preface to Cimarron. When I came across that, I just danced a jig. I was just like, “Well, this is wonderful for what’s going on in my head.” And then I think it might have been the Hakeem Olajuwon quote about design, architecture, and the feel of certain rooms, because he obviously plays a prominent role in the book, so that felt good to include him in there. I would be editing and then I would get back to, “Okay, let’s consider this thing as a whole piece again,” because those things are fun to think about. I think it helps you hone in on, “Okay, what’s the book about?”

It just started to feel like I wasn’t explaining all the vibes that are in this book by just having these two quotes. It felt like it was going to be overkill, probably, having ten of them, but who cares? Let’s just do it, embrace a little maximalism here at the beginning, and just get it all out. I was sort of like, “Who knows if I get to do another one? Let’s just make sure that in this one you feel like you got all the arrows out of your quiver.” anytime I would come across one of these I’d be like, “Oh, that’s just too good to not put in there.”

One of the things that is most embarrassing to me about this is that I did not catch a typo in the quote from Robert Robinson’s “Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing.” It’s not supposed to be “wonder” with an “o,” it’s supposed to be [“wander” with] an “a.” I thought that it was “wonder” for forever when I was younger. Knew better this time around. I don’t know what happened, but I missed it and others missed it. I would get the galley and I would comb through it because there would be [a voice] in my head, “You messed something up. You’re going to find something.” And I did find a couple of things, but I had the feeling that there was something outstanding, you know what I mean? Like maybe the gas wasn’t left on but maybe a side door was unlocked? It’s hidden by bushes, but it is open. That sort of thing. Hopefully, readers are forgiving.

That kind of switch fits in so perfectly with Table’s personality. He’s someone who would mishear a lyric and then just double down and say that’s the way it’s always been.

Yes, or that he must have heard a special live rendition for one time only where they did a special change up just for the night and they changed the lyric at his suggestion. “You know, we have to keep singing it the same way, just because the way that people know the song, the way it’s famous, is this other way. But we agree with you, Table, it would be better if we kept it.”

I want to talk about Table and Lady because their dynamic is so compelling. Their relationship is very dysfunctional at times, but it’s also really funny and she seems to really challenge him in a way no one else does. Can you talk about what went into creating all the different aspects of their relationship?

Some of the first things of theirs that I wrote were them meeting. Early on, they were almost written as like a montage of scenes. They were not chronological. It was all over the place, because I didn’t know what I was doing or anything. “Maybe they should go to Carl’s Jr.? I don’t know.” (laughs) I wanted to have a kind of bullshit artist that seems like he’s at the center of the stuff. That he’s charismatic and funny in his own way, but is also just a piece of shit. He’s capable of good moments, but he is ultimately a selfish person.

It felt like to make the relationship as compelling as possible, the best way to deal with somebody like that would be to put them with someone who won’t let them get away with any of their shit. And if they do put up with it, they acknowledge it and are pretty realistic about the whole thing. They’re still going to push back and be capable of putting him in his place. It’s ultimately just a more interesting character. I wanted it to be a thing where people are reading it and thinking that it’s more of a Table kind of story, and then they realize that’s not what it is. He’s definitely one person, but then it’s like a real three-hander in that that you’re getting stuff from all sides.

Sam Lipsyte was a teacher of mine at Columbia and he said something in class one time that really landed.The things that make characters interesting is they’re both victims and victimizers. They’re oppressed, but they also make mistakes. That was the way that I wanted to approach pretty much all the characters in the book, at least the main ones where you’re actually dealing with some interiority. These are inherently flawed people that are sometimes in the right, and then, at least in Table’s case, often in the wrong. I liked the idea of trying to have somebody complicated and charming, but who is ultimately just kind of a piece of shit. I think sometimes the complicated and charming guy gets to wind up being complicated and charming, but [by the end] he’s figured some stuff out. Everybody’s like, “Man, look at this guy. He finally got it. He’s going to have a great family with this girl that he just met. This is great.” I wanted it to be like if it was an Apatow movie or something, one of those kind of stunted [characters] taken to its conclusion, where they don’t figure out how to really be, at least not personality wise, right?

I think one of the things that makes him so funny is that he’s so resistant to any kind of growth. He’s almost incapable of having any kind of emotional development.

Yeah, I wanted to be intentional, especially in the quieter times, when either it’s a softer moment or he’s having to apologize or something.It’s clear that he’s trying to get to an understanding place with her, but then he immediately is like, “I’m sorry, I want to stop talking about this.” One of the other things going on in the book is that it’s just a bunch of people who desperately want to feel connected to someone or something else, and just can’t. Shit’s getting in the way. His lack of comfort doing that gave Lady stuff to play off and it could show her sort of resiliency, you know what I mean? This woman’s dealing with this shit every day.

I think Table’s so appealing because of all the different ways he overcompensates for his insecurities, but Lady’s an equally funny character. I loved how her sense  of humor shines through and how she deals with him.

I really wanted to make sure that she and Priscilla, even though they’re going through stuff, that they had fun, that you saw their personalities and the playful sides of who they were. I hate it when the guy gets all the laugh lines. That’s just such bullshit and not how it ever goes. Table’s ultimately, like you say, just such an insecure guy, and Lady knows that and knows all the ways to get him. It would have felt not even truthful to the nature of the way that the relationship was written if he was besting her all the time. He’s coming in just firing away without aiming and she’s really concentrating on where she’s pointing her sights. She’s just a more focused person than he is. I really wanted the women to have moments where they were either in on the laugh or they were being properly entertaining—or interesting or thoughtful or eloquent or trying to be able to word a thought, but not able to do that. I wanted them to have all the same complexities and everything that Table had.

I was always thinking of this kind of as a comic Western, but it turned into a comic Western tragedy. Halfway through the writing of the whole thing, I was like, “Oh, this is a tragedy. This has got a lot of good bits in here, hopefully, but this is going to be a sad story.” When I was thinking about it as this Western, I was trying to be intentional about the women getting just as much of a say as the dude does. Native characters will have a say in this. Not that those things haven’t existed in certain Westerns, but it just feels like by and large, that was not something that a lot of the older stuff we came up on seemed interested in doing.

I was really delighted by the scope of the novel, as it follows these characters’ lives for about thirty years. What was appealing to you about covering these characters for such a huge span of time?

This is a bad answer, but it just sort of felt like that. I fussed with the structure of it, [asking,] “Is it chronological? Is it not?” I fussed with that for a long time. It was super late into the writing that I realized, “Oh, you need to lead with the Solomon scene.” Basically what was happening was I was starting with just Priscilla and Table meeting. That was the first thing that you saw, and you see them get married and everything. It was basically like the book was split into two parts, so part one was Lady and Table and part two was just Priscilla. You didn’t even see her until the second half of the book.

The book read, I think, a little bit slower. It wasn’t clear how focused it was, because you are sort of like, “Okay, is this about this married couple and kind of a little slice of life? Is it just with them? Is any other conflict going to emerge here?” When I added the Priscilla and Solomon stuff and put that at the beginning, it focused everything and propelled it. It just made everything else fall into place. It wasn’t even necessarily like when I started it that I was like, “I want to see these characters for a large swath of time.” Initially I just thought that what I was writing was going to basically be set over the course of a week, two weeks, something like that. In writing it more I realized that no, Priscilla is a big part of this. You need to have her running on a parallel track for it to all kind of land in the ways that I wanted it to. Whenever I was waiting to reveal the Table and Solomon stuff, some of the writing would get cagey. It would get a little too cute for itself. I wasn’t good enough to be trying to make those moves at the time. It was also really maudlin. When I would go back and read it, it just feel like, “You’re clearly withholding something.” Sometimes that’s fun, but it wasn’t feeling like it was a rewarding sort of thing, you know what I mean? So it was like, “Oh, let’s just get all this out in the open for the most part. Everybody’s seeing all the cards.”

I love hearing about that because I find that first scene so engrossing. It colors the rest of the novel with a sense of foreboding. None of the characters involved are able to ever really escape the violence from the opening chapter. It holds so much weight in their lives.

No, totally. I wanted to be conscientious. I don’t like the idea of tricking the reader into like, “You thought it was gonna be like this, but it’s like this.” There’s something a little bit like, “Well just show me how it is!” I wanted there to be some light stuff there at the beginning and have it register as a good loving, father daughter relationship. But you also are trying to put up some decorations so that people know what kind of party they’re walking into. You don’t want to put up a bunch of Christmas lights and Snoopy on a sleigh outside and then you walk inside and it’s a bubble rave. Why not have the bubble rave also be outside with all the Christmas decorations too?  Let’s just throw it all in. Let them know, “Hey, there’s gonna be a trail mix here. It’s not a layer cake.” I also don’t know what a layer cake is. 

The story is  bookended by two five-year-old girls, first with Priscilla as a five-year-old and then later, Table and Lady’s daughter, Dianna. They’re both such unique and specific little girls, I wanted to hear about how you approached writing your child characters.

That’s a good question. I wanted Priscilla to be smart and quick in her own way. She wants to play the game, and Solomon’s trying to perform for himself. “Maybe hopefully there’s a neighbor a couple of yards over and they’re hearing me be really funny to my daughter too.” He’s doing a couple things there, and she’s like, “Can we just play the game?” There’s something in that immediacy, like, “This is what is happening, this is what I want to be doing, and this is my thing. Stop trying to be the star of this game because I’m supposed to be the star of this game, dad.” I wanted her to feel like this is a smart kid who is not going to be intimidated, but also just wants to have fun. There’s some mischief there.

I wanted her to have like a streak of silliness in her, you know what I mean? I wanted her to feel like she would be a lot of fun to have around. Once you get into [the scene] with Table, I wanted her to not be afraid to throw her weight around. In some way, Dad’s conducting business, but she interrupts whenever she wants. There’s the unhealthy stuff that’s going on too, obviously the stuff that you don’t want a child seeing, but there’s the unhealthy aspect of like, “Oh, no. I see my daddy is sad, I should be the one to fix this.” As a dad, you don’t ever want your kids thinking that they are at all responsible for cheering you up. You just want them to be kids. And so I thought that it would be a way to show, “Oh, this is a discerning kind of girl who’s gonna pay attention to stuff.”

With Dianna, I wanted to keep looking at that idea of connection. [Lady believes,] “If just this thing will happen then everything will be fine and exactly how it’s supposed to be. Things will be heading downhill.” Lady doesn’t have Dianna just so that she’ll have someone to connect with, but I think that any parent, if you have a kid, you want to be able to talk with them and then for them to talk back to you. It felt like a way to show other sides of Lady and other ways that she can be both empathetic, but also maybe not be on the ball. [It shows] ways that her confidence and things like that can also get in the way of her making decisions that would be for the betterment of her and her family, right?

The other aspect of it was you’ve got Priscilla desperately wanting to hear from God and desperately wanting God to talk back to her, and he just won’t. I wanted there to be a mirror on the opposite side of the narrative that could do some similar things and run around in not only the same territory, but also other nooks and crannies.

Finally, since this is for the Public Library Association, what role has the library played in your life? Is there a particular book you remember getting from the library as a child?

I have such fond memories of my librarians growing up. The first chapter book that I remember ever connecting with was one my upper school elementary librarian gave me called Danger Zone by David Klass. I remember looking for it and it’s out of print, and there’s also been a staggering number of books called Danger Zone, if you can believe it. It’s about this high school basketball player, of course, so that would have resonated with me. He’s added to U-18 team for the U.S., and when he gets there, the best player doesn’t like him because he took the last spot on the team that [everyone] thought was going to [the best player’s] friend or cousin or something. It’s all very sort of “Remember the Titans,” but the coach isn’t the big thing, it’s just the players. It wasn’t even the librarian making some great leap right? She didn’t have to do a lot of digging, but she took the time to be like, “Oh, I know you, you sporty jerk. You like basketball? Come here and give this a try.” And you know, there’s a world where they don’t care enough to know that, right? And you’re left to your own devices and you try to read the skinniest sports autobiography that you can get through very quickly before your Accelerated Reader test. That book always has a special place in my memory for just, you know, actually getting my attention.

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 Can you start by giving us a brief overview of the events that the book covers?

The photographs in the book depict events that occurred over five days in Newark. I believe that the uprising began on July the 12th 1967. It was sparked by the arrest and beating of a Black cab driver named John Smith. Essentially the spark that lit the fuse for this uprising was the arrest and the beating of John Smith, who was held in a precinct. People in the community did not know what was happening to him, but they had heard that he had either being killed—which he had not—or his ribs had been separated from the beating that he received from the police. There were protests outside the police precinct that gradually got larger and the situation grew and grew till there was looting and stores being burned. This happened for two days, I think July 13th through the 14th. In the early hours of July 14th, there was a call from the police chief and the mayor of Newark, Hugh Addonizio, to the Democratic governor, Richard J. Hughes, basically telling them that the situation had gotten out of control and they needed to call in the National Guard. So Governor Hughes gave the order to call in the National Guard.

The troops came into the city and set up roadblocks and curfews to try and control the movement of people and police the situation. That happened, I think, on July 14^th. By that time there was a curfew in the city. That’s where Bud Lee comes into the story. He received a call, I think on July 14th, that he needed to go to Newark immediately to cover what was happening there for Life magazine. The book really covers that period. It’s the aftermath of the first two days of what was occurring in Newark, which was the most violent and explosive [time]. In some senses what you’re seeing, although Life had tasked Bud Lee with going to cover a “riot,” what he actually captured was the aftermath, although the events carried on for another three days. He’s sort of almost capturing this vacuum after the explosion. To me, that’s what’s so powerful about these images. They’re really detailing people trying to live their daily lives in what had become a war zone.

The centerpiece of the book are the photos that Life chose to run that he took. That was an event that he sort of stumbled on to and became involved with, which was the shooting and killing of a man named Billy Furr by Newark police and the wounding of a young twelve-year-old boy named Joey Bass Jr. The photo of Joey Bass Jr. lying wounded by police gunfire on concrete on the streets of Newark is what ended up on the cover of Life magazine. The photos of the killing of Billy Furr by the police were inside the magazine

Can you give a little background on Bud Lee? He seemed to have a unique background that made him uniquely suited to take such memorable photos here.

Suited and not suited at the same time. He was essentially a self-taught photographer. He had trained as an artist at the National Academy of Fine Arts at Columbia University. He was a fine artist. He was a painter. He studied under a man named Dean Cornell, who was a muralist and had been referred to as the Norman Rockwell of murals. Photography wasn’t Bud Lee’s first choice as a medium. He enrolled in the military. While he was in the military, he took a photography course and he became a photographer for Stars and Stripes magazine, in Europe, largely. This was early 60s.

He came back to America and won Military Photographer of the Year, but they weren’t for combat photos. They were photos of soldiers in training. He had used as his model for those photos a fashion photographer named Hiro who worked for Harper’s Bazaar. They were sort of staged photos, but very powerful. When he won the Military Photographer of the Year Award, he was basically headhunted by Life magazine’s Photo Editor Peggy Sargent and so he started working for the Life magazine in 1967.

What he brought to the photographs that he took in Newark was a very particular aesthetic that came out of his fine arts training. When I look at these photos, they don’t feel like news photos necessarily. There are aspects of that to them, but there’s something about the framing of them, the focus on people and characters. All of the photos in the book are run full frame. There’s no cropping on anything. Some of the ways that they were framed were pretty extraordinary considering he was shooting in the moment. Often there were only single shots. There were not multiple shots of the same event, or the same people even. He brought a sort of an artist’s eye to documentary photography. I think that really shows in his approach and his empathy for the people of Newark and his subjects. Obviously, you know, he’d sort of stumbled into this situation, in some ways. It wasn’t his first choice thing to do. It was an assignment.

A lot of the pictures have almost this painterly feel to them.

Certainly in the choice of images. I was very conscious of that. There’s a stillness to them because of that. There are action photographs that are in there, but I think some of the more powerful images and the more emotive ones are these very beautifully composed photographs. One in particular is the photograph of Joey Bass’ family sitting in their house. My art history background is not very good, but it sort of feels like a Renaissance painting in some ways.

The other part of that is because of his fine art training, he could call on references to classic paintings. We’ve found paintings that he almost sort of recreated in his head through the lens in the spur of the moment, which to me was pretty extraordinary. He just had that vision, that focus, and also that art history knowledge that he could see something in the situations that he was covering, and translate it and utilize classic paintings as a sort of model for what he was trying to capture. I find it very hard to explain because he was doing this stuff in the moment. There was something about what he was seeing that he was able to translate into his images, if that makes sense.

Another fascinating aspect of the photos was that two of this cameras had been damaged, so when he was actually taking pictures he only had the one shot to get the image.

That came into play specifically in the sequence of images of the shooting of Billy Furr. He’s suddenly in this situation where he’s having to take photographs in a split second. There’s all of these things happening in front of him and he’s trying to shoot. He had a Pentax Spotmatic camera with a manual wind on it. Basically what happened was he met this twenty-four year-old man named Billy Furr on the street, and he and the reporter Dale Whitner started talking to Billy and his friends.

Billy and his friends decided to go into an already looted liquor store and get some beer because it was a hot Saturday afternoon. Bud took photos of that occurring, so there were photos of Billy Furr and his friends going into this store and carrying out cases of beer. What happened next was that the police arrived without warning. A patrol car just comes screeching to a halt on the sidewalk. The cops jump out. Two of Billy Furr’s friends basically fall to the sidewalk. Billy goes running with a six pack in his hand. What you see in the images is the cops aiming and firing and shooting him in the back. Bud was capturing all of this. Two of those shots that they fired at Billy Furr ended up hitting this twelve-year-old boy named Joey Bass at the next intersection.

So Bud moves between taking photographs of Billy Furr who is now fatally injured and dying on the sidewalk and capturing the crowd of onlookers that are surrounding Joey Bass Jr., [plus] the police coming in and attending to him with paramedics. It’s an extremely dramatic sequence of images. I think six of them might have been used in Life. I’m not sure how many there are, maybe twenty-four images total. But those images that run in the central section of the book, we used pretty much every image he shot.

I separated it from the rest of the book because I really wanted people to be in that moment with Bud. I wanted you to be able to experience this as it was happening and really sit and dwell on how this event occurred. I think they’re very powerful images and they’re images that need to be seen, especially in the current climate where these things are happening on a daily basis. I feel a lot of the images in this book, as well as being a historical document, really speak to the current place that we’re in in America. Things that are occurring with gun violence, with police brutality, with any of these situations that are coming up. I just felt it was very important that these particular images are seen and exposed. To me, they offer a sense of perspective. We’re in the same place that we were fifty years ago in some regards. There’s a certain amount of police accountability now, but these things are still happening. When I was looking at these images, it was deeply shocking to me that we’re sort of in the same place.

I don’t want to psychoanalyze Bud, but it seems that he was profoundly affected by his experience in Newark. He visited Joey in the hospital for months afterwards, right?

Yeah, that’s true. He was affected in the way that war photographers are affected. That’s the only way that I can understand it, I think. I quoted him in the book, specifically about the incident with Billy Furr and Joey Bass, he said that he didn’t feel in danger, he felt like the camera was a shield. I wrote that it wasn’t a shield for the mind, because you’re still witnessing these images. He’s taking photographs, he’s frozen behind the camera. He can’t act. He can’t intervene, which is something that I cited Susan Sontag talking about, the quandary that a photographer faces in these situations. You either intervene or you take a photograph, and the photographer is almost compelled to take the photograph. But the impact of those events, witnessing those events, being involved in those events, and the level of guilt that he felt felt—because he had taken photographs of Billy Furr in the seconds before he was shot and killed by the police—I think that that really stayed with him.

Also, this this was the story that made him. He won the News Photographer of the Year award. I think that didn’t sit well with him on some level. These photos of immense tragedy had sort of somehow given him a leg up. Again, it’s like the feelings of guilt I think that were there. So yes, he was profoundly affected by these events.

I appreciated that you included the conversation he had later with a New York Times photographer who pointed out that Billy was probably showing off for Bud by getting the beer, and how Bud’s presence was a factor in how events played out.

I think he was he was very aware of that. [The fact] that that conversation came from him really shows his awareness of the complexity of all of those events, and his own role in it. That’s the role that most photographers, certainly war photographers and conflict photographers, have to face. That was not where his heart lay. He really was an artist at heart. It was difficult for him to to deal with all of that stuff.

The foreword of the book is written by Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark. Can you talk about the connection between his family have with Newark and the events of 1967?

Mayor Baraka’s father was Amiri Baraka, the esteemed poet, playwright, and political activist, who was deeply associated with Newark. At the time of the events of July 1967, Amiri Baraka had just moved from New York back to Newark. He was very much associated with the Greenwich Village arts scene and with Alan Ginsberg. He was a very noted character already. He moved back to Newark and sort of re-established himself there. His house on Sterling Street in Newark became known as the Spirit House and it became a community center and arts workshop. Amiri Baraka became very involved in community work and community activism at that time, so he was well known, if not notorious.

During the uprising in ‘67, almost probably the same day that John Smith was beaten by the police and arrested, Amiri Baraka went out to see what was going on in the city. He and the people he was traveling with in a van were stopped by police also. He was subjected to a police beating that almost killed him. He was arrested and then charged with illegal possession of a firearm, which he maintained had been planted by the police. It turned out later that one of the same policemen who had been involved in the beating of Amiri Baraka was also one of the same policemen who had fired the shots that killed Billy Furr and wounded Joey Bass, which is kind of an extraordinary, almost unbelievable, coincidence.

Amiri Baraka was arrested and then he was released around July 24th, a couple of weeks after the events in Newark. He hosted the first National Conference on Black Power in Newark. There was a press conference at the Spirit House, and H. Rap Brown, who was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was there. Ron Karenga of US Organization in Los Angeles was there. Bud Lee went back to New York to cover the National Conference on Black Power and photographed Amiri Baraka and the other participants in the conference at the Spirit House. Part of that press conference, Bud photographed the family of another young man who had been shot and killed by the police, a nineteen-year-old called James Rutledge, Jr. He had been shot thirty-nine times by police. His father and his mother came to the event and his father held up a photograph of the autopsy that had been performed on James Rutledge, Jr. to show what the police gunfire had done to him. Amiri Baraka spoke about this event and called it “an act past murder.” I think it was really indicative of the level of police brutality and violence that was being meted out on members of the community there.

Those photos basically form the end of the book. The photo of Amiri Baraka, who still had the bandage on his head from the police beating, in this very sort of fiery pose talking, is the last photo in the book. It just felt it was appropriate to end that way. The book actually ends with a quote by Amiri Baraka. So that’s a long way of saying that Ras Baraka’s family were intimately involved in these events.

I think the most powerful thing about Mayor Baraka’s text is he’s talking about generational trauma and how it is handed down. That’s his own family’s trauma, his memory. He was not born yet, but basically the events in Newark became part of family lore, but also the trauma that happened to Newark itself. He talks about sort of managing that trauma and trying to rebuild and reframe [it]. I think his text is extremely powerful. It was an extraordinary thing that his family went from. His father was a political activist and the next generation Ras Baraka had assumed the reins of power in Newark, really carrying on his father’s work. I think that’s an extraordinary arc for the Baraka family. I’m just very grateful that he wrote that text for us. It really does not pull any punches, and really frames the book as something that’s affecting people in Newark, but also around America today.

I think you need that bracing beginning to prepare yourself for the images that you’re going to see too.

It definitely sets the tone. Again, these are not pictures of a riot, so to speak. These are pictures of a people trying to survive in the aftermath and in the face of all of this sort of destruction that had been meted on the city. For me, one of the more powerful images is the second image in the book, which is of an armored personnel carrier with a soldier with a rifle, and in the background are these destroyed buildings. It really spoke to the title of the book, “the war is here.” I’ve showed people that photograph and they think it’s somewhere outside of America, that it’s Vietnam or somewhere like that. It’s hard for them to even process that this was an American city. Again, I think that’s why these images need to be seen. The war is here, the war is continuing. We’re still dealing with these issues. The National Guard is still being sent into American cities. The police are using militarized tactics to police American cities. We’re still dealing with all of these things to this day.

You end the book with this really powerful letter that Billy Furr’s widow, Ellene Furr, wrote last December. Can you talk about what went into the decision to give her the final word in the book?

I had wanted to reach out to her and actually the family of Joey Bass, who we weren’t able to locate. I definitely wanted to reach out to the family of Billy Furr to let them know that the book was being published. I was put in contact with Ellene by Junius Williams, who’s the official historian of Newark, and so I reached out to her, and she responded straightaway. It sounds strange, but it was almost as if she’d been waiting for me to call.

These are events that are long in the past, but had a massive impact on her life. She’d been married to Billy Furr for two years at the time that he was murdered, so she lost her husband. I said, “Would you be interested in writing something for the book?” because I felt it was very important to take this back to the personal stories—especially considering the photos that are in the book, to really bring that back into a personal sphere. I think we forget about the victims of these events.

I should qualify that in some ways. Taking it back to what Mayor Baraka wrote about generational trauma, that was really part of why I wanted to make sure that Ellene’s voice was in there, and that she was able to speak about how these events impacted her. I think when these killings occur, we’re almost caught in an eternal sort of present. We’re sort of trapped in this moment, replaying the events over and over again. Certainly in these days when there is footage of, say, George Floyd’s murder, and this video footage of it gets replayed over and over again. We’re sort of caught in that moment, but I think we need to step outside of that and realize that it doesn’t end when the camera is switched off. I’m finding it hard to describe this, but I wanted to make sure that we understood that these things, these events, have impact that goes through decades. They change people’s lives entirely. They don’t even change one person’s life, I mean, it’s entire families. Anytime there are any of these shootings, Uvalde or Buffalo or wherever it is, we’re talking about tens, hundreds, even more people being impacted by these events and traumatized by them. I wanted to bring that home to somebody’s personal story and explain the impact that these events had on her. It’s a difficult subject to talk about.

Finally, what role has library played in your life?

As a writer, and as a journalist, libraries were so important to me, just in terms of research, as a source of knowledge, and being able to go into a library and call up books. I worked in the British Library as well and have done research in there. It’s so important to have that store of knowledge and access to that knowledge as a free resource as well, that you can just go into a place and read books, look at books. The library is a space where there are no restrictions on you in terms of time or access. I think that’s incredibly important now. I’d very much like this book to be in libraries. I think it’s important that it’s sort of sitting there, that people can take the time to sit, look at it, and really absorb the images and the story they’re telling.

The post Bringing Home The Personal Story In “The War Is Here” first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

In other interviews, I’ve heard you talk about how you reverse engineer your writing process by coming up with the plot first, and then figuring out the perfect characters to fit into that story. Can you talk about why that process works for you?

I think a lot of writers start with character and then, of course, the challenge is going to be figuring out what they’re going to get up to. My brain doesn’t really work that way. I start with plot and then I have to figure out the kind of character that’s going to be the most susceptible to that plot. Who’s going to be the most changed by these circumstances? What Achilles heels do I want to give them that are going to be interesting for this plot or that would get them drawn into it? People talk sometimes about how if you put Romeo into the plot of Hamlet, he just does it. He’s just like, “I’ll kill the guy, yeah, okay.” But if you put Hamlet into the plot of Romeo and Juliet, he’s like, “Well, we should think about this for a long time,” and nothing bad happens, right? You need to find the character that this plot could only have happened to them. For me, that means working backwards.

Bodie was such a fascinating character for me as a reader. I was really drawn into everything that she was going through. Can you talk a little bit about  why she’s the perfect person for this specific story?

I wanted someone who had been really adrift and insecure as a teenager and is really secure and confident as an adult, so that when I put her back on her high school campus, she’s dramatically torn between those two people. She isn’t who she was. I also wanted someone who had very, very much felt like an outsider in high school. Part of her journey is realizing how much of an insider she actually was, just being part of these systems, willingly or not. [I wanted] someone who thinks systemically about abuse of power. She thinks about whose stories get told and how, in her work with film history, but hasn’t had had a reason to turn that on her own life. She really thought that this was a case that was settled. Realizing that it isn’t, she has that skill set to use and those real observational powers, but it’s still a slow, painful awakening process going on there. I wanted someone with a good sense of humor, etcetera. That helps a lot, being in first person and stuck in their head.

The dynamic between Bodie and her former classmates are so compelling also, especially since we get to see Bodie’s memories of people against their present day interactions. Can you talk about how you created the relationship between Bodie and Beth?

That would be a character who Bodie quintessentially viewed as the epitome of this school—you know, popular and attractive and talented and wealthy. Very much an insider. Bodie has a line late in the book that she never would have dreamed that she had a hand in bullying this girl. She just felt like gossip about her was fair play in the same way that we might feel like gossiping about a celebrity is fair play. Like, “They’re never gonna see this, why would they care about me?”

Of course, it’s going to dawn on her later—as it dawns on all of us—that other people were going through things and might have been even more vulnerable than we were. But Bodie’s someone who’s avoided class reunions, she’s avoided Facebook for the most part, and she hasn’t had that experience of being thrust back together with these people before. Social media has really been that for a lot of us, like, suddenly becoming friends with someone that you were never friends with in high school and going, “Oh, wait. You’re not the person I thought you were.”

For someone like Beth, she really saw Bodie as sort of thinking she was above it all, thinking she was better than everybody else—which she did! (laughs) That’s what tends to happen in some of these cases, you see yourself as an outsider and then you look down on the people who you see as insiders. I think that’s just very realistic. That’s, in so many cases, exactly the way that things went down in high school and probably go on in subtler ways when we’re adults.

It also seems that this is a story that could only have taken place in 2018; Bodie is constantly in conversation with the news events of the day and the #MeToo movement. What was it like to write a book that was so specific to its time period?

I started writing in 2019 and I was forced to make a choice pretty quickly, just because of COVID. I had been setting it kind of vaguely “now,” and then suddenly “now” became like, “Well, what do you mean by now?” Right? (laughs) I’m not quite sure why I chose 2018 instead of 2019, except that I didn’t want it to feel like COVID was bearing down, so I scooched it back. It was funny, because in 2020 ,when I made this decision, I thought, “I’ll just set the last part in 2022 when the pandemic will surely be completely over.” Then I had to go in there and take masks off my characters and put them back on and off, depending on what was going on. Fortunately, I didn’t have to finish editing it until after March of 2022,  so I could write with authority about what the situation would be in New Hampshire at that point.

There was that part, but then setting it and writing it when I did, those #MeToo questions were definitely on my mind. It was a time—it still is—when we were all looking back on things that we were told we were supposed to be okay with in the past and re-examining them. That was something I think that was going on for all of us. It made a lot of sense to me that it found its way into my book, maybe in a more contradictory, complex, nuanced way than the same discussions that we were all having on Twitter.

I was really drawn into the relationships Bodie forges with her students. They’re so engaging in how smart and vibrant they are. What made you choose which students to bring along with Bodie and her journey? 

First of all, just generationally, it’s funny because they are in so many ways just more aware—socially, culturally, more considerate of other people’s feelings. They also are really annoying in their overthinking of everything and their sort of policing of each other, but they’re still working it out. They’re very young. It’s not like I’m saying that they are this perfect generation by a long shot. But the contrast between them and Bodie’s classmates is notable, as it is in real life. If you step into a high school now at a place where kids are really thoughtful and well educated—oh my God, the difference is enormous.

I wanted of all the kids that I could have created for this situation, I did want one kid who was maybe getting a little over her skis and have these lofty ideas in terms of like, “I’m going to solve this.” Something interesting about this younger generation right now is that because they sometimes do have huge reach online, they sometimes—correctly or incorrectly—feel like they have a very big voice and that they might accomplish huge things. That often is correct, but it’s funny to someone of even my generation. I’m not that much older, but the farthest we ever thought anything that we said or did was ever going to go was the people in the room. Maybe you went to a protest, but you didn’t really think anyone was paying attention to you.

Alder, I just, liked him as a character and he kind of came alive on the page. It started to make sense that he would get involved in this and that he could have some real agency. I was never going to write the version where two white women come in and save the day. That was not going to work for many different reasons. His agency there is very important to me, but also I think he’s he’s the kind of kid who would have been probably incredibly ostracized by a previous generation of Granby students. The fact that he’s popular and beloved is real. That is a real cultural shift that we’ve experienced.

I’ve read in other interviews where you talk about how you wanted to correct some common mistakes that occur in a boarding school novel. Can you talk about what some of those misconceptions or mistakes are?

I mean, some of them I’ve joked about.  It’s just the aesthetic and the vibe. Every building is ancient, it’s always October, and everyone writes letters. (laughs) I live on campus at a boarding school, so this does come up in conversation. Once in a while you get people going, “Do those still exist?” I think they’re thinking of something like “Dead Poets Society” or Harry Potter. I don’t know what they’re thinking of, but something very, very, very old. Other people, this is much more I encountered when I was a day student at a boarding school, but people asking me if it was a reform school. People would ask, “What did you do to get sent there?” When I was a day student at a boarding school, we hired a singing gorilla telegram for one of my friends in the dorm. The singing gorilla shows up and we’re leading this guy basically down the hall, which we probably weren’t supposed to do. The singing gorilla is like, “What did you guys do to go this reform school?” It was like, “What choices did you make in your life that you’re a singing gorilla?” (laughs)

Even within stories that people are telling about a boarding school, they’re very often ignoring the diversity of a really responsible good boarding school that works in the same way that a responsible small liberal arts college would, in what I think of as the Robin-Hooding of wealth through financial aid and scholarships. Maybe half the kids there are wealthy and full pay, but you’ve got kids from all over the world. You’ve got kids from underserved communities and cities nearby. You’ve got kids from very, very small rural towns where they weren’t going to get this kind of education, and everything in between, in a way that even within a public school in a major city, you’re not getting that kind of diversity in terms of the extremes of international experience. Kids are exposed to that at a very formative time in their lives. High school is a more formative time than college. It readjusts you in some way. I’m not saying that they are superior to other schools at all, but I’m just saying that to me, that is the greatest strength of a good boarding school, that incredible diversity of all kinds. When they’re depicted as these incredibly homogenous places, I find that dispiriting. It’s like you’re completely missing the point of what’s going on here. Of course, they’re significantly more diverse now than they were even in the 90s. But even in the 90s, as much as Bodie feels like an outsider, there are plenty of other kids in that boat. The classmates that she names are people from all over the world and that’s just not something that gets represented.

I love your newsletter and you recently posted questions to ask at a book talk, so I thought I would steal one of those questions. What did you end up having to cut that you that you wish you could have kept?

There was a lot more stuff about Rita Hayworth that didn’t have much to do with the book. So much about Rita Hayworth. (laughs) There’s this discussion in brief about this teacher who was killed by her boyfriend in the 70s. There was originally a lot more about her. It wasn’t a major plotline, but the details of her case kept coming up in a way that ultimately, it’s just giving you too much to juggle. It doesn’t really matter that much.

I had a lot of scenes that were cut because they were all doing the same thing. Scenes of misperception or scenes of Bodie feeling uncomfortable in high school because everyone else seems to know some kind of code. I had a scene where they had Kmart Day. It was this day every year where the students would go and buy all their clothes from Kmart. It was making fun of the clothing that you could purchase at Kmart and just the class thing there, but it was basically beating a drum that I had already beat. I had made those points elsewhere.

I had scenes of them watching “My So-Called Life” or paying attention to the beginning of the OJ trial, things that were cultural markers. I get annoyed when I’m reading something set anytime in the past and there are just too many mentions of what’s going on in the world. Like working in song titles constantly. And then someone turns on the news and this is what was on the news. I roll my eyes at that, so I needed to keep that to pretty much to a minimum.

It seems like you’ve had to have done a ton of research because we get so immersed in the New Hampshire legal system with the trial of the man who’s been accused of the killing Bodie’s classmate. That must have been a balancing act that you’ve had to play in terms of what to share for the reader and then what the reader didn’t need to know.

It helps that I don’t know that much. (laughs) I was working with this wonderful woman who until recently was a public defender in New Hampshire. It was more about her answering my questions than, for instance, me going and taking a yearlong class about something and then ending up with too much information. I think, for me, very often with research it helps to be filling in blanks in my own story, rather than to go and collect absolutely everything I can and then figure out what to do with it all. You need to know some things before you begin for sure or you’re going to end up with a story that doesn’t make any sense.

I really end up researching in layers where I’m researching, writing, researching, writing, and it ends up pretty quickly being a matter of filling in the gaps. I don’t know a whole lot more than what’s on the page to be honest. But what is on the page is very well researched and I was incredibly grateful for the generosity of this one person.

Finally, what role has the library played in your life?

I tend to think of it definitely in relation to my childhood public library, the Lake Bluff Public Library. I did own some books, for sure, but 99% of my books came from the library. Lois Lowry was my favorite writer as a kid and I would just make a beeline twice a week for the L shelf to see if she’d written something new.  She doesn’t have ghost writers. It was like, twice a year, once a year, [when a new book would come out]. But I can still tell you exactly where her shelf was.

Like a lot of kids, the summer reading program was huge for me. Much more specifically, they had a short story contest for grade school kids every spring where you were up against other kids in your grade. I have no idea how many kids entered, but every time that I entered I either won first or second prize or honorable mention or something. A couple of times, it was first prize, to the point where I really felt, excited and supported and like, “Oh my God, this is something I can do.” I think the prize was a hardcover book that you got to pick out, any hardcover book you wanted. I cannot say confidently that I would be a writer without that. They would print up and Xerox everyone’s stories and then leave it on the shelf in the library. It’s still there, which is hilarious. The Lake Bluff Public Library loves to point this out. It’s a contest that is still going. I’ve helped them do their award ceremony just for fun. It had an enormous, enormous impact. It’s very, very hard to imagine my life without that library.

The post Rebecca Makkai On Plot Construction, Boarding Schools, And Singing Gorilla Telegrams first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

 The book is a memoir yet reads like a novel, where the character Maddie Twist guides us through her childhood and young adulthood. Can you talk about how Maddie Twist was the ideal character for you to tell your story?

I’d like to start by saying that I’ve been working on this book for— oh my goodness, I started it back in the late seventies. Over the decades, I would write a little bit and then put it away. This went on for years and years because, if you’ve read it, you understand that it was a very hard story to tell. Finally it came to the point where I really wanted to finish it. I’ve written a couple of other books and I’m always searching for the right voice to bring me into the journey of the book. With my memoir, I needed cover to go into the battle zones of my youth. I came up with the character of Maddie Twist as a type of Trojan horse, because it was a really hard story to go into.

[With the origins of] Maddie Twist, it was Maria Magdalena, which was my grandmother’s name. It was Madeline—my mother wanted to call me Madeline, but she named me Adele instead. Twist also came from my mother. She was thought of by the Italians on my father’s side of the family as Kitty Twist, which was based on a Jane Fonda character. So it was an amalgamation of a lot of creative things from my childhood that coalesced into creating this character to give me the armor, so to speak, of going into the war zones of my childhood.

The experiences that you write about are so raw and painful, but as I was reading, I felt like you really had such a clear perspective on your childhood and the people involved that you were able to write about them with a lot of compassion.

Well, that’s something I learned through years of therapy. This is going to sound a bit woowoo, but I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of alchemy. I’ve always thought of alchemy as not like the physical elements of changing base materials into gold, but in a spiritual sense of being able to take what might be cruelty and darkness and discern the light in the darkness, to be able to transform that into something illuminating and something positive. For instance, my mother’s schizophrenia. She could be very cruel but at the same time, she could be incredibly imaginative and creative. Had she not been that imaginative, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to live the life I’ve lived, to take the chances and the risks I’ve taken that have made me who I am. It’s an interesting thing, being able to look at people with compassion, even though they’ve been cruel. It’s kind of digging into the systemic reasons of why people are cruel in our society. And that’s another conversation altogether.

There are so many allusions to literature and different authors from the start, it’s clear that reading played a key role in your life. Can you talk about where and from who you developed your love of reading?

My mother read a lot. She would swing from reading trashy novels like Valley Of The Dolls [to reading] poetry. She read Byron and Keats and Shelley. She read the Greek philosophers and the myths. Thank God for that because I was living in a working class milieu where people just didn’t care about literature or poetry. I was fortunate to have that in her. Books played a central role in my life because it was a way for me to escape the traumatic situations of my childhood and, in a way, be involved in a magical thinking that took me into new worlds that were enchanting, [although] not always good. I mean, I loved Edgar Allan Poe, but the darkness of his poetry mirrored some of the confusing feelings and darkness that I was experiencing as a child. So there was a relating to it. I was really fortunate that my mother was a reader.

It seems that poetry plays such a big role in your life. One of my favorite lines from the book is “poetry protects me like a shield against the nitwits.” Can you talk about that?

I grew up in a very working class suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Like I said, none of the kids that I was going to elementary school with ever read poetry. I didn’t have anything in common with those kids. It was kind of like I was living in this little fantasy bubble with my mother and, sometimes, my father. It was a world that was so unlike anything else. When kids were cruel, for instance on the playground, poetry was my shield. It was a form of protection in a way, to say that there is something else besides this. What I see outside of myself on this playground and the insults and the cruelty, there is another world. That world came from poetry and it was mine. It was like a foxhole for me.

The book also makes clear the key role that music in your life. Where did you develop your love of music?

My mother was a dancer in musical theater when she was young, and she also taught dance at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. She absolutely adored music. It’s an interesting trajectory on my maternal side of women without fathers. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had my mother out of wedlock. The father was unknown. I have often thought that my mother may have been the child of rape, because my grandmother was very poor and played piano in speakeasies during the Depression to support herself and my mother, which was an incredibly dangerous thing for women to do at that time. My mother grew up in speakeasies with my grandmother, holding on to the piano leg, while my grandmother played stride and honkytonk piano. In a sense, music was in the blood, it was in the bloodstream.

My grandmother, who was of Irish origin, just imbued such a love of rhythm and music in me. We used to play cards together at night. She taught me how to beat rhythms with the cards on the table. To hell with gin rummy, we were more into playing beats together.(laughs) It’s something I grew up with on my maternal side, and I’m very grateful for that.

Your mom seemed to have such an interesting career in musical theater. She worked with Joel Grey, correct?

I don’t think she worked with him. They met in that musical theater scene in downtown Cleveland, which was very vibrant at the time, and they started dating. The irony is that I ended up playing him as a drag king in cabaret with my drag queen friends as a young woman. (laughs)

It seems that musicals provide a through-line in the book, like how Maddie is constantly being forced to sing songs from “Oliver!” but never the songs that she wants to sing.

Oliver Twist in a way ties in with that that perspective of being orphaned, except that I never wanted to play victim. There are millions of abandoned kids all over this country. One thing I can say as an abandoned kid is that the last thing you ever want to do is treat a child like they’re pitiful, because pity is extremely shaming. Even though we can be feeling incredibly lost, many of us have resilience and we don’t want to be treated like a pitiful object. We need love and caring and compassion. To be pitied makes one feel ashamed, and it’s shaming enough for a child to have been thrown away by their parents.

It’s eye-opening reading the book in terms of how the how the kids are treated, and whether or not all that much has changed in those kinds of systems since then.

Unfortunately, there are good foster parents and there are really bad foster parents, and I think that continues to this day. It’s an overburdened system. People that work as counselors and caseworkers in that system are overburdened because there’s such a huge caseload. One of the main ideas in the book is that you have to imagine a new life. Everything starts with imagination. If you can imagine a new life for yourself, you can create a new life for yourself. If my mother had not imparted that to me, I don’t know where I’d be.

I’m probably being a little inarticulate, but I want to stress that even though there’s some really dark elements in this book, I think my searching for the light as a child and finding that light was the key to my survival. I could easily have been brought down by it all. It’s the curiosity of constantly searching for that light [that saved me], be it through the goodness in other people, through music, or through literature and poetry.

That seems to tie back to when you mentioned magical thinking before, and how important magical thinking was to you throughout your entire childhood.

And magical thinking gets a bad rap. (laughs) As I said, I’ve spent years and years in therapy. My therapist once said to me, “You know, magical thinking worked for you as a child, but if you bring a blown-up life raft into an elevator at William Morris, people are gonna think you’re nuts. (laughs) You have to grow up and understand how to be a part of a society without the defenses and the magical thinking of your childhood.” I agree with that to a certain extent, but I also believe in the power of visualization, creating what you want in your head, and then making that come true.

The book is also a queer coming of age book as you’re figuring out your identity. The last part of the book, when you’re working at the Salvation Army and going to the clubs is such a vibrant picture of queer life in the early 70s. Can you talk about how you approached portraying that time?

It was such an enchanted life that we had. We were outcasts in terms of society, but we really created a sense of family and celebration when we were in the clubs and when we were in our homes. Getting together with each other was—gosh, how do I explain it? It was very different than it is today. And I think that it’s important for LGBTQ+ people today to understand our history too. The time I’m writing about was a time when you could be murdered. I was beaten terribly for seeing another girl in junior high school. We went through hell for decades, which continued into AIDS activism, to fight for the right for LGBTQ people to be who they are today.

What are you working on musically right now?

I had such a very hard trajectory in music because of being an out lesbian. It was incredibly difficult in the 80s. Nobody was out when I was making music. Ellen DeGeneres wasn’t even out at that time. I encountered a lot of hostility after having been in the post-punk scene, where women were incredibly free and equal and could be whatever we wanted. There were no gender expectations on us whatsoever. Going into the commercial music business where it’s like “control control control the women,” it was not for me. I have had a lot of heartaches in the music business. It’s taken me a long time to want to reapproach and I’m doing it one song at a time. I recently released a very political song called “American Elegy.” I’m releasing another song that’s more on dance hit called “Savage As the Wolf,” which is coming out on piece biscuit records in April. So I’m doing it one song at a time, very tentatively.

And finally, what role that library has played in your life?

The Cleveland Public Library was a big escape for me. I would often go to the Cleveland Public Library downtown, which was an amazing place to hang out and just get lost in all of the different rooms. Because I didn’t go to university or study I always felt a bit like Jude the Obscure, you know, longing for Christminster. (laughs) The public library ended up being my place to feel like I was getting a proper education, not only because of the books but also the architecture and the feeling. It was the same feeling of being in a church. The air in a library is imbued with curiosity and knowledge and wisdom. I feel the same thing when I go into beautiful churches all over Europe, that idea that the actual air’s imbued with the holiness of people praying. Libraries have a very important place in my life.

The post Adele Bertei On Entering The Battle Zones Of Her Youth first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Where did you first get the idea of writing about a character like Danielle, a “hidden child?”

The idea started with my stepmother, who was a hidden child in World War II. She was a five-year-old Jewish girl in Hungary, and in the early days of the war, her mother took her down to a farm in the countryside and left her there with a family who had agreed to take her in. She needed to present as a little Catholic orphan. They changed her name, they taught her the Catholic prayers, and they warned her, “Don’t talk to the police and don’t ever cry.” I learned that when I was about twelve-years-old, Danielle’s age when the novel starts. That just struck me as an extraordinary experience. I wanted to write a story about it, [although] I want to be clear, this not my stepmother’s story at all. I changed the age of my character to twelve, which I felt would allow me a little more complexity. I feel that age is already such a time when identity is still forming. To take an adolescent and put them into a situation where now they have to take on this other identity struck me as a really interesting psychological experience.

We see Danielle progress from a fairly sheltered and innocent adolescent in Paris to someone who fully embraces the antisemitic propaganda the government produces. What was it like writing from the perspective of an adolescent and teenage girl?

I think I tapped a little bit into my own experience as a twelve-year-old, to start with. I wanted to start Danielle as a rather sophisticated, cosmopolitan, secular, rather spoiled twelve-year-old girl who is thrown into this situation. The paradox that happens over the course of the novel is, in many ways, she becomes a better person. She becomes more generous, more giving, more loving, and more selfless as she bonds with this “adoptive” family and matures into a fourteen and fifteen-year-old under the extraordinary experiences of the war. But at the same time, the antisemitic, fascist, and extremist ideologies of the time have a really insidious influence on her still-developing psyche, especially because the stakes are so high. She really is told if she can’t inhabit this new personality as a good little Catholic orphan, everyone is going to get killed because of her. I was interested in the idea of her getting lost in this new identity, buying in to the warped psyche of the time, and—this is a cliched phrase—swallowing the Kool-Aid. France was undergoing a very similar split identity where, as this all was happening, half of France wanted to resist and created the anti-Nazi resistance. Yet the other half of France, especially in the early days of the war, went along with the Vichy idea of collaboration, that the only way we are going to survive is becoming friends with German Nazi regime and doing what they want. I think that is reflected in Danielle also, that split of identity.

In Danielle’s new village, we meet many characters who fully support, or are at least curious about, the beliefs of the Nazi party. How did you approach creating these characters?

The novel is in third person, but I really wanted us limited to what was going on in Danielle’s head and her perspective. I really wanted the reader to stay deep in her perspective. But the other characters—it was uncomfortable. I’m Jewish, but I’ve always been very privileged. I don’t feel like I’ve ever experienced anti-Semitism. It was very uncomfortable for me to get into the mindset of people who embraced this kind of ideology. I’ve always been able to stay on the outside of it. For me, the secret to it was to really get inside of the epigraph to the novel, which is the quote from Solzhenitzin, and I’m paraphrasing, “to do evil a person first has to believe they are doing good.” I had to find the emotional logic behind the characters thinking. For the characters who embraced anti-Semitic, fascist extremist ideology, I had to come at it from the perspective of why they thought that was honorable. Why did they think that was in the service of a public interest and the good? Again it was very uncomfortable to get myself to that place. I didn’t want to simply parrot the kind of propaganda that was out in the world at the time and unfortunately is rising in the world again. I didn’t want to just take the slogans, I didn’t want to just take the fascist, Anti-Semitic talking points. I wanted to really understand why these characters felt that they were doing good.

So many of the characters surprise the reader. Not only Danielle is going through these huge changes, but everyone else in the village is going through big changes as well. What went into crafting the book in terms of tracking those people’s changes through Danielle’s eyes?

I think, initially, we can take [her adoptive brother] Luke at face value. He is a fourteen, fifteen-year-old boy, an only child, and here comes this twelve-year-old intruder into his house. He has an anti-Semitic mindset. He resents, I think, both the danger he feels she is putting the family in, but he’s still a boy himself. I think he resents her taking attention away from him. [Luke’s mother] Gert is so happy to have a little girl and I think he very much resents that. I think Luke’s arc is very, very personal. Initially he so wants his parents to be proud of him. He so wants to be a grown-up man. The antisemitic fascist propaganda is a way for him to prove his manhood in his eyes, go along with what his father says, and make his father proud of him. But his core conflict happens before the novel begins. We don’t learn this for quite some time, when he met Genevieve, another little twelve-year-old girl in the village. She’s such a symbol to him of goodness, beauty, and hope. He’s so drawn to her, but now he’s in conflict. I don’t want to spoil anything, but Genevieve is a girl who he’s not supposed to be associating with. I think that his arc becomes very, very personal. I don’t think it’s initially ideological for him in the true way. I think this is true for adolescents, it’s through relationships that children—and a lot of adults—change their perspective.

You give the reader such a tactile experience of the day to day life in a French village during the war. Can you talk about your research process?

What the sunflower stalks looked like and what kind of jam they made. I have been working on this book for twenty-five years, which included obviously a massive amount of research. I was slightly familiar with France and French culture when I began because I spent a year in France as a student on a Rotary scholarship. I’ve always loved the country. I’ve always felt an affinity for France.

My research was very comprehensive. Obviously it starts with books. Also movies, documentaries, articles, so much traditional scholarly type research. I was fortunate enough to be able to make several trips to France, which gave me access to a lot of other research materials: museums, archives, monuments, libraries, bookstores. At the same time, I allowed it to be experiential, not informational. I traveled down to the area and was trying to decide where in France to set the novel. At one point, I was traveling with a friend down to Limoges. We had a car and we traveled around to some of the local villages. It felt right. It felt right geopolitically, in that it was initially part of the free zone or the unoccupied zone, but then later became occupied. It’s beautiful, for one thing, but of course all of France is very, very beautiful. I spent as much time as I could just listening to the sounds, looking at the cobblestones, smelling the air. What did the withering sunflower stalks look like? Sitting outside in a café in a small village and listening. Do I hear music? Do I hear the sound of footsteps? Do I hear someone singing? Do I hear people talking? I think those sensual details—what is my character tasting, touching, hearing, feeling—are so critical, because otherwise it’s a history book, it’s a documentary. One of my all-time favorite quotes is by E. L. Doctorow, who said. “The historian will tell you what happened, the novelist will tell you what it felt like.” That has always, as a fiction writer who loves doing research, resonated with me.

So many of the reviews have talked about how timely the novel is, especially with the rise of far-right ideologies. What was it like writing this book and then realizing so many of its themes resonate so strongly today?

When I started writing this book, I never set out to write a political book. I was interested in the psychological transformation of the character. I would work on the book, put it down for a while, work on another project, pick it up again, and then put it down. I picked it up again probably five or six years ago. I hadn’t looked at it for maybe a year or two and was shocked at how characters in  the novel are saying things that I’m hearing on the news now. [The characters were] saying things and reading articles in the newspapers that feel like virtually the same articles being published right now. It was disheartening, disturbing. At the same time, it was extra motivation to finish this book and get it out in the world, because we aren’t learning our lessons. My tools as a writer are stories. I felt extra motivated that this book and what this book was exploring—basically how to turn people into fascists—I felt that I had an obligation and a responsibility to finish this book and get it out in the world. Will it change one mind? Will it illuminate anything for anybody? I don’t know. But as a novelist, that’s what I can do. I can try.

You have a lot of moments of hope in the book. Can you talk about where you decided to end Danielle’s story?

I thought about that a lot. At one point, I thought about doing a bookend device, but I decided not to do that. I wanted to stay in the moment, but it was tricky to find the right balance. If her “epiphany” was too strong that can feel, I think, very false. To have a character suddenly become again a new person, after we have spent three hundred pages watching her transform into a certain kind of person, would have felt very false to completely change her back again. I did feel it was important to end the novel with a glimmer of light and a glimmer of hope. [I wanted to] create the feeling that this is the very first step in what is going to be a very long road for Danielle to rediscover who she is, what she believes, and what is good and what is evil. I just wanted to open the door and let in a beam of light where we know she understands that this has to be the beginning of a new identity. She’s no longer Danielle, but she also knows that she cannot continue to be Marie-Jeanne. Also, I think her awakening has a lot to do with her personal relationships. When she starts to truly understand the effects of some of her actions on people she has had an intimacy with, I think that’s a critical step towards her being able to look at things with a different perspective and come to a new understanding of how she now has to change. She doesn’t know how. She has no idea how to start a new life, to recreate herself, but she knows she has to try.

I want to believe in hope. Especially right now, in this moment, I want to believe that positive change is possible. I want to believe—again a cliché—in the goodness in people’s hearts. She’s not Anne Frank. I’ve joked a little bit that in a way she’s the anti-Anne Frank. Although now there’s some controversy about this interpretation, but Anne Frank seems to have held on to her belief in the goodness of people throughout everything she suffered. That’s not who Danielle is. She thinks that’s who she is, but she’s the opposite of that. Danielle has to learn what Anne Frank knew in her heart all along.

Finally, what role has the library played in your life?

First of all, thank you librarians for all you do. When I was a kid I was fortunate that my parents were readers and encouraged me as a reader. There was a public library a couple of miles away from my house on a main street that went from my junior high school. I could take the bus after school. I don’t know how often I did this, at least once a week. I was maybe ten, eleven, twelve-years-old. I would take the bus to my local public library and turn in the books that I had read and check out the new books. I’ll never forget the smell of that library and how that opened these other worlds and other experiences to me. I felt from a young age the library allowed me to understand that there are other people in the world, you know? And other stories and other histories and other experiences. I will forever be grateful for that. As I’ve gotten older, I purchase books when I can, but wherever I’ve lived I’ve taken out a membership to my local public library. Obviously now as a professor I have access to my university’s library system, but I’m still a member of the local community library, who finds books for me. It’s so critical, even in the age of the internet. That’s great, but there’s nothing like the smell of the library. There’s nothing like the smell of a book in your hand. I don’t think this is a luxury for people, I think it’s part of what makes us human.

The post Tara Ison On Finding The Emotional Logic Beneath Her Characters first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

You write a lot about your great grandmother Cillie, and at one point you write, “like the other mothers in my life, Cillie modeled for me how to make a way out of no way.” Can you talk about what you learned from Cillie as a parent?

She was someone who I always felt just a very strong sense of unconditional love. Her home, her style—everything was so graceful. As a kid, I found her house to be this magical place and found her to be just seamlessly kind. It’s only later, as I’ve grown up and gotten older, that I learned about her struggles to hang on to the house, the kinds of ways that even her migration from New Orleans to Chicago has these kind of unspoken tensions that were probably racialized and also about class. What I learned from her was, first of all, the importance of always providing this sense of being loved and also liked by an elder,  the importance of really investing energy and smarts into providing a home. Also, that home can be not just for the people who are immediately around you, but also for the folks who are coming from the South or folks in the family when people were down and out. I didn’t feel or see the labor that it took and that was a real grace, in terms of being a child and not being aware of the work that it took to provide that. So part of that “making a way out of no way” was her creating this sense of abundance and stability that actually was a group effort.

I’ve learned that, as a parent, I haven’t been able to completely follow that role, because part of being a parent is also just being more of a human being with flaws. I think because she was my great-grandmother, we saw her several times a year, but we weren’t in her household all the time. She provided a kind of dream space of possibility for me. As a parent, I’ve really tried to create that lovingness and stability, but also I’m more willing to show the human side. If I’m struggling, I try to talk about that with [my daughter] Cece.

I think what was just so great about Cillie, too, is just her sense of confidence. When I’m reading about Black women’s history, in some histories there’s sort of a sense of only the struggle, but not always of the confidence and the grace. That’s something that sometimes gets left out when historians are trying to map the difficulties of living in this country, especially during the era that she was alive.

When you discuss your grandmother, Gwendolyn, you write about how you envision her when you write and that you write what you imagine she would want to read. Can you talk more about her?

She was someone who she always called me her twin, which was pretty wonderful. I have an old picture of her, which is from before I was born, I think it was my mom’s high school graduation. She has this really winsome, almost sort of spacey look. She was someone who really struggled from day to day. She dealt with poverty, had a household of kids, and was really a hard worker. But in this particular photo, you can really see on her face that she has this kind of creativity and winsomeness that I sometimes feel in myself too.

When I write, I think about the fact that she loved to tell stories. She loved knowing facts, and she was just hungry for information. The fact that she sometimes stole or liberated books from the school that she cleaned was indicative of the person that she was. She was always just trying to find information wherever she was, like watching PBS, clipping things from the newspaper, or vigilantly reading her Reader’s Digest. She was just hungry for information. I think about who she could have been if she had been born at a different time and under different circumstances. She was an intellectual, and maybe what Robin D.G Kelley calls “organic intellectuals.” She was really someone who loved to think about and share ideas. She was very creative and imaginative, but just by being in her house, I was also aware of how sometimes that space to create wasn’t one that she was allowed.

When I write—and this is also coming from my training as an academic and trying to change my own language to make it more accessible and more direct—I think about people like my grandmother, who was a wonderful and unique person and part of a community of people who were intelligent, excited, and imaginative. I think about how could I write and tell stories where they would see themselves? I really wanted my grandmother to have a story where she could see herself. She isn’t with us now, but she was alive for my first book, which was Becoming Cleopatra. I was still learning how to write, but I wish I had written more directly then for her to read. I did some interviews with her before she passed away. I’m really glad that I got some of those stories, but it would have been great to have them in print for her. I wish that I had, because I know she loved books and really valued writing and publishing things.

Were the interviews part of something for a project or was that just something for you?

That actually got me going for this project. I had the idea of writing about my great grandmother’s house, about the idea of home and the house with the boarders. When I was interviewing my dad, I was expanding that idea to also think about making a home. I wasn’t sure what form it would be. I’d taken a film class and I thought maybe I would make it a film. I interviewed him on video and made a short film, but it was hampered by the fact that Cillie’s house had already been torn down. A lot of the places in the neighborhood were gone, even from my own childhood. I think that working on that project primed me for writing this book. Some of the early drafts of chapters about my grandmother and also about Cillie were part of me thinking through what that could look like. As I started thinking of myself as a mother, I realized that this is where these stories can go and that this is part of the same story. So the film that never was, the oral history, turned into this book. (laughs)

You write so movingly about how you and your wife have formed your queer life and how that isn’t necessarily reflected in how pop culture presents queer life. Can you can you talk about that?

Absolutely. Especially in my early single days, I was a big fan of “The L Word,” and growing up, “Tales Of The City.” [It started me] thinking about the idea of LGBTQ life partly as reinventing yourself or distancing yourself from family, or just seeing yourself as more singular. I think that, despite the fact that “The L Word” revolves around these characters who are connected in some ways, the warmth of everyday life that I was feeling, especially in my present day community, just wasn’t really reflected. I think about the fantasy of going to search for your community and your life somewhere else, like going to Oz or San Francisco. At different points in my life, I’ve attempted that as well. But really, what I ran into was the inescapability of reconciling [with family]. I mean, not everybody is able to reconcile with their blood family or to find models of how they want to be. I totally get the privilege of that, but I also feel like who I am was shaped by that history and I have these loving examples. So my own strategy has been to see myself as a product of these “making a way out of no way” people, including the women, as well as the product of struggle. Those are the things that I value: loyalty, making a home, hospitality, generosity, a kind of fluidity of space, and a kind of tenuous hold on property. We definitely own property, we own our house. (laughs) But just the idea that that’s not the end all and be all, but rather to see it as a way of helping create a place of welcome for other people. Those are things that I learned really from my own family.

I hadn’t seen images where people are really thinking multi-generationally about their queerness and thinking about how it can look different. I think also that the dominant images are mostly white images. There are a few examples, like “Noah’s Ark” and “Pose,” but especially the images of [LGBTQ] women are predominantly white, with some exceptions. Also this idea that you earn your visibility in our culture by being financially successful as defined by these particular terms and being heteronormative, being as close to the nuclear family as you can be.

Annie’s also coming from a family experience that’s not as positive at all times and definitely had some conflict. Her struggle to make peace with her family and to keep relationships with them was a lot of work. That also was really inspiring to me and made it all the more important that the family that we would create with Cece would be one where our blood family could be included. [It would be one where] we would try to bring together chosen family and blood family—even if it’s not completely seamless at all times—and try to integrate everybody. That’s what we’ve tried to do.

I was really fascinated by your writing about your mom, who probably wouldn’t have self-identified as queer, but she nevertheless created and cultivated a queer family of her own. Can you talk about that?

I would love to talk about that because my mom [introduced] the idea of total acceptance of lots of different kinds of people and ways of being in the world. That has always been true of her. She got involved in a church in her neighborhood, what is now known as Boys Town, that had a really strong AIDS ministry. I think she actually chose it and got involved in the ministry because her best friend had passed away from AIDS. She really committed to doing whatever she could to bring consciousness and support people and be a source of love and connection. It was really in the air, and also part of the fabric of her church and neighborhood, to be involved in gay life.

What was a revelation to me as I was thinking about making family is the way that I thought of my mom more as like a friend of gay men, but not as part of a family where she is an equal participant in this culture. Part of the language of chosen family really allows for all these different roles. It’s a little different than the image of the “’F-word’ hag.” I don’t want say the word, but you know what I mean? That was the image that might have been operating in the 80s into the 90s when she was doing that work, but I think the image of chosen family is much more allowing for a different formation of connection and ways where she was really central. That was consistent with my mother throughout our lives, that she had lots of different kinds of friends. She was often a mother figure or sister figure to her friends. She was very familial with folks that she worked with or other friends that she met through her activism, and really liked bringing them in, bringing them home. That model of making your friends and your co-workers your family is something that I can remember from the beginning..

She had this group of friends who were also her co-workers. They called themselves “The Raiders” and they would go to reggae clubs in Wrigleyville. They had a Christmas jammie party where they would like stay over and it was really very fun. It’s also just freeing to know that my mom had fun, even as a mother. Sometimes her role was to give advice and to help solve problems, but she also listened to music with her friends and hung out.

One thing that I was really struck by was how you were conscious of giving space for your daughter to tell her own story. Can you talk about like your mindset was as you embarked on this project?

Sure, absolutely. Thinking about the film and my great grandmother’s household, I had been wanting to write about family for a while. Then the experience of becoming a mother was so intense. Sometimes I didn’t know what to do with just the anticipation and also processing the fact that this is a child that another family has lost. We’re gaining this wonderful kid, but I know also that there’s a family that doesn’t have her in a direct way in their lives anymore. That’s a really difficult thing. Just figuring out mothering, what to take and what to leave behind in terms of my own family, working as a team [with Annie], all of those things, I needed a way to document it. The process of writing it down helped me deal with the intensity of the feelings of it, so I started writing. First, just journaling, but also writing things down so I could figure it out. My writing group, which is still my writing group and had been my writing group before we embarked on parenthood, is made up of people who are mostly my age and a little older. Most of them have raised children. As I was writing—and I might not have been doing it consciously—I would share drafts of things and get advice. It just felt less alone to think about things.

Some of the things that I write about are also really joyous. In the same way that I’m a compulsive picture taker—especially when Cece was young—I had to actually slow down, because I was missing things because I was so busy trying to take pictures. I just wanted to document that joy and try to slow it down a little bit. So the space of the page has been helpful for me to reflect, think about my feelings, and also come to terms with some of the difficulties and the struggles of being a mother and adoption as well. So yeah, I think I moved from writing, telling stories—sort of to figure them out—to connecting them to things I was writing, and realizing that I could make a connected story about the different generations and home and struggle.

And finally, what role has the library played in your life?

A huge role, for sure. I am a library nerd.  I was kind of raised in the library because my mom’s first job was as a librarian at a community center. When we were in Nashville, there was a community center that also had books, but they were books that people could take and not necessarily give back. It was called Read and Rap. My sister and I would hang out there after school. I got the idea from there that books were there for the taking—I still haven’t quite gotten used to that. (laughs) So libraries have been really important. I think the Read and Rap experience not only gave me a sense of the plenitude of books that are there for me, but also that there’s a social justice part of creating a space for everyone to be welcome and to be part of the library. That was definitely the idea behind Read and Rap, that there were different kinds of learning—including books—that took place there: games, conversations. I’ve never quite shaken the idea that a library is an important part of a community and that often books are a way in to talking about what kinds of things that people care about the most.

A lot of this book was written in the library. Because our lives are so busy, the library on campus was a place that Annie and I would often meet before our days would get started, after we dropped off Cece. We would write together sometimes with another friend of ours, Julie. We called it “The Library Club.”  We would just go and sit with our computers and write. My experience post-motherhood has been a sense of urgency about writing, but also that I had to be more strategic about finding the quiet time to do it. Sometimes that means leaving the house and making an appointment, so the library has helped me out a lot with that as well.

The post Francesca T. Royster On The Joys of Chosen Family first appeared on Public Libraries Online.