Sarah-Jane Stratford On Writing About The Hollywood Blacklist & The Red Scare

Mindy:

Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. 

Today's guest is Sarah Jane Stratford. Her first novel, Radio Girls, was based on the early days of the BBC and its pioneering talks producer, Hilda Matheson. Red Letter Days, her newest novel, continues that tradition by similarly highlighting a little known but influential woman in media set during the 19 fifties Red Scare and inspired by the real life TV producer Hannah Weinstein, Red Letter Days reveals the untold story of women who escaped the Hollywood blacklist. Sarah joined me today to talk about the inspiration for Red Letter Days and the research involved in writing about the Red Scare.

Mindy:

So your new book is called Red Letter Days, and it is all about the 1950s red scare and talks a bit about how it affected women, particularly on the Hollywood blacklist, which we've known and heard many stories about men in Hollywood who fell victim to the red scare. But as with all topics, we hear much, much less about the women. And so your new book is inspired in many ways by Hannah Weinstein. So if you would talk a little bit about who Hannah was and then also about how you came across the concept for the book and how Hannah's story drew you in, that would be great.  

Sarah-Jane: 

I love your introduction because that is exactly how I approach almost all my work. And even back when I was a student of history, it was always my question is  - whose stories are not being told? And inevitably, it was always the stories of women, stories of more marginalized people, and that was what I was naturally more drawn to. So, yeah, the case of Hannah Weinstein. She's this extraordinary woman who just deserves so much more recognition. She had initially been a fairly firebrand liberal journalist. She was a speechwriter. She worked for mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in New York, very staunch liberal, and she sort of saw which way the winds were blowing post war as the House UN American Activities Committee, it really was finding its feet. And she decamped from the US fairly early and completely reinvented herself as a producer. Came to a point where she was able to set up her own production company. And the first major program that the company produced was The Adventures of Robin Hood, which began in 1955. It's a wonderful program, it actually still really holds up. But at the time, there were a lot of people who talked about how well shot it was and how wonderful the scripts were. 

Well, behind the scenes, the reasons scripts were so wonderful is because every single one of them was written by a blacklisted writer and including it's the chief writer was Ring Lardner Jr. Who had won an Oscar for his script for Woman of the Year. He's famous if people know much about some of the Hollywood Ten's testimony before Congress. So he was one of the Hollywood 10 and when he was asked the famous question, Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? he answered. Well, I could answer the question as you'd like me to. But I'd hate myself in the morning." 

Which is a wonderful quote, they cited him for contempt of Congress, and he went to prison, as many of the Hollywood 10 did. He was very grateful to Hannah and helped get a lot of other writers in touch with her. Um and yes. So for the several years that Robin Hood ran, it was always scripted by blacklisted writers. You know, she was determined to try and keep people's careers going at great risk to herself. If the operation had been uncovered, she certainly would have faced extradition on prison. 

Mindy: 

So she was doing this work then from London. Is that correct?

Sarah-Jane:

Yes, that's correct. The company she ran was called Sapphire Films. It was based here in London. 

Mindy:

I know that your first book called Radio Girls, was about the early days of the BBC and a woman named Hilda Matheson. So did you come across information that led you to Hannah's story while you were working on Radio Girls?  

Sarah-Jane:

No, not at all. Although it is kind of funny. First book is radio second book is television, right? It's rather unintentional, but I kind of like the way it shook out. Um, no, look, I do love me some bad ass women. So that's that connection. But no, really, what led me to Red Letter Days was immediately following the 2016 election, I was despondent, and and I got to thinking about America and American history and American mythology about itself. There's just certain things, certain stories that as Americans here, we will believe about ourselves. And you know who we are, who we've always been. And of course, you know you don't need to poke at it too hard to find all the holes. 

It got me thinking about the blacklist, which was something I do as a historian, as a cultural historian. And and it did strike me as as having some interesting potential parallels which, actually at the time thought could happen. And of course, increasingly they have been happening. I mean, it's only in the past couple of weeks that have been talk of purges from the government, which was certainly something that happened during the red scare. People were on lists. It is interesting how little does change. 

But initially I was thinking about how The Red Scare came about a large part out of fear. And then that fear was used to suppress voices of liberalism, voices of dissent, and how once that began it was very easy to spiral. And of course you know so many of us when we we think about it, we do think about what happened in Hollywood, but in fact the red scare cast a very wide net. Teachers, journalists, union members, activists. The NAACP was very widely targeted. It was very far reaching and of course, what was most effective really was the climate of fear, and that was very long lasting. It was interesting. I went back and I was looking at a contemporary footage and things. And when they were attempting to desegregate schools in the south, Ah, lot of the anti desegregation forces were carrying signs saying, No Communists. That was just always that correlation. You know that that remained the idea, you know, through the fifties and well into the sixties and really still today.

Mindy:

Fear is how you control people. There's no doubt. 

Sarah-Jane: 

Absolutely.

Mindy: 

I wanted to follow up with you about when you're writing fiction that is based on a real person. In the case of Red Letter Days, Hannah Weinstein, your main character, though, is only based on her. It is not actually Hannah your main character's last name is Wolfson in the book. So how do you as a writer then blur those lines between fiction and history and reality? 

Sarah-Jane:

You know, it's a little different each time and to a certain extent, as I developed the character and think about the character, I let the character kind of go forge their path. In the case of Hannah, as I was working on it, I realized for the sake of my story, I was just going to make a lot of changes and suppositions. It just felt much more natural to have her be an inspiration, rather than try and write something that skewed a little more biographical.

You know at the end of the day, I'm a fiction writer I'm not a biographer. I do think a very good biography of her needs to exist, at the same time, I'm much more about the drama. It worked better to have her be slightly more fictionalized. Now, though, there were various and sundry little details about her life that it just wasn't going to work for my narrative, particularly as I created this wholly fictional character with whom she interacts. And it was the other main character of the book. It just worked out better. But yeah, each time is a little bit different. I I try not to have and a sort of a set formula. I don't like to put myself in a box. 

Mindy:

Coming up, the challenge of basing a fictional character on a real person and the lasting repercussions of the Red Scare.  

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Mindy:

Any time you're writing a historical novel, obviously you have to do research of some type. Everything has an element that perhaps you don't even consider. So, for example, I have written a novel. It's not published, but I've written a novel that takes place in 1918 and I have a woman falling down some steps and she loses consciousness, and at one point you know people are running over to her and I have her shoe, like, falling down a couple of steps below her. And then I got to thinking about it. I'm like, Well, wait a minute. What do her shoes look like? Could they even come off? And you know I did some research and it's like, no, her shoes probably were buckled up. Um, and more than likely could not have come off of her feet when she fell down the stairs. So that was something that just this tiny scene in this little visual of this shoe sitting there without a foot in it could that actually happen? Were there any scenes like that? Any small moments where you were like, Wait, I have to go do some research on some surprising thing that I just did not expect to pop up. 

Sarah-Jane: 

It's funny because yes, so many. And then I have to stop and think, Oh, yeah, but what were they exactly? For me, research is sort of the most fun and and yet also, in many ways, the most frustrating. Because you get an idea and you love it. And then you realize that actually wouldn't happen. Curses, curses. And it tends to be less so for me these days than not, only because I do so much research before that. By the time I sit down to writing sort of more or less feel fairly comfortable with the trappings of the daily lives, those should move along pretty well. I mean, there were definitely little things. At some point in an earlier draft. I had Hannah when she was still in the states, she was in, ah, particular press club and that it was only later that I realized Oh, wait, it hadn't yet opened its doors to women by this particular time. So it would be little things like that and and of course, it evidently, by the way, you always end up some mistake, always sneaks through. And then some reader, you know, will email you and say, I love the book. You know, you made this little mistake. Ugh! Rats! 

Mindy:

Yeah. That's why I don't I enjoy writing historical fiction. If I can get away with it, I never set my story anywhere that is real. Like, Obviously you have a particular story. But I always set it somewhere else because inevitably, you have people saying like Well, you have this street running north south that actually runs west east and I'm like I don't care. It doesn't matter. That doesn't affect the story, right? But they want to tell you that you're wrong. And so I very much I will write by the facts right up until it becomes arbitrary. 

Sarah-Jane:

Oh, completely. And Peter Morgan, who wrote Frost Nixon and the Queen and other such stories. Yeah, I once went to a talk he was giving, and he said he in fact, writes the story first and then goes back, does the research. Yeah, which I thought was amazing. And I queried it, actually. But he said, You know, really, the drama must take precedence over the history, and I guess so. And I and I respect that.

Mindy:

Absolutely. So same vein - did you have any assumptions that you, any preconceived notions that you were hoping to use or some element of the story? Or just as I said any any thoughts ahead of time that when you dove into your research, you found contradicts history? Did you have any assumptions that were erroneous about the time period, I guess, Or the story itself? 

Sarah-Jane:

Not so much erroneous. It's more that certain things were surprising about some of the details of what was going on, how people were persecuted by the FBI. I guess vis a vis things like phone tapping. I got a lot of my assumptions about that based on film and television, and so I thought, Okay, well, it must be a certain sort of way. And what I was not expecting was that it was actually absolutely bonkers. You could have a situation whereby so if you had more than one phone, but all the same line, one would ring. But then the other would ring a few seconds later. And it would really clue you in that actually something was amiss. 

And then it would get odder than that. You might answer the phone and nobody would be there, which more or less tracked with what I assumed might be the case. But what did often happen was that you would answer the phone and what you would hear was a recording of one of your very own conversations that might have happened, like a few days or a few weeks, or even further back than that. And, of course, what I thought was Well, now wait a minute, if someone would obviously pick up that their phone was being seriously interfered with. And that's when it hit me. Well, yes, of course. And that's the point. Yeah, because it comes back to what we said before. It's about the fear. 

Mindy:

Yeah, so they wanted people to know. 

Sarah-Jane:

Exactly. That's how your silence, people. That's how you get people from continuing to live comfortable lives, you know? But, I mean, if if someone is always looking behind them about themselves, that they can't be looking forward, you know people are less likely to continue to be activists or engaged with any level of society. If if they're now that nervous about what may be going on, it was an eye opener. 

Mindy:

That's fascinating. So fleeing to London, then she still suffered persecution. Wiretapping. Intimidation, things like this. So I have to say I personally don't know much about McCarthy era outside of the U. S. So, like, how would that work? Were British forces doing this? Was this the FBI. 

Sarah-Jane: 

Well, this was the FBI, and it's interesting. I mean, I was thrown. That was another thing that that really stunned me when I read it. But most European governments found the whole concept of the blacklist ridiculous. And even though they themselves were not exactly pro Communist, neither did they agree with what was going on in America. And to the extent they could, they did try to protect people, but things would happen. The American Embassy would send out erroneous notifications to Americans abroad, saying, Oh, you have to come to the embassy and bring your passport. We need to check it for something or other in the hopes that they would indeed come, and then their passport would be sequestered. And even if perhaps there was not grounds to arrest them, they would effectively find themselves stateless. So various and sundry things like that were going on, and it was pretty shocking. But the British government, to its great credit, really did try and help people as much as it possibly could, but also people really had to help each other.  

Mindy: 

What's interesting to me is that, of course, the 1950s was not all that long ago, and I remember 10, 15 years ago now, when Elia Kazan was given the Lifetime Recognition Award by the ah, by the Oscar by the Academy. And I was pretty young when it happened. I used to follow film really closely, and I remember watching that year and the camera pan the audience and there were quite a few actors that were not applauding and were not standing up and were refusing to participate, and I didn't understand why. And I ended up like asking my mother, and she explained a little bit about how he was one of the people that was giving up names and, uh, reporting on other people in film and then was rewarded for that with some of these roles that he was being recognized for. It was so interesting to me because, like I said, I was pretty young and I had no concept of the blacklist and McCarthy era like it meant nothing to me. And then here, you know, 40 years later, there were still repercussions, and there were people who were refusing to participate in the celebration of this person. 

Sarah-Jane:

Oh, absolutely. He was widely unforgiven, in large part because it was generally believed that he didn't have to do what he did, right? Whether that's true or not, I don't know. But indeed, the fact remains that he decided to name names and his career absolutely soared, whereas many others who were certainly just as talented and capable as he saw their careers ruined forever. It's a complicated question. I mean, it's interesting, because a large part of my research, I read memoirs. A lot of people were fairly philosophical about those who named names, saying, You know, it's difficult because obviously not everyone had the same opportunities and comforts as others. So whereas there were some who you had some other resources and could manage, there were others who were really caught. You know, if they had young Children or, perhaps elderly relatives, all of whom were relying upon them.  

And they could get philosophical themselves and saying the names are already known. So what difference does it make if I named them? Which, by the way, was true. So they went ahead and did it for the sake of their livelihood. And yeah, and and years later, there some who were able to say, well, it wasn't the choice I made, but I understand it and others who said, you know if we'd all stuck together. But who knows? It's complicated. That's why the playwright Lillian Hellman you called her memoir of the period Scoundrel Time. So many people were indeed scoundrels, but they were made to be by a situation that, you know, forced this upon them.  

Mindy:

Yes, and it's It's very difficult to put yourself in that type of situation. A lot of people - I work with high schoolers. I worked in a high school for about 15 years, and God bless them. I love their youth and their courage. But most often they haven't had enough experience yet in the world to understand a complex situation like that. Most of them, not all by far. but very often and with younger people and some naive adults too, saying things, they'll go, well, if that would've happened to me, I would have done this or I would have done that. It's like, No, you don't know what you would have done. You do not know until you're there. You cannot say with any type of conviction how you were going to perform or behave in a high stress situation until you are in it.

Sarah-Jane:

Oh, no, completely. And you know, these people's lives were just being intruded upon every day. They knew that they were being followed by FBI agents, and they knew that, you know everything they did, you know, and any any research they did in the library, the post they were receiving you, even even the groceries they were shopping for. They knew that all of it was being scrutinized. It is very difficult to live under after a while. Yeah, it's very grating of it's no wonder relationships fell apart. You know, there were schisms between children and parents, whole families where, there were whole groups of families who you know, really never spoke to each other again. It has is very, very complicated.  

Mindy:

It is complicated, complicated situation, and it's something that I see, you know, the same dynamics are at work in different areas, always. I mean, there are different parts of the world in different time periods where there are those who have the power and then those with less power and the people that are speaking out, and the people that are trying to squelch their voices, and it's always... it's the same dynamic. We're just wearing different hats, I think. 

Sarah-Jane:

No, completely, completely. And that was certainly something I had at the back of my mind whilst I was writing, and that's something I was hoping to put across. History is never really that far away. We always do need to think about what's come before, what's happening now and how could we apply it? And what can we try to do to do better this time around because that's the one thing that history does give us. It does give, you know, we have the opportunity to do better.

Mindy:

Very much, very much. Well, and that's when my students are saying things like, Well, this is what I would have done, you know, if the Nazis came for me and I'm like, Well, hey, you might get your chance. 

Sarah-Jane:

Yeah, fantastic.

Mindy:

Last thing. Why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can purchase the book.

Sarah-Jane:

Well, of course, I always say, please purchase from your local independent bookshop. We love our independent bookshops. For people who happen to be listening. right now, we haven't discussed it but you know, we are in in the middle of dealing with the Corona virus. And of course, not a lot of people are going out shopping. But it is a good time, particularly now to try and support independent businesses. Many independent bookshops will do online orders or even in person deliveries. You know, you just need to call and ask. That would be wonderful. Got to support our local businesses. Um, as for me, I have websites. Sarah janestratford dot com I am on Instagram at Sarah Jane Stratford, Twitter at Stratford S. J., Facebook, Where all else? The book is also available from the libraries. We also we do love our libraries. 

Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.

Tom Lutz on The Constantly Changing Landscape of Publishing

Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. 

Today's guest is Tom Lutz, editor in chief of the l. A Review of Books, a non profit dedicated to promoting writing about literature, culture and the arts. Tom teaches creative writing at the University of California in Riverside and is on a quest to visit every country in the world. 135 down, only 60 to go. Tom has dovetailed his wanderlust and passion for writing into seven nonfiction books, some on travel one on the history of slackers, another on the history of tears. His first crime novel, Born Slippy, was published in January. Tom joined me today to talk about some of the monumental changes he's seen in publishing during this decade as well as how global trade and politics affects every day artists.  

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Mindy: You're the editor in chief of the L. A Review of Books, as well as being a creative writing teacher at the University of California and a novelist yourself. So you have been in the publishing industry ins and outs for a while. My listeners are mostly made up of aspiring writers and also some published authors, so a lot of them are really interested in hearing about the industry, in general. You've been around and seen things come and go, so if you could just talk a little bit about the industry in general, where it's been where it is now and where it could be going.  

Tom: I should preface it by saying, Nobody knows anything and that includes me. It's a, uh it's an industry where things have been changing very fast for a long time. For a couple of decades now, things have been changing very regularly and very quickly. Whatever one guesses about the way things are today, they're going to be different again tomorrow. So with that caveat, obviously the big change in our lifetimes is the e emergence of Amazon as the dominant player in book distribution. What happened when that happened, is that they kind of made their mark in the world by offering books at a much lower prices than anyone else. That helped put the big chains out of business. It put a lot of small book stores out of business, help squeeze publishers profits quite a bit. They require publishers to give them a bigger discount than other distributors have in the past.

Now that I'm also a publisher, we LARB publishes books. Now we are putting out six or seven books, a year and once every couple of months. I get a notice from Amazon that the amendment they're gonna pay me for book dipping down a couple more pennies. Its a couple more pennies each never a big change. But it's always a change in their favor, and that has made everything tougher for publishers. Publishing was always a tough business to be in. Imagine if you were selling pants, just clothing stores, clothing store bought the pants and they could, at any point up for years could just send you back any of the pants that they didn't manage to sell and expect full price in return. And have you pay the shipping in both directions. So it's a very strange business to begin with, different than any other business.  

Tom: And it's always been tough for publishers to make a living. Amazon has changed the margins, and the margins were never very large. It's a tougher and tougher business for publishers to survive in, and one of the ways I think publishers have done it is by, like movie studios, relying more and more on blockbusters. If they can kind of always be looking for blockbusters. Used to be that a prestige publisher would have the majority of their list being books that the editors really cared about and a couple of books each year that would sell more copies than anything else, but maybe were not dear to the editors’ hearts. They're just the books that would support the place, the midlist books, as we call them. The books that were never expected to sell a 1,000,000 copies.

 Those books have been harder and harder to publish, and that's got mostly a bad impact on writers but maybe a good impact on readers in that lots of tiny publishers like us have popped up to pick up all of the books that the big publishers don't oh, don't publish anymore. We're publishing those books. We can't pay the author very well, but the books are getting out there. So it's the It's the best of times and the worst of times.  

Mindy: The mid list, as you mentioned, keeps feeling that squeeze, too. It's harder and harder to get published, and I know myself as a YA author. The past 15 years has just been kind of a free for all for YA. It grew and expanded incredibly, and now it is going back to the median and it's shifting. And it's becoming more and more difficult to get picked up to break in as a YA author. And it's becoming more difficult also for those of us who have been around for a while to continue to publish because, as you were saying, publishers are relying on those big black busters. And as soon as you have one book published that maybe didn't do so well, your profit and loss sheet doesn't look good anymore. They're less likely to give you a livable advance. You may not even get published if you have one book that doesn't do well. Continuing a career is very difficult now. If you're midlist.

Tom: It is. It is because a publisher can look at a book. They think - you know what this could catch on. This could be a seller. Let's let's take a chance on it. And if they do that once for you and it doesn't sell a lot, then it's very hard to get them to take the second chance. And if they take the second chance and that doesn't go over, you're kind of SOL. Tt is becoming tougher. People I know who used to get $50,000 advances on their books are getting $5000 advances. People that used to get $5000 advances are getting $500 advances, and people that used to get $1000 advances are getting no advances. At every level, things have gone down a little bit. Stephen King. Still, he's fine.

Mindy: Right?  

Tom: Yeah, The perennial sellers, the David Baldacci's, and Michael Connelly's. They're doing fine. If you're on a rack at an airport, you're doing fine and you're making a perfectly good living off the mid list, as we call it, which is, everybody else is having a tough time. On the other hand, if you're a new author and you are trying to have your first book published, it's never been easier. You can't make any money, probably, but you can, but you can if you certainly wish, you can obviously self publish. But even without self publishing, there are lots of places that are that are willing to take a risk, especially at a print on demand basis, and let you try to get your wares out there. 

Mindy: You mentioned airports It's funny how once you've been in the business a while you start to learn what are indicators of success. And getting shelf space in an airport bookstore is a definite indicator of success as well as just being out in a Kroger, a Target, a Walmart. If you get shelf space in those that is a big deal, your publisher put you out there. It's just funny to me as an author the things that you learn. So if I'm walking through a Target and I see one of my friends on the shelf, I take a picture and I text them right way like Did you know that you're on the shelf in Target? You know, and that's a huge deal. 

Tom: It's a very big deal. I mean, it's both. It's both an indicator of success, and it's a perpetuater of success because once you get into a venue like that, you're going to sell more books. Roughly 25% of all books are sold in those big box stores. If you're in there, the sense is that you're you're already in the top selling category or you wouldn't get there. I have a friend who sold 50,000 copies of her book on one day. Costco bought 25,000 and Wal Mart, about 25,000 in the same day. 

Those stores sell an enormous number of books and more books than all the independent bookstores put together. It's a major thing getting in there and the airports, as well. If you get into an airport bookstore, you're gonna you're gonna sell more copies than you possibly could any other way. 

One of the things I should say too, is that I'm you know, I started life as a literary historian. Well, I started life as a carpenter, but once I started going to school in my late twenties and then went and got my PhD, I was a was a literary historian, and I watched the kind of publishing industry in America from the 19th century through to the present. And there have been waves in which a few companies start to buy up all of their rivals. There's consolidation that means that they're getting run on a strict business basis, and they tend towards blockbuster understandings of what you should do and what they should publish what they shouldn't. 

When that happens, a bunch of little publishers pop up, and this was true at the turn of the century again in the 19 twenties. In the 19 twenties, you know, Alfred A. Knpof and his wife, they started a publishing company in their living room. Basically, Simon and Schuster were a couple of booksellers who didn't like what they were getting from the big publishers and decided to start a publishing house in the back room of their bookstore. Most of what we think of as the great literature from the 19 twenties was published by these little tiny houses, and I think that we're in a period like that now, where the little houses are publishing really interesting, great work. It's hard for it to find its full potential audience, but history will be kind to the little publishers. 

Mindy: I don't know if you saw the news just broke. Ah, maybe two or three hours ago, but Hachette Book Group, bought I don't know how many backlist but a few 1000 off of Disney Hyperion today. A little more consolidation going on. 

Tom: And that means that you have to get your ideas past the businessman. And also, you know, the other thing that's changed is that everybody has Bookscan. It tells you exactly how many copies of every book that that was ever sold. And it used to be that your agent could go into a book seller say, Oh, yeah, has his last book her, her last book did really well, especially among young people, The publisher can look at Bookscan and say, Well, it sold, 375 copies. I don't think that's really well, and, uh, we're not interested. So amazing amount of information helps the business people win the argument against the editorial people over and over again.  

Mindy: Yes, certainly. And something else that the average just reader doesn't realize is how politics and global economies can effect an author. So, for example, the cost of paper with trade embargoes in China has changed my experience as an author. I don't get as many arcs as many review copies of my books. They simply don't exist anymore. I have some. I don't have the amount that I used to have and, again, just global politics. I had a couple of Turkish foreign language deals that went belly up about two years ago because there was so much political turmoil in that country. And it's interesting to me as an artist, a writer living in rural Ohio. Political turmoil in Turkey directly affects me. Those ripples in the pond hit everyone.  

Tom: Yes, they certainly do! And of course, the paper shortage, one of the main causes of our current paper shortage, which is hitting everybody. And it's making delivery dates late and everything else. Paper shortage is a serious problem right now, and one of the causes of it is that Amazon is buying an enormous amount of paper for the cardboard boxes that they ship, not just books, but everything else to people in. They're part of the paper problem.

 Well, one other thing about the global economy. It impacts us because of desktop publishing because it's so easy. If you want to become a publisher, you can do it tomorrow. Build a book on on your computer. You can send it off to a printer on your computer. You're gonna have it. You can have copies, uh, in a matter of weeks. So it's very, very easy. And that means that piracy has become incredibly easy as well. Yes. So the very first copy of Michael Wolf's look about the Trump administration. The very first copy I saw that was on the street in Bangladesh. Somebody offered it to me a stack of books and it hasn't even been published yet in the U. S. It was the only the only way it was available was as as an advance review copy. And it was already kind of for sale by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids that are running around in the traffic selling books to people on the street.  

Mindy: Wow. And that is a physical copy. An e copy is even easier to pirate. I know a lot of people don't realize, but the way the current copyright law is set up, if you find someone that has illegal download of your book available, you can send them a takedown notice and they take it down. And they are in compliance with the law by taking it down. And all they have to do is change that URL and put it up again.  

Tom: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've found several of my books online. Yeah,

Mindy: Me too. It really is like hitting gophers at the at... the fair game? 

Tom: Yeah, it's Whack a Mole. On the other hand, what are we gonna do? Quit show business? As they say, No, I'm not gonna feel right if I'm not writing and therefore we want to publish them and therefore we live with the world we're in. What most of us are doing is figuring out ways to monetize our expertise that is not strictly tied to the copies we sell of a book. A lot of us that means teaching as I do at a university, all sorts of other activities. Kind of like what you're what you're doing right now is a way to kind of monetize your expertise is a way to kind of take what you know, develop an income stream out of it. That's what kind of what what writers need to do now. This has always been true for poets. It hasn't always been true for fiction writers. Poets have never been to make a living from selling copies of poetry books. Not for the last 150 years. It's something that they're used to and we're just learning. 

Mindy: Side hustle is half my income. 

Tom: Exactly, exactly. But most of the writers I know are into multiple side hustles, and that's, uh, that's how they keep body and soul together. 

Mindy: So, speaking of different mediums, we talked about print books and paper, and we talked about E books as well, on the problem of pirating. Audio has exploded recently. So why you think that happened? And what are the pros and cons?  

Tom: I don't see any cons to it. I like to listen to books. I mean, I think it's a slightly different experience. People talk about the difference between reading in paper and reading electronically, and I don't I find that when I'm in the throes of a reading experience, but I'm really wrapped up in a book. I don't notice whether it's paper or or a Kindle or even a phone. I just I'm just kind of wrapped up in what's happening. But audio is a significantly different. It's different to listen to a piece than it is to read it. I love the audio experience in a way that I love television, and I love movies, and I love movies on the television and movies in the theater. They're all slightly different experiences.

But I'm completely platform agnostic in terms of my own enjoyment. I think that the reason that audio is taken off has to do with the fact that we have, everyone has a player in their pocket at all times. Most Americans commute at least a little. It has become a standard part of most, of a lot of people's commutes to listen to books. The Podcast Revolution has made us think more often about what's available to us to listen to rather than immediately just popping on the radio in the car. And we're in a world in which our audio experience is a is a kind of central part of our daily lives, and books have benefited from that.

Mindy: For me as a consumer in the past, before we had digital audio books, I didn't use them because I can read faster than the performer is narrating. If I were to use an audio book like a CD player in my car, obviously when I'm driving, I can't be reading a physical book. But I'm making slower progress than I would be actually holding a book and reading it. But now, with the digitals, you know I can listen to them at 1.5 speed or two times speed, depending on how fast the narrator goes. And so now I'm just destroying my TBR. I have long drives when I'm doing school visits or going to a library for an appearance or a bookstore, and I can I can listen to three novels in a week. Now the digitization of the audio book has made. It's completely changed how I consume my books now.  

Tom: Yeah, me too. I like 1.25 If you're at 1.5, you really have to kind of pay attention a long time. And you can at 1.25 you can drift a little bit. 

Mindy: Lately, I have had the experience of falling asleep on a plane while listening to an audiobook and waking up and just being like, I have no idea what's going on. 

Tom: You know, having ti backtrack, that is a downside. I mean, when you're you know, I think that experience we all have had when reading a paper book that you're flipping through pages  and you realize you've been technically reading for for 10, minutes. But you stopped actually processing it and then your eyes, they're going across lines, and so you have to go back and find where you are. That's fairly, it's easiest to do in a paper book. It's a second easiest to do in an electronic book, and it's the hardest to do. Audio wise, absolutely.

Mindy: Backtracking on audio is tedious. 

Coming up Tom's first crime novel, Born Slippy and tackling the topic of toxic masculinity. 

Mindy: So let's switch tracks and talk about your first crime novel. Born Slippy. It came out in January. So if you could tell my listeners what Born Slippy is about. 

Tom: Born Slippy is a bit of a literary thriller that's about a very, very bad man named Dmitri, it's told from close third person Perspective by Frank. He represents the kind of reader's view of things, but he's also a little bit slower than the reader. I've always liked these novels, from Tristram Shandy to Candide, to The Great Gatsby, where the the narrator is a little bit slower on the uptake than the reader. We're a little bit of ahead of the narrator, Frank Is that is that guy.  

He is fascinated by Dmitri and repelled by him at the same time. For some reason, Dmitri keeps coming by to find him and look him up over the years. And, uh, they keep a friendship going against all odds, because Dimitri is a terrible human being in all sorts of ways. A charming, sociopath. So he is charming and this and I think he's really fun character to read. We don't like those Tony Soprano, Walter White, kind of terrible people, but ah, we're fascinated by them. We stay, we stay with them, and Dimitri is kind of fun that way. So let's just say mayhem ensues.  

Mindy: Born Slippy is pitched as a provocative, globe trotting, time shifting novel about the seductions of and resistance to toxic masculinity. So what do each of these characters Frank and Dimitri bring to the page in terms of toxic masculinity? 

Tom: I was very conscious of the long history of the kind of buddy novel and the buddy, you know, if you think of On the Road and the buddy film, the main character and the sidekick and the way in which novels and films are have always been models for how to be in the world for men and boys. Sometimes models of bad behaviors was as well as good behavior. 

I was interested in thinking about how it is that misogyny gets re created. Was that there was a period when we really we thought we fixed this. Feminism came in and kind of steered us all right. And now we understand how misogyny operates and we're no longer going to do that. I mean, you know, I've had students telling me that they're not feminist, cause there's no reason to have feminism anymore. We've solved problems. Well, we know, of course, no. If we if we haven't all along the way, we know that that's not true. 

And the question is, how? How does a guy like Harvey Weinstein how does he keep showing up? He's basically my age. I grew up learning what was wrong with with that kind of man. Why didn't he learn it? And I think that one of the reasons is that through all of those years, men were being taught to be more sensitive and less sexist. At the same time, these images of unbridled's male working out of their own kind of fantasy lives on the bodies of women that just continue to take place. And we had our James Bonds in the sixties, and then we had our Tony Soprano's in the in the nineties, or in the office. So we kind of continued to have models of that kind of masculinity in front of us at all times, and I think that there's something very seductive about that. Freud would say that it's so that we can indulge in wish fulfillment fantasy all of the time, and one of the wishes is to be ultimately powerful and ultimately unanswerable to other people. 

And so I was interested in looking at this basic narrative structure. The buddy narrative and how it reinforces keeps, keeps alive fantasies of male dominance is not always the issue. That is that I don't think that's what men are looking for In a lot of cases. I probably you know, in the case of something like Harvey Weinstein, it is about dominance. But for a lot of men, it's not about dominance. It's about having what you want with no consequences, something for nothing. That's the American dream anyway, and that also functions in the realm of sexuality. 

Gender stereotypes are kind of kept alive through certain kinds of myth making, and I wanted to let these two characters run through what that all means. Frank is a guy who really would like to be a decent person. He really is trying to be a decent person at the same time that he's having these other ideas about what, how he might live. But he wants to be a decent person. He just is a little bit of a dope about it at one point. You know, I guess that this is not giving too much away. He falls in love with Dimitri's wife and decides that he's gonna rescue her. And he's completely unaware that rescue fantasy is itself completely misogynist fantasy. She doesn't want to be rescued. As it turns out, he remains blissfully unaware of that.  

Mindy: You know, it's interesting you mentioned feminism and running into the attitude in classroom situations where people say, you know, we don't need it anymore. We're all equal. It's funny. I was in college and I remember being in a classroom where one of my teachers introduced herself and and said, you know that she was a feminist and a couple of people groaned and it was mostly boys And she was like, I want to inform all of you that you are feminists, too. She said, If you're sitting in here right now with these girls sitting next to you and you don't question that they have a right to be here in this room than you're actually a feminist. 

Tom: Yes, You're the effects of the feminist before you. Yes, exactly.

Mindy: And it kind of blew all of their minds. And it was a lot of the girls were kind of hiding our smiles behind her hands. It was a good moment.

Tom: I should say to that, you know, I'm talking about the kind of idea content of this narrative that I really think that it's kind of just fun. What I really wanted to do was write what you know. Graham Greene called "an entertainment." I wanted it to be fun for readers, and part of that fun is indulging the fantasy life that I was talking about and what I'm hoping is that at some point you think - Oh, oh, I see. I see what what's happening here. I'm enjoying this in exactly the way that I probably shouldn't be. It's a multi layered experience. I hope.

Mindy: It's also the novel Born Slippy is also described as darkly comic, which is what you're angling at here. Um, that's a difficult thing to pull off. Dark humor is often misinterpreted. How do you go about approaching something as difficult as the topic from that angle of the dark humor? Because that's tough, especially in the, you know, the current climate.  

Tom: Yeah, it is. And I think that I think I solved it by having Frank be a little bit out of it. The humor is dark, but he is not himself a cynical person. A lot of dark humor has a cynical protagonist who looks at the world in very dark ways and that can be tough to take over time and can wear on you. That you, you root for Frank. You think he's not a bad guy. He keeps being taken advantage of is funny, but not because he feels the darkness of the humor. It's partly that he's doesn't quite get that, that makes it funny.

Mindy: Lastly, why don't you let my listeners know where they can find you online?  

Tom:  I have a website now. Tom Lutz writer dot com It has, You know, it's about all of my different books, about Born Slippy. has a calendar of where I'm showing up for readings and that kind of thing. 

Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.

Kiley Reid: On Representation of Language & Examining Race in Fiction

Mindy:             Today's guest is Kiley Reid, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop where she was the recipient of the Truman Capote fellowship. She lives in Philadelphia. Such A Fun Age is her first novel. Kylie joined me today to talk about Such A Fun Age and how writing two dimensional characters, people who are both good and bad, is how to make them true to life.

Mindy:             We are here to talk about your book, Such A Fun Age, and I would like first to start off just with you telling us a little bit about the book, what it's about.

Kiley:               Sure. the book starts on a Saturday night in September. In 2015 we meet Amira Tucker. She is a 25 year old African American babysitter. She's a Temple University graduate, and she's at that phase in her life where she's really not sure what she wants to do. She lives in an apartment she doesn't like. But one thing she does love doing is babysitting. So Amira is babysitting three-year-old Briar Chamberlain. They're in a grocery store or they're having a good time. They're singing and dancing until a security guard and a customer upon seeing a black woman with a white child accuse Amira of kidnapping, someone else pulls out their cell phone, they record it Amira is humiliated. And Alex Chamberlain, Briar's mom feels terrible that this happened while, you know, Amira was under her care. So she tries to write the night's wrongs, but the book turns into a comedy of good intentions after that.

Mindy:             Yes, very much. And that's one of the things that does make it so compelling because it's a very modern story. And it's a very much about one scene, one moment that triggers life altering events for many people. Obviously the babysitter is being racially profiled and is experiencing this, which I'm sure is not the first time in her life that she has been racially profiled. But then we have an upper class white woman who is, you know, trying to fix it. It just ends up being a kind of a tumbleweed rolling down a hill, gathering weight, turning almost into a ballistic missile.

Kiley:               Oh yeah. I think there's a lot of people who have wonderful intentions both black and white, but there's a huge emphasis on them as individuals rather than a collective society. There's this overwhelming feeling of, okay, how can I say the perfect thing in this moment? How can I do the perfect thing with this racially charged incident? And there's little room for, all right, well why does, why does this incident happen in the first place? I think a little bit too much emphasis is put on the individual by many people.

Mindy:             Yes, absolutely. And it also brings up the question of whether or not it's performative.

Kiley:               Right? There is that that level too, I also am really intrigued by memory and memory serves a huge role in this novel and memories that people have become self-serving. They get twisted and warped. And as I think memories do often and they often kind of shape who we are, whether they happen to like that or not. And so in writing this book, I wanted to really honor the truth of memory and not always tell the reader exactly how something happened because I think the more important thing is how it happened for that character. So there's definitely some conflicting memories that the reader has to grapple with.

Mindy:             That's wonderful. And it brings up an interesting question too of are our experiences shaping us and who we are? Are we or are we rewriting our experiences to fit the image of who we think we are.

Kiley:                That's an interesting way of putting it. I think it's, sometimes it's both in studying memory a little bit you know, for the most part, memories come about when a really strong reaction happens in a moment. But sometimes I think when you're telling a story and you get a big reaction from it, the feeling that that emotion of feeling accepted because you've told a story also gets encoded on you in a certain way. And certain stories we tell over and over again, they get bigger and bigger as we tell them because we want a reaction out of it. So all of those things I think really factor into these characters.

Mindy:             Ah, that's fascinating. I read an interview that you gave with NBC and you were talking about as a writer myself, one of the things that I really enjoyed you bringing up towards the end of the interview, and I'm going to quote you here. You say, "the characters that I enjoy the most, the author has set me up to not know how to feel about them. I think it's a bit romantic to believe that racist and homophobic individuals are those ways all of the time.”

Mindy:             Which is a great way to kind of flip what we were just saying. When you have someone with good intentions trying to do the right thing, possibly it being performative or even just like an ego boost or self cleansing in some ways. And here you are also bringing up the opposite, people that truly are racist or homophobic or acting in these ways purposefully. Are they always that way? A another quote from you, you say that you "try to give each character a win, a moment when they are redeemable." And I love that. I think it's so true. I mean, you know, one of the cliches that we often hear as writers is that you don't want to write a mustache twirling villain. They are not compelling. So I mean, I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about that. Seeing both sides of all of your characters, even the ones are, you know, not so easy to swallow.

Kiley:              Totally. I think that showing character strengths and weaknesses just remains so much more true to who we can be as human. When I taught undergraduate workshops at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, I had students who are not writers, which is kind of my favorite student. Students who need an art credit and hope to get an a from it from an art class. And I had a lot of tendencies from my students to write these villains that were just so two dimensional - kill and steal and say bad things and are very, very rude to people. And we talked a lot about how much scarier is it when that that horrible villain goes home and plays with his children and is really loving towards them. I think that those sides can exist really harmoniously. I remember when I was a child, I lived in Tucson, Arizona, which is a very white town and I had friends who their parents loved me and they loved when I came over and I, they made me feel part of the family, but they would never allow their children to date or marry an African American man. I think that all of those, those, you know, feelings make up a human. And so I wanted to show characters that are sweet and kind and also have really terrible and harmful ways of thinking about people. Because I think that that's more true to how white supremacy can exist.

Mindy:             Absolutely. Because they're not all Adolf Hitler.

Kiley:              No. Yeah.

Mindy:             It's the guy that came and fixed your sink and was perfectly polite to you or the woman that smiled at you and asked about your day. But you know, I mean it's, it's everyday people,

Kiley:               Everyday people. Totally. And in the first scene there is this really big moment of racial bias at the same time for the remainder of the novel. And Amira is struggling to get health insurance. And I think that that's another extension of racism. Why don't domestic workers have an easy time of getting health insurance as they're working sometimes much harder and longer than other professions. And so people often ask me, you know, is this a book showing that racism is getting better or worse? And I think the only way of answering it is kind of like how humans are, is I think that it evolves in different sometimes insidious ways. And so I was hoping to show exactly how that happens with Amira.

Mindy:             Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's also a very good way to actually illustrate a, it's a, it's a buzz word now, but systemic racism and then actually illustrating it through these everyday actions of everyday people rather than, you know, people marching with Tiki torches, you know, and it's like that's the-- while it's a horrible visual, it's also makes it easier for everyday racism to I think, hide.

Kiley:               I think so too. Yeah. And I have to, I mean, as a human I'm so interested in these big socioeconomic issues, but as a reader and writer, I love the tiny little nuance to moments that do so much heavy lifting and show years and years of of history come back to one tiny moment between a woman and her babysitter. I think those moments are really fascinating.

Mindy:             Coming up, working life with a living wage, representing race on the page through language choice and the truth that resides in fiction.

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Mindy:             So you mentioned socioeconomic issues being an interest for you. You set this book in Philadelphia partly because it has a more progressive approach to setting standards for domestic workers who on average have an income of $10,000, which you obviously cannot live on. So if you want to talk about that a little bit, cause I know that you yourself had experience as a domestic worker walking away from the book for a little bit. If you just talk about your experiences as a domestic worker and then also just the plight of these people that have to live on not a living wage.

Kiley:              Absolutely. I did work as a nanny for six years and Amira Tucker, my protagonist, and I couldn't be more different when it comes to personalities. But I definitely remember not having health insurance and being, having a a very, you know, mild level of panic all the time. Thinking, what if I get hit by a car? What if I cut myself cutting this birthday cake? That would change the course of my life and paying for it would set me back in a way that I may not come back from. I think emotional labor and domestic labor is fascinating and it goes back to a history of slavery, a history of not giving farmers and domestic workers the same rights as other people and farmers and domestic workers were mostly black and Brown people in the 30s. And people like Amira are still struggling with that today.

Kiley:                But I will say one thing that is so uplifting for me to know is Philadelphia is kind of leading the way along with Seattle, I believe with a recent bill passed for a domestic workers bill of rights, where everyone who babysits for a family more than five hours a month is now contracted. Whether they signed something or not. And things other jobs I've had for so long, like sick days and paid leave and lunch breaks and time to get off of your feet, those things will be included. There's a moment in the novel where Amira thinks, I really want to quit and she thinks, you know, I can't just put in my two weeks notice. That's not how this works. But under the domestic workers bill of rights here in Philadelphia, that is how it works. And things like that are very encouraging. I think they're going to be hard to implement but still encouraging, nonetheless.

Mindy:             I survived on a rather low income for a period of time in my life. And you are absolutely right. It is so scary if you don't have health insurance, those really simple things like cutting a birthday cake or you know, driving. I, you know, you have to drive if you're lucky enough to have a car, you know?

Kiley:               Yeah.

Mindy:             You could be injured. I mean, any of us, you know, I'm literally sitting in my office right now. There is no guarantee that the ceiling won't fall on me. I mean, right?

Kiley:                Right, right. You never know. Yeah. It's a crazy thing, especially with domestic labor with children. It's this profession that you have such a small margin of error, not just for yourself, but for the child. If something happens to that child, that can change your life, their family's life forever and with such a high stakes situation, if you're lucky, you get paid $15 an hour. It's kind of, that doesn't make any sense. And I, and I hope Philadelphia leads the way and changing that for other women.

Mindy:             You've had great luck right out of the door with Such A Fun Age. Emmy winning writer, producer Lena Waite has snapped up the film and TV rights even before publication. Reese Witherspoon has adopted it as a book club book. It has just had such a wave of enthusiasm, even pre-publication. So I know that you have gone through quite a bit of training and education in order to... You were accepted into the Iowa's Writer's Workshop at the university of Iowa, but you also had stumbling blocks before that. Again, I've done some reading about your experiences and you were rejected from nine schools that you applied to for your MFA and to have this, this experience now, I would just love that, know your feelings of the compare and contrast those different ups and downs as a writer.

Kiley:                The first time I applied to grad school, I got those nine rejections and it was so difficult. So much of being a writer is having other jobs to support your writing habit as it's not, you know, sustainable for a bit. And it's really hard to know, okay, when do I pull the plug on this and say this isn't for me? And so I tried again, I had the our opportunity to move to Arkansas with my now husband and I worked in a coffee shop and I wrote copy for a few companies for, for work and wrote for a few magazines in Arkansas as I applied again. And the second time around I was so much more grounded in what I wanted to do and my sample was just so much stronger. And instead of, you know, "Oh please, let me write at your school." The second time around it was, "Hey, I write about really big socioeconomic issues down to tiny little petty instances. Let me know if I can do that at your school."

Kiley:                And the second time it worked out a lot better and got into nine schools and I was so pleased to take this novel to Iowa where I completed it, but I think that rejections are part of the process. I could probably wallpaper my room with rejections, but the ones that always stand out are the good ones. I've definitely had rejections that say, "Hey, this one almost made it." And as a writer, you're like, Oh my gosh, I can, I can do this for another three months. This, this little phrase is going to carry me for a little bit. And I think that's just part of the process.

Mindy:             Absolutely. I agree with you 100%. I was trying to get an agent for 10 years and that is pain, you know, and it's just, you're talking about wallpapering with rejections. I mean, absolutely. Absolutely. And you're so right about those positive rejections though because you can have that one phrase. I remember I did get a specific rejection from an agent that I really wanted and she said this isn't a good fit for me at the moment cause the genre was off. But she was like, "you are a good writer and I believe you will succeed." And there was just that one line.

Kiley:               Exactly.

Mindy:             And my heart leapt in my chest and it was as if she had signed me, you know, I was so happy.

Kiley:               Yeah, it's nice having writer friends in those moments too. Because they're there to celebrate with you. Wait, it wasn't like a form rejection. It wasn't a dear author letter. This is amazing. Keep going. Those moments.

Mindy:             Yeah. When someone on the inside of where you want to be is acknowledging that it's a possibility that you might get to be on the other side that that... I mean sometimes that's all it's takes. You're, you're right. I lived off of that one line complement for three months.

Kiley:                It's amazing how long that those will take you or even just, you know, someone like when you're workshopping something. When I walked into the workshop with this novel, one of my friends said okay, I've cast the entire book. Do you want to know who should play who? Just her enthusiasm made me so excited about the book and that just gives you a little boost that you really need at that moment.

Mindy:             Absolutely. And it also can reinvigorate you about your own work, I think.

Kiley:                I think so too. When you see it from someone else's perspective. A workshop can be really difficult, but when everyone is getting excited and saying, Oh my gosh, at this moment I thought she was going to do this and she did this. It gives you a lot of clarity to what you've been doing in your room alone for so many hours.

Mindy:             That is absolutely the best way to put it. Because you do achieve a certain amount of manuscript blindness when you're working in, you're diving so deep and digging and you're getting down into the insides of it. It loses it, it loses sometimes that personal connection, if you're just looking at it structurally or looking at the craft aspect, sometimes you lose the human angle that you had. And when other humans are then reacting to your work and giving you that feedback and you remember why you did this.

Kiley:                Oh yeah, exactly. That's the best. When someone says, Hey, and this moment, why wouldn't she just close the door? And you're like, Oh wait. Yeah, she's a human. Why wouldn't I just have this person do the human thing. And it's nice to be reminded that you need other humans to write about humans. Sometimes.

Mindy:             We are easily, easily isolated just because of the nature of what we do. And I personally live in a very rural area. I don't have the option of going to a coffee shop or something like that to work. And so I substitute in the schools simply so that I can be around people sometimes because you lose that connection, you can't write about people if you don't know them.

Kiley:                I completely agree. Yeah.

Mindy:             [Bell Ringing] As you can tell, I'm in this school right now.

Kiley:               That's fine.

Mindy:             Any thoughts then on the success that you've had? Because you've just had an enormous amount of prepublication buzz and a lot of people talking this book up and I'm personally and just like super excited about it. So not necessarily looking at it from a, did you ever believe that this is what happened to you, but more of what is the experience like?

Kiley:                That's a good question. The experience is a bit surreal and it's one of those things that like I lived in in New York city for nine years and I was a babysitter for so long, but I felt like I didn't really make sense of that experience until I took myself out and took a year in Arkansas. And all of those experiences kind of made more sense to me when I stepped, stepped away. So I'll probably have more information on what's happening now in a few months. But I will say that one of the surprising and wonderful parts is the messages that I get from a lot of black women saying, you know, I read all the time and I've never read a black protagonist before. And I didn't realize it until that till now. Or when I was in the process of finding an agent, I did have some say to me, you know, we may need to pull back on the slang language that you use.

Kiley:               And that was one area that I, it was a hard... I, you know, you want them to have the best book you can have. But I wanted to keep my dialogue from, you know, young African American girls to white toddlers to different friends. I wanted to keep it all extremely hyper real. And now on the other side, hearing women at every reading say these people talk like me and my friends talk. That's so wonderful. And to know like the first goal is always just to have a gripping story, but to have people see themselves in this novel has been lovely stuff. That's been a good part.

Mindy:             Well, and I think even just using code switching in the book as a matter of daily course without, you know, saying this is code switching, it's honest, right? I mean, this is representation of a real world, a diverse world. And I think that of course everyone should have the opportunities to see themselves on the page. And I, I love that. You know, you stuck to your guns and you're like, no, I mean we're gonna we're going to keep this the way that it is, which honestly, your readers are gonna react to that. Lovely that the black women that are reading it can say, Oh, this is great. I identify with this. But I also think it's wonderful that a white woman such as myself could read this and be like, okay, I don't identify with the slang and the conversations that are going on here, but it's good for me to be exposed to it and I can appreciate it.

Kiley:              Absolutely. That's my, I mean that's like one of the main reasons that I read is I just want to see into other, another world. And so there's so many times where I say, Oh my gosh, this is so different. Or Oh, this is exactly like what I do. And that's just part of, you know, being a reader and a writer. And so that's been really lovely. I think that I had to realize that people are bringing in all of their own stuff to my book and they're carrying a lot of experiences and sometimes prejudices and, and feelings like, or even just like, you know, not feeling well that day. All of those things are bringing into the reading experience. And so knowing that all I can do is just tell my version of the truth. My professor Paul Harding at grad school just said over and over, your job as a fiction writer is to tell the truth. And so that's always my goal and I'm glad I've been so thrilled that people are enjoying it so far.

Mindy:             And I love the quote there from your professor. I am a librarian in my day life. I don't work full time, but [bell ringing] as I said, you can tell him in the school today.

Mindy:             One of the easy ways that we break down the difference between nonfiction and fiction when we're talking to younger children is we say, well, nonfiction is true. And the older I get, I'm just like, you know, I don't like saying that to the kids. Because then the flip side of that, you know, and is that fiction is false. Like it's not, it is true representation. It's... The people may not exist and be real people, but you know, they are, that person is out there in the world. So I've just kind of been redefining to myself as a writer and as a librarian and someone educating children like, is saying, nonfiction is true degrading or misrepresenting fiction in some ways to these young minds?

Kiley:               That's interesting. And I don't know if it, who knows if it could be, especially because when I think about my process, it's mostly reading nonfiction to become inspired for my fiction. I think that the more true elements I can insert into my fiction the better it is, and the characters that aren't real will seem even more real. And I think that fiction can often do this really special thing that the essay or the think piece can't do, where it just makes you so entranced by a person who doesn't exist. But it makes you see the world you live in, in a different way often. So yeah, we might need to redefine that for children. I don't know.

Mindy:             Last thing, why don't you tell listeners where they can find you online and where they can find your book, Such A Fun Age?

Kiley:                Absolutely. Such A Fun Age is available, pretty much I think where all books are sold for the most part. I can be found on Kyliereid.com and that's also where you can order the book. Twitter is not my thing. It goes a little bit too fast for me, but I am available on Instagram at, at Kylie Reed.