Hilli Levin

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This BookPage Icebreaker is sponsored by Candlewick.


In T.R. Simon’s honest, humorous and equally heartwrenching middle grade novel, Zora and Me: The Cursed Ground, a young Zora Neale Hurston and her best friend, Cassie, investigate a town secret that is tied to their community's roots in slavery. Alternating between Hurston’s childhood in Eatonville, Florida, in 1903 and the horrors experienced on a nearby plantation in 1855, this is an important and poignant story that is sure to become popular in classrooms. We spoke with Simon about the importance of Hurston's legacy, honestly discussing the dark parts of American history, the joys of girlhood friendships and more.

What was your first experience with Zora Neale Hurston’s writing, and how did it influence you as a writer?
I discovered Zora Neale Hurston my sophomore year in college when I read Their Eyes Were Watching God. I remember coming alive to the words and how completely they conveyed the feelings of a young black woman in the rural south. It was also my first experience reading a book that posed and answered questions that made me know it was a book for precisely the kind of black girl I was.

As I researched Zora’s life, I learned that she was not only a novelist and playwright but also an ethnographer, a folklorist and an intellectual adventurer. I longed to understand the world, so I studied anthropology in graduate school, just like Zora. Unlike Zora, it took me a long time to own my desire to write, and then a bit longer to act on it.

There are some very honest and nuanced, yet graphic descriptions of slavery and physical abuse in this story. Did you feel it was important to fully investigate these horrors for your readers, which are so often glossed over in classrooms?
I don’t shy away from the physical brutality of slavery because it happened and because it is a reflection of the emotional brutality at the heart of the institution. Sadly, slavery is a ubiquitous fact of human existence and it has taken many forms throughout history. The race-based caste system of American slavery was particularly physically brutal. Black folks were seen as an ultimate other, so other that we were no longer considered human. Declared apart from the race of “man,” slaveholders believed we felt no pain, so action against our minds and bodies was not an action against a person. American slavery cannot be fully understood without understanding the hateful interpersonal logic that undergirded it. Glossing over the physicality of slavery allows it to become abstract, theoretical. By making the bodies of those impacted by slavery part of the story, I hoped to make the horror more personal, to force my reader to take a moral position. I was also careful not to make the slaveholders in this story mustache-twirling villains. And that is ultimately the point: Very regular people did very brutal things to other human beings under slavery. If we can’t understand that, we are at great risk of repeating the past.

What kind of conversations do you hope this novel opens up in classrooms and in homes about the ripple effects of slavery and the Jim Crow era?
I think we’re living in a very polarized time and many of today’s most pressing cultural disagreements are still rooted in American slavery. As Faulkner so famously put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In order to understand who we are as Americans, we must understand the history of America, and we have yet to do justice to an understanding of the hard parts of that history. We need more writing on genocide, slavery, Jim Crow and internment to sit side by side with the deeply researched and documented works on the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World Wars I and II. America was a slaveholding nation that also gave birth to modern democracy, which means freedom has been a very complicated issue for America since its inception. Slavery and Jim Crow sit in direct contradiction to the stated aim of the Declaration of Independence. The degree to which the idea of American democracy has shined like a beacon in the world is also due to the ways in which African-American bids for freedom and equality have shaped it. We can’t fully understand one without the other. These conversations and tensions are ongoing, and so our need to unpack this history is ongoing.

What do you love most about writing mysteries for children? Did you have a favorite mystery as a kid?
When I was young, my mother and I would watch all the detective shows together—“Ellery Queen,” “Cannon,” “The Rockford Files,” and “Columbo.” My favorite board game, hands down, was Clue. Nancy Drew, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet Vane and anything by Wilkie Collins was my go-to reading. I loved superheroes and comics, too, but none of the caped crusaders could hold a candle to the superpower of brilliance. And that made Sherlock Holmes the unrivaled greatest superhero of all. I loved the idea that a person, using only their mind, could make narrative sense of purposeful subterfuge or an unlikely series of events. The power of observation and logic restored truth and justice in every mystery I read and that appealed to my young sense of karmic balance.

What is it about Hurston’s childhood in the South that sparked this series of novels? Did you grow up in the South yourself?
I’m from Washington D.C., and my father’s people are from North Carolina. My grandmother died before I was born, and I only met my grandfather once before he passed. I was three and we went to the house my father bought his parents with his World War II soldier’s pay. It was a little cottage sitting on the land they farmed, the land they had once picked cotton on. I remember how dark the night was and the sandy quality of the soil. I also remember my grandfather’s booming laugh as he bounced me on his stiff knees. His life, before he passed, bore a direct relation to the kind of childhood Zora had, in both the simplicity of living and the intricacy of the relationships between the people who lived with and near him. In writing about Zora and the turn of the century, I’m excavating a piece of my own agrarian history, my own connection to those Southern black folks whose whole lives depended on the land they stood on.

What do you love most about Carrie and Zora’s friendship?
I love that Carrie and Zora love each other. I love that Carrie sees everything that is special and complicated and brilliant about Zora, and that even when the sharp edges of Zora’s mind push Carrie out of her comfort zone, she’s willing to change and adapt for the sake of their friendship. I love that Zora sees Carrie’s fears and weaknesses and pushes her to be the very best version of herself that she can be. And I love that they are stronger and more whole because of their relationship. I think healthy, strong girlhood friendship is like a forcefield. Not only does it sow the seeds for supporting women in the future, but it lays the groundwork for self-respect in childhood. Good friends make each other better people. Zora and Carrie are better people for knowing one another.

What’s the most surprising fact you’ve learned about Hurston during your research and writing process?
Zora’s life is the most surprising fact of all: That a black girl from the Jim Crow south would come to be recognized as one of the great literary minds of American letters is a testimony not only to her ambition and brilliance but the powerful and enduring legacy that is the hallmark of book writing. Zora herself is a beautiful self-invention, and because she committed that invention to paper, we are blessed with the possibility of visiting with her mind through her books and letters.

What do you hope young readers take away from The Cursed Ground?
Last year, my daughter’s sixth-grade class was taught a relatively conventional story of slavery—that it was bad, that white people were trapped in an unjust system with black people, that it was passed down generationally, that it could not be ended until the nation engaged in a civil war. In Zora and Me: The Cursed Ground, I wanted to tell my daughter a different kind of story about slavery. I wanted to tell her a story that emphasized how participation in a system of injustice is always a choice for those who have power, that tradition is a choice, that complicity is a choice. I wanted her to understand the relationship between master and slave as a daily choice to dehumanize those we might otherwise respect, befriend, or even love. I wanted her to consider the idea that our humanity resides in our ability to see other human beings as people with the same feelings we ourselves have, and to actively choose in favor of their wellbeing as we wish them to choose in favor of ours. Slavery was not self-sustaining: It had to be enforced minute by minute, and each act of suppression represented a choice. When we understand that, we become capable of understanding just how much agency we do possess. We become free to choose love over hate, tolerance over intolerance, and genuine freedom over the privilege produced through oppression.

What are you working on next?
Right now I’m playing with the outline of a historical novel about the aftermath of violence. It’s about a young black girl forced to piece her life back together after a riot. I want to examine how we’re shaped by violence and loss, and how human resilience allows us to overcome the things that were meant to destroy us. It’s easy to invoke love, but how do you put love back at the center of your life when hatred has taken away everything you love? It’s a story about hurt and healing and how we come to have and sustain hope not just for ourselves, but for our communities. And there is a crow. A very singular crow.

This BookPage Icebreaker is sponsored by Candlewick.
Interview by

A beach vacation is supposed to be a relaxing, work-free endeavor, but for author Virginia Boecker, it was the source of inspiration for her newest young adult novel, An Assassin’s Guide to Love and Treason.

Boecker’s previous novels, The Witch Hunter and The King Slayer, are paranormal fantasies that draw inspiration from historical English witch trials. This time around, it all started with her rather unusual choice in beach reads: “I was reading The Watchers [by Stephen Alford]. It’s about Francis Walsingham, who was the secretary of state to Elizabeth I, and he’s considered the founder of modern spycraft,” Boecker excitedly tells me during our phone call. For the history junkie with a deep love for England’s grandiose and tumultuous political landscape, this history was pure gold, and she was quickly caught up in “the coding of all the letters, the spy networks [Walsingham] used, the people he would recruit to be in these networks . . . writers like Anthony Munday and Christopher Marlowe that he trained in cryptography.”

Then it clicked, and her novel started to take form. “I was sitting on the beach, book in one hand, notebook in the other hand with a highlighter and pen, writing down all these notes. There are spies, there’s theater, there’s Marlowe . . . all this religious conflict, Queen Elizabeth—and I love all these things, so I’m thinking, how can I mash all these things together and turn them into a story that’s my own?”

Boecker successfully does just that in her thrilling story An Assassin’s Guide to Love and Treason, which follows two London teenagers during the fall and winter of 1601, when Queen Elizabeth’s vicious struggle to maintain Protestant control over Britain—and to keep her Catholic enemies in France and Spain at bay—was at its peak.

“That period of time is so crazy,” Boecker says. “All these things happen, and it almost reads like a real-life ‘Game of Thrones.’ You don’t really need ‘Game of Thrones,’ you could just go back in your actual history books and these crazy, crazy things happened. I think that’s what draws me to historical fiction.”

Toby is a cunning orphan who harbors a dream of becoming a famous playwright like the late Marlowe, his former mentor and the object of his unrequited love. Instead, he’s now Queen Elizabeth’s most trusted spy. He’s adept at seamlessly blending in with rough crowds and taking on identities to sniff out traitors and send them to the Tower of London. His heart isn’t really in his job as an agent of the Crown, but he soon intercepts a coded message that outlines a Catholic-led plot to unseat the queen. He is subsequently tasked with luring the conspirators out of the shadows.

His inventive solution is to set a trap: He will collaborate with the one and only William Shakespeare on a lightly treasonous play—to be privately performed for the queen, naturally—and wait for an actor with alternative motives to show up. Cue Lady Katherine, a secret Catholic from Cornwall who wants to get serious revenge on the queen—even though the mission would be suicide. Freshly orphaned herself, she’s been on the run, posing as a stable boy named Kit, and when her co-conspirators hear rumors of a play centered on the religious Twelfth Night feast, she knows she must secure a role to sink her dagger into the queen.

“I needed the right Shakespeare play, and I knew that I wanted a cross-dressing play. He’s written a number of those—The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It [and] Twelfth Night are probably the best known. Those three in particular are the plays where a girl dressed as a boy is central to the complication and the resolution of the plot. I was also looking for something that had Catholic undertones. . . . There’s this whole idea that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic. Twelfth Night has those Catholic undertones, so that sealed it for me, and of course, you have Viola in disguise as a boy for her protection, the [same] way Katherine ends up. That just worked for me.”

Kit wows Toby and Shakespeare with a polished audition—one that’s a little too good for a self-proclaimed poor stable boy. Thus, Toby gains another actor and suspect, but the more he tails the hard-to-read, whip-smart, hilarious and alluring Kit, the more things get complicated for the closeted bisexual teen. And of course, the more time Kit spends around the sharp, blue-eyed Toby, the more her plans to keep her head down and her true identity a secret go by the wayside. And the closer the pair becomes, the more Kit’s resolve begins to waver.

“Katherine is this character who is bent on revenge. She wants to avenge her father’s death, which she believes is the fault of the queen. It’s the thing that brings her to London, it’s the thing that puts her in disguise, trains her to kill [and] gets her on stage before the queen to do it,” Boecker says. “But . . . you can’t get revenge on someone for doing to them the same thing they did to you. There’s that saying: ‘Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.’ That’s a really powerful message.”

Readers will be eager for Katherine and Toby to admit their true identities—but can they also admit their true feelings for one another before the play’s opening night, and before the trap closes?

As Boecker’s writing process for Assassin’s Guide started on a beach in Mexico, it only seems fitting that’s she’s aiming to end it there as well. “You know, I think I’m going to Cabo with some girlfriends. That’s my pub day celebration!”

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A beach vacation is supposed to be a relaxing, work-free endeavor, but for author Virginia Boecker, it was the source of inspiration for her newest young adult novel, An Assassin’s Guide to Love and Treason.

Interview by

Award-winning author Laurie Halse Anderson talks about the difficult and healing process of writing her new memoir, SHOUT, her hope for the future of YA literature, her advice for today’s teens and more.


How did you decide to write this memoir in verse? Did it allow you more freedom to explore certain memories or emotions than prose?
I conceived SHOUT on a trip to New York City in late 2017. The #MeToo movement (started by Tarana Burke in 2006) was gaining visibility and generating both support and push-back. The criticism of the survivors coming forward infuriated me. Lines of poetry boiled up from somewhere very deep inside and I scribbled them down. That was when I knew that a) I had to write this book and b) I wanted it to be in verse.

Writing in verse allows for a more visceral experience, which made it the perfect form for my raw and intense subject matter.

How did you decompress and practice self-care while writing this memoir, which delves into some very difficult subjects?
I took a lot of very long walks, usually listening to an audiobook. (Being able to borrow audiobooks from my library with the Libby app has changed my life!) I also gave myself permission to grieve. Writing SHOUT brought up old pain, but it also gave me perspective on why I made some bad choices when I was a kid. Reexamining those years left me awash in gratitude for all the people who tried to love me when I was so broken.

Was there any part of this writing process that surprised you?
The poem “calving iceberg” gutted me. It tells of moving into my university dorm room after living at home and attending community college. Writing it dredged up oceans of painful feelings—I never moved home after this move, and we all knew that was the plan—of loss and sadness. I had packed those feeling away so securely that unleashing them came as a shock.

The other unexpected thing was that writing this book has allowed me to enjoy the music of my teens and 20’s. I’ve always been able to listen to a song or two (hello, Fleetwood Mac and Boston), but listening to entire albums or playlists were uncomfortable. Now I understand why; too much of the music carried unresolved sorrow. Working on SHOUT helped transmute the sorrow into compassion and gave me back lots of great music.

What advice do you have for young adults who might be struggling right now with the current social and political climate?
Thank you for caring! Your commitment to each other and to a healthier culture, with equal justice, opportunities and respect for all gives me life. Revolutions are always bloody and usually led by the young, but you have the most at stake. Stay true to your cause, build your communities of kindred spirits, and take care of each other, please. Together, we will make the world better for everyone.

You’ve made a name for yourself by challenging the kinds of stories that we open up for young adults. What are your thoughts on the genre today, which is now one of the biggest segments of publishing?
It’s fabulous to see more writers of color and LGBTQIA writers being published, though we have far to go in the publishing industry in terms of representation. The boundary between YA and adult literature has become porous, which benefits all readers. I believe YA thrives because it examines the critical development point where so many of us stumble: adolescence. Once you can make peace with the events of your teens, you usually become a happier person. I suspect YA lit will be a dominant segment of publishing for quite a while.

Your debut novel, Speak, just had its 20th anniversary. Do you think we're finally at a cultural tipping point in terms of how we talk about sexual assault and consent?
We’re at the tipping point in terms of beginning to have these conversations. Beginning. I’m still hearing from high school teachers who want to teach Speak, but have to deal with parents who refuse to let their kids read a book about sexual violence. I talk to female survivors of rape who—when they disclosed their assault to family and friends—were greeted with “What were you wearing?” and “Did you lead him on?”

But we have start somewhere, right? I’m grateful for the progress we’ve made and am impatient for much, much more.

What are some of your other favorite memoirs that young adult readers would enjoy?
There are so many great ones!

Parkland Speaks: Survivors from Marjory Stoneman Douglas Share Their Stories, Sarah Lerner, ed.

Spinning by Tillie Walden

The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam by G. Willow Wilson

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen by Jazz Jennings

Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White by Lila Quintero Weaver

Educated by Tara Westover

The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism by Naoki Higashida

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay

Sex Object: A Memoir by Jessica Valenti

Hey Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt With Family Addiction by Jarrett J. Krosoczka

Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir by Nikki Grimes (coming 10/8/19)

What project are you working on next?
I’ve just finished up a graphic novel about Wonder Woman for DC Comics that will be published in 2020. I’m juggling a couple of secret projects right now, but I can’t talk about them until they’re further developed. Stay tuned!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of SHOUT.

Author photo by Randy Fontanilla.

Award-winning author Laurie Halse Anderson talks about the difficult and healing process of writing her new memoir, SHOUT, her hope for the future of YA literature, her advice for today’s teens and more.

Interview by

Julie Berry explores passion and destruction in her latest historical YA novel, Lovely War


I love a World War II novel, but it’s so refreshing to see a World War I story. And for American readers, this is far off our radars. What made you choose this time period?
My grandmothers were teenage girls during WWI, so they would have been contemporaries of Hazel and the main characters in the story. I found myself thinking, now why did WWI start again? And it’s murkier, it’s more confusing. We talked about it last in high school history, and we haven’t talked about it since. I’m really drawn to stories that are less known and moments in history that we might overlook.

How did you decide to weave in the mythology and have Greek gods narrate?
I kept wrestling with the questions of a vantage point. How can you write about something as enormous as this war and encapsulate something of its enormity while still having an intimate relationship with one or two or three mere mortals?

When you focus in on one girl, you gain intimacy into her heart and mind, but you forfeit anything she can’t see or experience. I just really wrestled with who was in a position to show how big this war actually was. I knew I wanted to tell a love story and a war story. And I thought, what if there was a way for love and war personified to tell this story? I realized, we already have love and war personified . . . and they’re lovers! My feeling is there is no Hazel or James without Aphrodite and Ares. We can’t know them unless we see them through those divine eyes—there’s no other way. My belief is that they are absolutely the creations of their divine creators. This wasn’t a stunt, so to speak. I couldn’t find Hazel until Aphrodite revealed her to me.

I’m sure that changed the whole game!
It was a hard book to write. I was determined that I wasn’t going to create events that didn’t really happen in the war. So to construct a story and attach it to real historical events wasn’t simple, but I absolutely felt that these gods carried it in their capable hands. They were in control, and that sounds hokey, but it’s kind of true! [Laughs]

Your novels often explore how violence can upend communities and young lives in particular. With this book, did you find any fresh angles that you hadn’t previously explored?
It’s funny you say that. Why do I keep writing stories where war and conflict keep happening? I’ve never lived in a war—I’m not sure why I keep going there! Maybe it’s partly because I grew up hearing about my mom’s and dad’s experiences living through the wars. I think that there is something about a war that strips away everything you thought you knew about who you were and what was important. There’s this dramatic recalibration of priorities, both for the individual and for a community and society. I guess artistically that moment of truth really interests me, where the complacencies of life are no longer possible.

The romance in Lovely War feels so universal—everyone remembers their first love. That’s a powerful topic to write about.
From your lips to god’s ears—any god! [Laughs] I wanted to write a young adult novel, but the war aged everyone who was involved in it. I just found that no matter how old you were, when your life was touched by this war, you grew up overnight. So I wondered about how that would translate into a YA novel—this sort of sobering, aging aspect of the hardships and the horrors of the war. And ultimately, I just had to say, well, it is what it is. A lot of teens have to grow up overnight.

This book is so powerful. I’m curious what you hope readers will take away from it.
My hope is that I can offer characters and a story so compelling that readers will really open their hearts to them and feel those experiences in a new way. I think if we can see ourselves in the past and realize that, just like us, our forebears were doing the best they could with a really hard time, it creates a kind of empathy and a kind of healing.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of Lovely War.

Julie Berry explores passion and destruction in her latest historical YA novel, Lovely War

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