Pulitzer Prize-winner Louise Erdrich is adept at creating all-consuming domestic plots that adroitly reveal broader insights about society, power, economics and our natural world. She’s done so again, to great effect, in The Mighty Red.
The Mighty Red encompasses so much—a community of wonderful characters and a riveting plot, plus a profound look at our relationship with the natural world. What was your initial inspiration for this book?
Inspiration? If only. I get curious about a subject and investigate. There’s no lightning strike. When I want to know something, I keep reading about it, talking to people about it, taking notes. And I make the most of personal experience, of course. I grew up in the Red River Valley, and there’s nothing like the sky there. I was used to seeing the weather coming from a long way off, even though I was a town girl. All I knew about farming was some field labor. I hoed beets and also picked cucumbers or whatever came in season. It was obviously hard work, but I loved being on a girl crew and making good money. It was one of the few jobs you could get before turning 14. My mother and many other Turtle Mountain people picked potatoes near Grand Forks, North Dakota. She and her friends did it every year to make money for school clothes, dragging a gunny sack down the rows.
I’ve worked on The Mighty Red for at least a decade, but finishing the book only happened once I’d accumulated pieces of information, incidents, stories, ideas and, of course, characters.
At the beginning of the book, you write about the Red River of the North, saying, “The river was shallow, it was deep, I grew up there, it was everything.” Tell us about your relationship with the river.
There are so many things I still don’t know about the river that defined so much about my life. I wanted to think about that.
“I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me.”
I love when one of the book’s central characters, Kismet Poe, reads Anna Karenina and says she is “surprised by how much of the book [is] about farming.” The Mighty Red is also about farming, and the details are fascinating. What sort of research did you do? Was it tough to integrate these facts so seamlessly into the narrative?
I read Anna Karenina every few years and the passages about farming are always interesting to me, sometimes more interesting than the doomed romance. My problem with writing about farming was that I found it hard to stop myself. I would talk about herbicide resistance with such enthusiasm that people started walking away from me. But then I’d get someone whose profession was connected with these issues, and we’d talk for hours.
Plenty of farmers are anxious to do the best they can for their land. Farming has always been a business, but there are businesses that care, and businesses that don’t. What’s most appalling isn’t in this book. For instance, R.D. Offutt, a giant agribusiness that supplies potatoes for McDonald’s french fries, has bought up land around communities on the White Earth Reservation and is using up fossil water and polluting tribal drinking water there. They operate with impunity. They just don’t care.
And most of that deep aquifer water is gone forever—for fries that are only delicious for six minutes, exactly. But, one might say, oh, those six minutes! Not so. You have to cram them in your mouth all at once, you can’t linger. Once they are 10 minutes old, they are limp, gummy and taste only of late-stage capitalism and mindless greed.
Which character came to you first? Which was the most difficult to write?
Hugo was the first character I wrote, and honestly they were all difficult. I wrestled with this entire book. So now I’m pretty sure St. Hildegarde (one of several patron saints of books and writers) will look upon me with favor and just cause my hand to move on the page until the next book is finished to perfection.
“I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write.
Tell us about how you settled on Kismet Poe’s wonderful name.
Years ago, I wrote down Kismet’s name. I have no idea where it came from, but I have lists of names and titles. While I was writing this book, my daughter Pallas raised a baby crow. We both wanted the most special name we could think of at the time, so I consulted my list. So there’s Kismet Poe and Kismet Crow. You can see her on TikTok @__pallas.
Also, my hope is that someone comes to me at a signing and says, “I named my treasured child for your character, Kismet.” I’d be so delighted. So far, besides Pallas’ crow, the only thing I know of named Kismet is a giant candy store on the way to Duluth.
Without giving anything away, Kismet’s father, Martin, is particularly intriguing! Did any of his actions surprise you as a writer? He seems to exemplify what you described in an interview with Time as “the usual crazy, crazy villainy that I love to write.”
This book is set during the economic collapse of 2008–09. What Martin does is only what a lot of people wanted to do. I didn’t think of what he did as villainy, but yes, I suppose it was absolutely crazy, and, you know, fun to write. I have to amuse myself.
The book club scenes in the novel are marvelous! Are you in a book club?
I am not in a book club these days, but I did run the Birchbark Books Singles Book Club at our bookstore in the early days. Everyone who came to our meetings was incredibly introverted. Nobody talked, everyone seemed embarrassed to be there, and after the meetings were over everyone raced off in different directions. Was it a failure? Perhaps not. I like to think that, after all, some strange alchemy took place. By serendipity, perhaps, a couple of the members met in a grocery store checkout line. They bonded over the weirdness of the book club, went back to one of their apartments, shared the groceries, etc., and a savior was born.
Ezri Maxwell and their sisters fled the house they grew up in—a malevolent McMansion in a gated community where the Maxwells were the only Black residents—as soon as they were old enough. Their parents stayed, and now they’re dead, seemingly in a murder-suicide. To finally face the traumas of the past, Ezri and their sisters will have to return to the nest.
Model Home is a striking take on a haunted house novel, and in its pages you make it clear that you know the trope’s lineage well. What are some of your favorite haunted houses, and what drew you to the house-as-monster motif? Having a favorite haunted house feels a little like having a favorite serial killer—it’s hard to hold something in any kind of esteem when what gives it its cultural hold is its degree of terror. I came first to the haunted house genre, if it can be called a genre in its own right, via film. Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) upset all my ideas about how we define a haunting in the first place, and for that reason was extremely formative for me when dreaming up Model Home.
I also can’t talk about Model Home without discussing Toni Morrison’s Beloved. They don’t have much in common at first glance besides families surviving in, to use Morrison’s word, spiteful homes, but both books also deal with the United States itself as a kind of specter, an entity that possesses. There’s so much that cannot be exorcized, no matter how much we will it.
“When writing about a place, I ask, what would I miss about it were I to leave it?”
Model Home is a very internal novel. Can you talk a little about what it was like getting inside Ezri’s head? Ezri has an extremely fractured, poorly realized identity. At many points in the novel, it’s evident they don’t see themself as a person or self at all. Still, they’re extraordinarily observant and self-examining. Getting into Ezri’s head was a little like writing about a subject the way a scientist might, with a very keen, cold, objective eye. I wrote Ezri the way I’d write someone filling out a lab report about themselves, trying desperately to understand something they never could.
One of the more unique features of the prose in Model Home is the lack of dialogue punctuation when Ezri is remembering a conversation, rather than actively taking part in it in the present. Why did you choose to use quotation marks for conversations in the present but not in the past? Everything that happens in the past is happening in Ezri’s memory, which necessarily has a dreamlike quality to it. When writing, I aim as much as possible to use the tools of language and prose to mirror various feelings and phenomena. The lack of quotations in the memories calls to attention the haze and murkiness inherent in the act of remembering.
A narrative featuring a heavily racist community could have (obviously) been set in a lot of places. Why did you decide to set Model Home in the suburbs of Dallas? I spent a lot of time as a kid in the North Dallas suburbs, and it will always have a really intense hold on my imagination. Texas, in general, actually. It’s a strange place with strange people (though, of course, that can be said of anywhere). My mother and I used to visit houses for sale in fancy gated communities just like the one in Model Home, fantasizing about what life there would be like. There was a short-lived TV series set in Dallas called Good Christian Bitches, based on a memoir of the same name. I’ve never seen the show or read the book, but I remember when I heard that name and learned it was about Dallas, I was like, oh, yes, absolutely, correct.
Over the years, I’ve loved seeing the breadth of places where your mind has taken readers—and how strongly you’re able to invoke those places. How do you go about instilling that sense of place within your work? I was always that kid who could get lost in a fantasy, and I haven’t outgrown that. I live in the worlds I create in my head, fall asleep thinking about them. It’s genuinely a pleasure. The realm of the imaginary, even when what I’m imagining is something awful, is a refuge for me. It’s like real life but more. Or sometimes less. But in just the right ways I need at a specific time. I like to think that by spending a lot of time in these fantasy worlds, I can pull out the details that give a place its uniqueness. I moved around a lot growing up. I am always longing for places I’ve been before. So when writing about a place, I ask, what would I miss about it were I to leave it?
I love the environmental contrasts that come up constantly in Model Home—from the heat of Dallas versus the cool of the interiors to the difference between Texas and the U.K. Why did you highlight the extreme contrasts of these environments? Contrast makes things easier to see. The fake sterility of a new-build development appears sharper against a crumbling old Victorian. But also, I love place. It’s strange how every city, and every pocket within a city, has a flavor and a history and a strangeness. It feels right and correct to write about it and draw out that uniqueness.
Emmanuelle, Ezri, Elijah, Eden, Eve—why the “E” names? There’s nothing special about the letter “E” in particular—They used to have all “F” names in a previous draft!—but I thought Eudora might be the sort of parent who would give all of her children names with a similar theme or sonic motif. Since she and her husband shared “E” names by coincidence, she decided on the letter E for her offspring: Ezri, Emmanuelle and Eve. I think the fact that Eve and Ezri kept up the tradition shows the hold their mother still has on them.
We mainly see the siblings’ father through Ezri’s eyes: a distant man who, while not particularly harmful to their upbringing, certainly has his own shortcomings. Do you think that Emmanuelle and Eve would have the same things to say about him? I think for all the siblings, their mother was such a massive force in their life that no matter what kind of father their dad was, he would’ve been overshadowed.
Your work spans several media. Has working with different forms—and video in particular—affected how you approach your writing? I absolutely think through a multimedia lens when I write. Through playwriting, I’ve learned specifically how to think about bodies in space, how they move, how they interact with the objects in a scene. And I always think about each scene as if it were in a film. What is being communicated through the actions of the characters? What does the space look like? What’s the geography of the room they’re in?
Photo of Rivers Solomon by Wasi Daniju.
The author’s new horror novel, Model Home, is a terrifying new take on the haunted house.
Sabaa Tahir’s Heir kicks off a duology taking place 20 years after the events of her bestselling An Ember in the Ashes series. Heir follows Aiz, a lowborn orphan seeking vengeance; Sirsha, an exiled tracker who takes on a dangerous job; and Quil, the reluctant heir to the throne who faces a threat to his empire. Despite their vastly different backgrounds, all three cross paths as they grapple with a mysterious force committing horrific crimes throughout the land.
What led you to revisit the world of An Ember in the Ashes? Did anything in particular spark the creation of this new duology?
It was really working on the last book of the Ember quartet, A Sky Beyond the Storm, that had me asking questions about one character in particular: the future Emperor. That’s how Heir began, back in 2020. By that point, I’d spent 13 years in the Ember world and planned everything for the characters of the first series. Imagine my surprise when I realized that I didn’t know everything about this world, nor did I know everything about my characters. It made for a very unexpected writing experience!
“I want the conflicts and conversations and victories and heartbreaks and emotions, most of all, to feel real and believable.”
Heir can be read as a standalone, so readers new to the AEITA world won’t have a problem keeping up. But returning fans will be delighted by some callbacks to the original series: What are you most excited for them to encounter in this book?
I’m excited for all the little Easter eggs I’ve left in the book for them, but I don’t want to spoil the book by giving them away! I’m also very excited for them to meet this new generation of characters, who have their own journeys and stories to share.
What was it like to weave together the complex storylines of Aiz, Sirsha and Quil?
Complicated. I knew how I wanted them to intersect, but without giving anything away, I’ll say that Aiz’s storyline in particular posed a challenge. I ended up planning a lot of scenes out on notecards, laying them all over the floor and then figuring out how they all fit together visually. It felt a bit like knowing the picture I wanted and having half the puzzle pieces. I had to move them around to see exactly where they belonged and then fashion the rest of the pieces to fit the empty spots.
Which was your favorite character to write?
They each had their own appeal. Aiz was the most challenging to write—I think I learned the most from her. Quil was the most challenging to edit—he ended up needing a lot of time because he was hard to get to know, at first. Once I did get to know him, though, it felt as if a whole world had opened up. Sirsha was just a joy to write. I feel like she walked into my brain fully formed.
What was it like to continue the legacies of beloved characters from the main series, 20 years later?
It was so much fun, but also very thought-provoking. Laia, Elias and Helene are characters who have been through a great deal of trauma. How would that impact the way they transition into adulthood and ultimately parenthood? Figuring out the answer to that question was arduous and took many drafts. I also had to focus on letting Quil, Aiz and Sirsha shine in this story. It is in the Ember world, but it is certainly not an Ember book. Finding a balance between the past and present was tricky.
What’s your secret to bringing compelling romance into your fast-paced, thrilling plots?
Well, romance is the ultimate wrench in the machine, is it not? In my books, my characters are already going through a tough time and then . . . they fall in love! Their minds go places they tell them not to, their bodies misbehave. They don’t want to fall in love because it is deeply inconvenient, and yet . . . it has happened. It’s a challenging plot twist, it raises the stakes and it is such fun to write something so hopeful in the midst of all the drama. I think finding that joy, (as well as the longing and frustration along the way, of course) is what I focus on when writing romance into my fantasy!
You don’t pull any punches with your stories, especially in Heir—and your fans keep coming back for more. What do you think is the key to winning fans’ hearts with these emotional rollercoasters?
I wish I knew because I feel like that would make writing much easier! Ultimately, I strive for authenticity. I want my books to feel true, even if they take place in fantasy worlds. I want the conflicts and conversations and victories and heartbreaks and emotions, most of all, to feel real and believable.
Your conflicts, despite taking place in a fantasy world, feel close to reality—for example, characters born into vast inequality are faced with difficult choices in their quests to break free. Is this aspect of your writing inspired by anything specific in real life?
So much of my writing is inspired by historical and current global events. I was an editor of foreign news [at The Washington Post] after graduating college, years ago now, so I will always carry that interest in global affairs and history with me. The influences range from news stories about refugees, famines and aerial bombardments, to the poetry and literature that arise from the disenfranchisement of entire populations, occupations and those surviving despotic governments.
But ultimately, at the heart of everything I write is the question: Why do we treat each other this way? I think I ask that question because as a writer for young people, I wish to convey the hope that we can be better. And I think that being better, and seeing each other with empathy, begins with asking ourselves this question.
Are there parts of the AEITA world you still want to explore?
Yes, so many. Entire countries and continents and epochs I haven’t gotten to. I think the stories in this world really are endless. It’s just a matter of if I go hunting for them or not!
Heir, the spinoff to Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes series, throws a new generation of characters into a world of chaos and danger.
“As a Diné person who has worked in forensics for 16 years, I saw death,” Ramona Emerson says. “I saw death all the time.”
She speaks by phone from her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, explaining how her Navajo heritage and work as a forensic photographer and videographer informed the creation of Rita Todacheene, a forensic photographer for the Albuquerque Police Department. Emerson’s first mystery starring Rita, Shutter, was a surprise hit that garnered numerous accolades and awards, including a spot on the National Book Award longlist.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone to read it, to tell you the truth,” she admits. Emerson, who is also a documentary filmmaker, adds, “I’ve never had anyone be interested in what I was doing.”
Indeed, there has been great anticipation for Exposure, the second book in her projected trilogy. Rita is summoned to photograph a horrific crime scene in the opening chapter: the murder of a retired police detective, his wife and six of their children. The oldest son, a teenager, is a suspect, but the ghost of one of his murdered sisters leads Rita to believe he is innocent.
“. . . you gotta worry about how much you’re putting your psyche and your mental stability and your own body on the line to get work done.”
Rita’s ability to see and hear the spirits of the dead is both a gift and a curse: The constant din of their voices becomes physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting. Navajo tradition, however, makes it taboo to talk about death, so Emerson had serious concerns about how her character might be received. “You don’t talk about people once they have died. You have a four-day mourning period and it’s done,” she explains. “So, my biggest fear about writing Shutter was that I was going to have some sort of Navajo backlash.” Instead, she happily discovered, many Native readers thanked her for openly discussing the subject.
“There are Navajo Nation police officers who see death—and nurses, doctors and forensic workers,” Emerson says. “Pathologists, scientists, all these people who work with life and death. And we do our jobs because that’s what we’re trained to do, and we’re good at it. And so, this second book is about this idea of Rita realizing that she has a spiritual side that she’s not tending to.”
“It’s a really big part of your work-life balance,” she continues. “Like, you gotta worry about how much you’re putting your psyche and your mental stability and your own body on the line to get work done. And a lot of what I write about in Exposure was Rita’s own healing, embracing the ideas of Navajo traditional culture, and why it’s there to protect you.”
Emerson has experienced a few paranormal events—although quite different from her character’s encounters. Once, while teaching a summer film workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she and two others heard a strange noise in an editing room where they had been having odd technical problems with the equipment. They all turned around and watched a coffee mug move on the table, all by itself. “We saged that editing room out so fast!” says Emerson. In addition, on the same campus, she felt something grab her behind the bleachers in the black-box theater, where she and others were filming a production. “I thought maybe I just stumbled and there was something behind the curtain. But about 30 minutes later, when I got in my car, I had three huge scratches on my arm.”
Emerson has also had her own share of nightmares from difficult cases. In fact, Emerson’s late grandmother was so worried about her granddaughter that she took her to see a medicine man about a year and a half into the job. And in Exposure, Rita’s grandmother travels from the Navajo Nation town of Tohatchi—where Emerson herself grew up—to bring a medicine man to help Rita when her job becomes overwhelming.
Like Rita’s grandmother, Emerson’s grandmother played a pivotal role in her life. “She taught me to read and she was a big reader,” Emerson recalls. “She was real big on stories. She bought me my first video camera. She took me to the movies, even if she didn’t want to watch them. She just supported that idea of being a storyteller. I wrote these little stories and she always read them.” Although she died in 2001, Emerson notes, “She’s still a big part of my life. I always think about her.”
Despite her abiding interest in stories, Emerson never set out to write crime fiction, and her path to becoming a novelist has been particularly long and winding. Surprisingly, writing has never come easily to her. “It’s hard for me to sit in one place and do one thing for a long period of time,” Emerson says. Instead, her life’s dream was to make movies, and her initial attraction to film involved a touch of forensics, almost as though foreshadowing her future career.
Growing up in Tohatchi, there wasn’t much to do, so she and her friends watched VHS tapes that they rented from a man in a trailer “with like a hundred crazy strange movies in there.” That included a horror film, Faces of Death, about a pathologist who presents a variety of gruesome deaths. Once the adults left the house, Emerson recalls, “we’d go and get all of that horrible, horrible stuff that we weren’t supposed to watch, and we’d watch it right away.” Harkening back to Navajo taboos about discussing death, she adds, “So when we watched Faces of Death and didn’t explode, we figured that it’s all just a bunch of hooey.”
“When I’m writing, I feel like I’m walking through the room with a video camera and describing it for you.”
Later, when her mother took her to see Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues in a theater, Emerson was transfixed, and decided she wanted to make her own films. After studying film at the University of New Mexico, she had trouble finding a job, which is how she ended up as a forensic photographer. She blindly called a man whose audiovisual company had police contracts. “He was kind of a mean, gruff, walrus-looking guy, and his name was like 10th on the Yellow Pages list.” Eventually, she says, she did photography as well as video work for him, “because I was the only one who could put up with him. He was so mean.”
In addition to photographing crime scenes, part of her work was making what she calls “day in the life” documentaries to show how peoples’ lives had been compromised by injuries. “My job,” she explains, “was to get the worst stuff on camera and make sure companies settled cases before they got to a jury. Because they knew if the jury saw my video, they would give them way too much money.” She adds, “I would have dreams about these people for months. I think the live people were the ones that stayed with me more than the dead people.”
However, she says that in both her forensics work and her fiction, focusing carefully on the details of dead bodies helps humanize victims. “I would always think, ‘Oh my God, this is so horrible. This is somebody’s daughter. This is somebody’s mom.’ That’s where my mind always went. And so, by talking about the details, and everything that you could possibly say about who they are and what happened to them kind of honors them in a way.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Emerson’s prose is so immediate, her descriptions so vivid. “When you’re doing a documentary and you want people to understand who a person is, you film their room, you film their hands,” she explains. “You show how dirty their fingernails are. You look at their shoes, where they live, what the town is like, all of that stuff. I think I just attack stories the same way as I would attack a visual story.” She adds, “When I’m writing, I feel like I’m walking through the room with a video camera and describing it for you.”
Plus, she says, “I think people don’t realize how long you’re there [photographing crime scenes]. On TV, it’s like everybody’s in and out in 10 minutes, but when you have a big murder scene or you’ve got something like that first scene in Exposure where there’s a whole family, that could take two or three days of processing. You take thousands of photographs, pictures of every little thing, even if you don’t think it matters. You spend a lot of time out in the boonies by yourself photographing really weird things, or in strange positions, underneath vehicles. So, I think just giving readers the breadth of how many photographs Rita takes gives people a real idea of how hard it is to do the work physically.”
Emerson’s years of forensic work had a bonus of giving her access to her boss’s cameras and editing equipment. She began making her own movies as well, and she and her husband, Kelly Byars (also a filmmaker), formed a production company called Reel Indian Pictures. Byars is a member of the Choctaw Nation, and heritage is a primary focus for both. Their documentaries include The Mayor of Shiprock, about a group of young Navajos who meet each week to improve their small community in Shiprock, New Mexico.
Emerson also enrolled in a creative writing MFA program at the University of New Mexico, obtaining her master’s degree in 2015. While there, she began writing stories about her grandmother, and was also writing about some of her forensic cases as background for a possible documentary about Navajos who work in forensics. The resulting pages were what she describes as “a weird collection of research and stories”—and she couldn’t figure out how to unify the hodgepodge.
At the same time, Emerson enrolled in a 16-week CSI course offered by the Albuquerque Police Department, hoping to learn more about forensic science and technical procedures. The topic of the first session was a terrible case involving a woman who jumped off a highway bridge, with accompanying graphic photos. “I think half of our class didn’t come back after that,” she recalls. “It was brutal. But I went home and wrote about that case.”
“. . . it shouldn’t have to take our deaths to be able to tell our stories.”
When she presented the chapter to her MFA class, her mentor, novelist Sherman Alexie, responded, “I’m so disturbed. I’m sickened by that chapter. But I want you to make that your first chapter. And add six to 10 pages more, because I also want to know every detail.” Emerson took his advice. “Once I did that, everything else started to fall into place. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ ” Suddenly, her musings and observations coalesced into a first draft of her debut novel, Shutter.
All told, however, the writing process took 10 years—quite different from the almost rapid-fire way she wrote its follow-up. “I really had 10 years to lament over every page of that first book,” she says. “This time, I just had to move on.” One thing that helped was that she was also working on a docuseries (Crossing the Line) about border town violence and death in several communities surrounding the Navajo Nation, including Albuquerque and Gallup, New Mexico—both of which are crime scene locations in Exposure. “It was easy for me to research both things at the same time,” Emerson explains. “And it just kind of fell into place.” She adds that she has witnessed policing from the perspective of officers, the court system and lawyers, but also notes, “It’s a different kind of experience for people of color. Policing is about enforcing white laws on brown bodies. I think a lot of people think police protect them, but brown and Black people don’t believe that police are there to protect them. And I think that’s probably why I speak about that a lot in my stories, and about corruption.”
Just as Rita Todacheene speaks for the crime victims who can no longer voice their stories, Emerson works to champion Native women in both her books and films. “I really feel like there’s not another group of women who are more underrepresented than Native women,” she says. “They’re never talked about; they’re never given a chance. And that’s why I feel the thing I have to do is give them power or give them a voice. Now, because of the missing and murdered Indigenous women’s movement, Native women are more visible. But it shouldn’t have to take our deaths to be able to tell our stories.”
Emerson is already hard at work on the third book about Rita—although fans are likely to clamor for more after that, even though her story began as a planned trilogy. “I may take a break after the third book and write a different book,” Emerson says. “But I have a feeling that somebody is going to try to resurrect Rita at some point, and it’ll be tough to keep her down as a character.”
Photo of Ramona Emerson by Ungelbah Davila Shivers.
For the forensic photographer-turned-mystery novelist, humanizing the victims of violent crimes is more than just a profession: It’s a calling.
In 2020, a long cypress barn near the tiny town of Drew, Mississippi, captured the attention of author Wright Thompson. Here, in the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was kidnapped and then tortured and murdered by a gang of white men. His capital offense? Allegedly whistling at the wife of one of his killers. It’s a story that’s been told by other writers, but in the hands of native Mississippian Thompson, the crime and the troubled soil out of which it grew take on a profound new resonance.
Thompson grew up a half-hour’s drive away, yet he never knew that a nondescript structure just 23 miles south of his family’s home was the site of a savage murder. What’s more: It was still standing, without a marker or sign indicating what transpired there. Thompson learned of the barn from Patrick Weems, a local activist who runs the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, an organization that was formed to push Tallahatchie County to acknowledge its fault in Till’s murder and the obstruction of justice after the crime.
“Ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”
Interviewed from his home in Oxford, Mississippi, in an unmistakably Southern-accented voice that comes rumbling from a place deep in his body, Thompson tells BookPage, “As a Mississippian, I needed to know more about this barn.”
The result is The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, a deeply reported history rooted in that unique and specific piece of ground.
Drew is located within a 36-square mile segment of Sunflower County that, Thompson writes, has “borne witness to the birth of the blues at the nearby Dockery Plantation, to the struggle of [1960s voting rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer, to the machinations of a founding family of the Klan, and to the death of Emmett Till.” The exact legal location of the barn is “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, measured from the Choctaw Meridian,” a phrase that is repeated, occasionally in altered forms, more than 60 times in The Barn. Thompson says that by the time the book reaches its conclusion, he hopes his very intentional repetition “carries the swelling power of chorus.”
The Barn was a passion project, one that propelled Thompson through hundreds of interviews, some 100 visits to the barn, and archival research in places as distant as Spain and England. However, “this was not work,” he tells BookPage. “This was something I was going to do whether anybody knew anything about it or not.” Though Thompson is best known as a writer for ESPN, his last book, 2020’s Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last, revealed that his interests extend beyond the world of sports.
“I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one.”
After sketching out the story of Emmett Till’s murder and the predictable, yet inexcusable exoneration of the men who committed it, Thompson moves into a detailed economic and cultural history of that small patch of land the barn stands on and the territory surrounding it. Though his survey spans some 400 years, he homes in most on the period from the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 through 1933, the year Congress saved the cotton industry from collapse amid the Great Depression. In that era, he says, “cotton was oil,” and Mississippi “had a seemingly limitless supply of the world’s most important commodity.”
Thompson says that one crucial element of The Barn is its focus on people like Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who was visiting Mississippi with Till at the time of the murder; Parker’s wife, Marvel; and Drew residents like Gloria Dickerson, who integrated the town’s school system as a child and has spent her retirement working to preserve the memory of Emmett Till and give meaning to his life and death. It was important to Thompson that he honor their efforts to secure justice for Till, he says, “because ultimately it’s a book about the fight to erase versus the fight to remember.”
The work of Till’s family members and Drew residents culminated in the 2023 authorization of a national monument to commemorate Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, whose insistence on forcing Americans to confront the brutality of her son’s lynching by allowing photos of his corpse to be published in Jet magazine galvanized the Civil Rights movement. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 and the murder of George Floyd a century later, the killing of Emmett Till is one of the most heinous racial crimes in an American history that’s deeply stained with them.
Thompson also candidly interrogates his own ambivalent relationship to his home state, writing that “the story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.” In this regard, he’s unsparing of his own ignorance. Near the end of the book, for example, he recounts his experience in a boarding school as a 16-year-old, where he festooned the walls of his dorm room with Confederate flags.
Questioned about his choice of decor, he says he had buried the memory for many years, but when it suddenly surfaced as he listened to a speech at an Emmett Till commemoration, he raced home to record it. When asked why he felt he had to take ownership of that long-ago episode, he admits some initial ambivalence, but then says, “Man, if you’re not doing this, you need to give the money back. If you’re not doing this, then everything you say you want this book to be is a lie.” The Barn is an eloquent antidote to Americans’ propensity to forget, and Thompson hopes there will be some healing power flowing from this work.
“The story of Till’s death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.”
“I’m a very proud American,” he says. “I hope everybody who reads this book will learn that telling the truth about ourselves doesn’t make you a weaker American; it makes you a stronger one. And seeing ourselves clearly doesn’t make us a lesser country, but a greater one. If the Mississippi Delta, and therefore America, has any future at all, it has to start with standing on one postage stamp of ground and saying, ‘This is what happened here.’ I certainly didn’t start off with that intention, but that became my sort of prayer for the thing. It’s not a book. It’s a map.”
Even as he expresses that ambition for his work, Thompson is notably humble in describing the product of his efforts: “I feel a profound sense of being a carrier of something, not the creator of it. There are going to be a lot of books written about this murder. There have been; there will be a lot more. So I’m very aware of being a tiny piece in a large mosaic of people still trying to understand how a 14-year-old child gets tortured for whistling.
“You can’t go back in time and stop it. But you can go back in time and understand exactly and specifically over the longest possible arc how all of these people came to be occupying the same piece of land on the same day at the same time in 1955. And I hope that answering that question adds to the mosaic, not just of that murder, but of every one like it.”
Photo of Wright Thompson by Evan France.
Fourteen-year-old Till was murdered in a nondescript barn in the Mississippi Delta. But few know the barn still stands today, or fully understand its history. Thompson believes we should.
TJ Klune’s gentle yet politically pointed tale of six magical orphans, their devoted caretaker, Arthur, and Linus, the government official who comes to love them, The House in the Cerulean Sea, was hailed as a beloved modern classic practically the second it hit shelves. Klune’s sequel, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, is told from Arthur’s perspective as he, Linus and the children continue the fight to protect their makeshift family.
The title card for the novel coming after the prologue felt wonderfully cinematic. How and why did it end up there instead of in the very front of the book? I thought of some great moments in film, television and video games where the title card comes not at the beginning, but partway through. I tend to be a visual writer, and the thought of the title coming after the prologue felt like a neat little trick. Not only that, it’s different! I want to try and find new ways to tell stories, and this is just the first step.
The technology in Somewhere Beyond the Sea, which takes place in a world just a few steps away from our own, is both fantastical and outdated—almost like what people thought “futuristic” would look like in the 1960s. What inspirations did you have for the setting, especially its technology and time period? I adore the idea of retro-futurism. It’s kind of funny how I chose what and what not to include. For example, there are radios and computers, but no mention of cell phones or televisions. Music gets played on records. People dress a certain way. It’s timeless, in a way, but also very much in the right now. It gives the illusion of this being a fairy tale of sorts, while allowing me to write about issues of today while still bopping about in the old-school.
The rich and playful sartorial choices in Somewhere Beyond the Sea are delightful. What visual or cultural influences went into our beloved characters’ iconic looks? OK, stick with me here because this might sound a little weird: You know Studio Ghibli? The makers of such animated film treasures like Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke or The Castle in the Sky? No one—and I mean no one—can animate food like they can. The soups! The bread! The big hunks of meat! Not only do I want to create literary visuals on par with Studio Ghibli (Reach for the sky!), but I want readers to feel like I do when I see Studio Ghibli animated food. It is such a weirdly specific thing, I know, and yet, it is something that gets stuck in my brain. You can feel the love and passion the animators have over such little details. That’s what I want to do with my writing. I think so many authors can get stuck on the Big Picture which, OK, fair play. To me, however, it is these little details that mean just as much.
“So many decisions are being made on behalf of children, but why is no one asking what they think or want?”
Poetry and song lyrics, especially from jazz standards, are absolutely everywhere, whether it’s via direct quotation, allusion or description. Why is music so important to Somewhere Beyond the Sea, and why the emphasis on jazz in particular? Music has always been a big part of my books, perhaps none more so than in these two books. But with the sequel, I wanted to push it a little further. Jazz music in particular feels like these characters, given how many variations of jazz there are. Jazz can bounce, it can sneak and slither, sometimes all at once. Particularly, I think of Lucy and Chauncey and Talia [some of Arthur’s charges] in terms of jazz music.
There are multiple moments in Somewhere Beyond the Sea when older generations try to pass down the defense mechanisms of respectability politics, an act that is generally met with justified pushback from the children. What do you hope people—especially older readers—take away from this debate? That so many decisions are being made on behalf of children, but why is no one asking what they think or want? It boggles the mind that some people seem to think that they can take away books or come down hard on trans students and not expect there to be repercussions. The youth of today are smarter, more worldly than we ever were at their age, and we expect them to just sit there and take it? That’s not going to happen. Kids know what’s going on, and they are furious about it. They walk out of schools in support of their classmates. They’re marching in the streets to show that they won’t let people in power get away with taking away their rights.
This book is meant to show that no matter how hard you prepare kids for the future, there will always come a moment when you have to step back and let them make their own decisions, their own mistakes. It’s part of growing up.
The idea of equity and human rights as an intersectional struggle comes up several times, from comments about nonbinary pronouns, to opposition to queer couples adopting, to race. You could create whatever kind of world you wanted, so why did you decide to create one where transphobia, homophobia, sexism and racism are still issues? Because I remember how certain people reacted in 2015 when same-sex marriage was legalized. They said things like, “Homophobia is over now that queer people can do what everyone else can!” Do you remember what followed? We were told that allowing same-sex marriage was a slippery slope toward degeneracy.
And now, here we are, in 2024, and the world has gotten that much worse, especially with regards to the LGBTQ+ community. If we don’t face these things head on, if we don’t call them out immediately, then they fester and grow.
Same-sex marriage isn’t even a decade old, and we have certain Supreme Court justices signaling they think the 2015 decision oversteps. We were told Roe v. Wade wouldn’t fall, and yet it did. The same could very easily happen with same-sex marriage.
And it boggles the mind that there are people in the queer community—mostly cis white gay men—who are just as transphobic as right-wingers are. Do we really think they’ll stop at the trans community? They won’t. If people in power have their way, they’ll come for the rest of us next. It brings to mind the fun little internet expression coined by Adam Brott on Twitter in 2015: “ ‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
All the children have their own stories and struggles, but Lucy’s transformation into a child who loves actively and fiercely over the course of both books is such a powerful one. How do you balance that with the fact that he is, technically, the Antichrist? Initially, I chose to include the Antichrist in the first book as I wanted an “extreme,” someone who is capable of great power. It fed into the idea of wanting to explore nature versus nurture. What would happen if a child like Lucy, a child of immense power born of darkness, was given the chance to be a child? What would that look like if he got to grow up just the same as everyone else?
In these stories—particularly in the sequel—we get to see Lucy reckon with the idea of what it means to be human. As he says, it is so hard being human. And it is. What I love about Lucy is that he takes this all in and makes his own decision about what it means to be human, or what it means to be good. Though I adore Arthur, I think it’s important to show that not everything is black and white; there are so many shades of gray that we can fall into, and still try to be good. That’s where I think Lucy is.
“Not everything is black and white; there are so many shades of gray that we can fall into, and still try to be good.”
Arthur’s relationship with the basement changes by necessity when David, a new addition to the orphanage moves in. Why did you put David’s bedroom there? These stories have always been about healing. What does it look like? How can it be different for each individual? How long does it take, or is it a lifelong process?
Part of Arthur’s healing was to remove the power that some places/people/things can hold over us. In his case, the basement was a place where Arthur was held because he was told he was a monster. To take something that caused pain and suffering and turn it into a beautiful thing, a room for a boy who has never had his own room before, seemed like something Arthur would do. It is for David, yes, but I like to think it was also for Arthur, too.
David mentions wanting to be a monster—and wanting to scare people—as a way of giving them what they want and bringing them joy. To say that Arthur is at first ambivalent about this concept feels like an understatement. How do you think each of their perspectives has changed by the end? Arthur has spent so long fighting against that word: monster. Not only for himself, but for his children, his community. And then, to have a child come to their home, one who finds power in that word? While Arthur is lovely and caring and would do anything to help, he’s also a bit stuck in protective mode, as many parents are. Bringing David to the island with his monstrous talents was meant to show that even Arthur can sometimes make mistakes. He too needed to grow, and I think David was the best thing for that.
Lucy mentions Florida as a place to send an unwanted individual, and the existence of Ella Fitzgerald does imply that the U.S. exists somewhere in this world. Does it—and Florida—exist as we know it in your version of Earth, or has Lucy glimpsed its unique horrors through the fabric of the cosmos? I do believe the U.S. exists in this world, at least some variation of it. And let’s be honest: Florida is probably not so great there, too. How delightful is it that even children who have never been know not to travel there? Though Chauncey would probably enjoy all the hotels along beaches in Florida, he would be dismayed at the fact that the Florida government isn’t allowing rainbow colors to be shown during Pride. As Chauncey says, “Gay rights are human rights!”
Photo of TJ Klune courtesy of the author.
How jazz and Studio Ghibli helped the author write a sequel to his bestselling The House in the Cerulean Sea.
Texas Ranger Darren Mathews wants out of his genre.
Or that’s what the husband of Attica Locke, author of the Highway 59 mystery trilogy, said when he finished reading Guide Me Home, Locke’s exceptional final volume in the series.
“It’s as if he’s kind of done with the cops and robbers of it all,” Locke says of Darren, the flawed lawman who first entranced readers in 2017’s Edgar Award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird. There, Darren slipped into seedy Aryan Brotherhood bars to help a grieving wife solve her husband’s murder. His uncle William was the first Black Texas Ranger, and Darren followed in his footsteps, wearing his silver star with pride. 2019’s Heaven, My Home saw him investigating the disappearance of a white supremacist’s son, as Darren’s marriage unraveled and his drinking got worse. Throughout both books, Frank Vaughn, a white district attorney with political ambitions, tries to expose Darren for lying to secure the freedom of an elderly Black man, who was accused of a crime he didn’t commit.
Guide Me Home is set three years after Heaven, My Home. Vaughn is still building his case, and a depressed, soul-weary Darren decides to take an early retirement from law enforcement. The very day he turns in his badge, his troublemaking mother, Bell, shows up uninvited at his family home. Bell blackmailed Darren in Heaven, and she is the key witness in Vaughn’s case. But she brings with her something Darren cannot resist: the kernel of a case. Sera Fuller, a Black college student, has gone missing, and the members of the all-white sorority she joined know more than they’ll admit.
Highway 59 snakes from the northeastern corner of Texas down through Houston, Locke’s hometown, and sweeps southwest to the border. “We would drive up and down Highway 59 all the time to go visit grandparents and relatives,” Locke tells BookPage from her home in Los Angeles. “And those car rides were my early kind of daydreaming out the window, thinking about stories, just making stuff up in my head.”
“I worry that readers would be like, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing here?’ . . . It has a different kind of energy about it.”
Locke often shifts from project to project, writing novels (Pleasantville, The Cutting Season) and for TV (Empire, When They See Us). The years she spent writing Guide Me Home were catastrophic: COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd and the 2023 Writers Guild strike all weighed heavily on Locke’s mind as she sent her hero hurtling toward ruin. She asks readers to grope around in the dark with Darren as he confronts truly painful truths, with the central mystery at times taking a backseat to his internal conflict and family drama.
“Darren is also just my whole heart,” Locke says. “And I worry that readers would be like, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing here? He’s not doing all the shoot ’em up, bang, bang, tough guy stuff. Where is all that?’ . . . It has a different kind of energy about it.”
And yet, Locke’s take on the missing girl trope is a standout in a genre that sheds girls like skin cells. While Sera is away at a nearby college, her family lives in an insular gated community called Thornhill, where families work in chicken and pork processing factories on-site in exchange for their cookie-cutter houses, K-12 schools and top-notch health care. As is usually the case, the utopian concept is, in practice, anything but. Rather, it’s a modern sharecropping system that keeps workers from ever accumulating wealth, all while they breathe acrid air from factories that might just be making people sick. Sera’s father, a Black Trump supporter named Joseph, has become a puppet for the rich white people who own Thornhill, ready and willing to be the Black face of the “movement” for “compassionate capitalism.” He is clearly lying when he denies that Sera has disappeared from her college campus: Her belongings are found in the trash, including her medication for sickle cell anemia.
Thornhill only truly clicked one day as Locke walked her dog: “I was thinking about two things that became really clear to people during COVID. We are not taking care of each other in terms of health care. It’s just really fucking difficult to be alive and have health care in this country. And capitalism does not give a shit about workers. . . . I’m realizing the ways in which COVID laid bare these two facts, and somehow they found their way into the soul and the plot of the book.”
The other valve in the dark heart of Guide Me Home is the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump and the escalating danger and sense of alienation it caused for Black Americans. Locke writes that Darren is “profoundly, unimaginatively sad in this world,” in the “fever dream that had been the years since Donald Trump was elected. Years that had laid bare the fragility of democracy.”
“This book series inadvertently became a treatise on the Trump era in a way that had not been intended,” Locke says. “I think in the series, Texas is often a stand-in for America. There’s a reason there’s that saying, ‘As Texas goes, so goes the nation’ . . . there is a sense that Darren’s ambivalent feelings about loving Texas are, I think, a mirror for a lot of people who have ambivalent feelings about how do we love our country through its worst impulses.”
Darren can’t imagine living anywhere else, even as the state constantly disappoints him. It disappoints Locke, too. “When I watch it from afar, it frequently breaks my heart to think of the Greg Abbotts of the [state] being what the rest of the world thinks Texas is,” she says, “when I know it to be, on the ground, infinitely more complex and infinitely less hateful. Now, I say that knowing full well that there are wild pockets of hateful people everywhere, and there are a lot of hateful people in Texas. But there are, I would argue, to some degree, more that aren’t.”
It’s not lost on Locke, or on Darren, that being a Black cop is complicated. As the series progresses, Darren is at odds with two competing ideologies handed down by the uncles who raised him, Texas Ranger William and defense attorney Clayton: Must Black people be protected by the law, or from the law? Locke lays this out in chapter one: “Sure, it was a sentiment among Black cops these days that ‘Black Lives Matter’ meant a gun and the law had their purpose—safeguarding Black folks in every corner of American life. But Darren felt resentful of the idea that Black cops somehow bore the sole responsibility for this. Surely it was someone else’s turn to do the work of righting the country’s racial wrongs, case by trauma-inducing case.”
“It frequently breaks my heart to think of the Greg Abbotts of the [state] being what the rest of the world thinks Texas is.”
Locke echoes this yearning: “There is a limit to what Black and brown folks can do alone to right some racial wrongs. And we kind of need help. And the hope is always that there will be folks who will consider that, just like I didn’t ask for the history on my back of slavery . . . You [meaning this white interviewer] also didn’t ask for all the privileges. You didn’t ask for it, but it’s real. So what do you do with it?”
All of this comes to bear on Darren’s psyche and heart. His alcoholism, present but not destructive in the first two books, is now raging. And his upbringing, developed marvelously in Bluebird and Heaven, comes into question. As an infant, Bell relinquished him to his uncles, and she’s breezed in and out of his life ever since, growing more manipulative and nasty with each episode. Her blackmailing him was the last straw. Darren’s trauma over her abandonment was so severe that he never asked her what happened, but took his well-meaning uncles’ version of the story as the truth. As he investigates Sera’s disappearance and Thornhill’s suspicious origins, he uncovers questions that only Bell can answer. Locke, whose daughter starts college this fall, hopes Guide Me Home will “flip how children see their parents.” The book’s dedication—“For every mother whose child knows only half the story”—conveys this hope, and Bell’s as well. Darren can only find home once he solves one final mystery, that of his own origins.
The Highway 59 series closes during the 2019 holiday season. In a few months, a global pandemic will take over the world. Darren has no idea what’s coming, but, thanks to Locke’s brilliant storytelling, readers will have faith that he’ll be all right.
Over two decades of writing books, author Danzy Senna (Caucasia and New People) faced the same obstacle again and again: “I kept coming up against the problem of my work being uncategorizable and me being uncategorizable.” At 53, Senna has earned critical acclaim, but she’s still keenly conscious of “being a writer who doesn’t fit into the binary world” in terms of how the American public consumes art and how publishing companies package race and fiction for publicity. As someone of mixed race who writes about the complexities of race, sex and class, she explores subjects that the industry has yet to gain comfort handling.
At the same time, living in Los Angeles, Senna was constantly aware of the “glittering television world” surrounding her. This parallel cultural universe was not just co-existing with the scruffier literary world she inhabited; it had “sort of taken over everything in our public conversation.”
Curious about what lay beyond the literary landscape, Senna decided to dip into television writing—and in the process, she found the seed for her fourth novel, Colored Television. Speaking to BookPage by video call from a sunny, mid-century modern den in her home, Senna talked about the origins of her novel, and how her life, past and present, has fed into her art.
“It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”
At first, there was just a kernel, an observation about her TV meetings: There was something inherently humorous and provocative about them. The network employees Senna met with were just sort of “cravenly thinking” of Senna’s mixed identity. “It’s almost pure, in a way, compared to the literary world—the way they think about how to market you.” Tongue only sort of in cheek, Senna remarks with a chuckle, “It was almost to the point where they were like ‘Oh, mulattoes. That could be good.’”
Then, a few years ago, Senna recalls, in the midst of the renaissance of television, and an accompanying hunger for diversity on screen, the story of struggling literary writer Jane Gibson came to her nearly fully formed. “I thought it would be funny if this character kind of hit a wall [as a novelist] and was ready to sell her soul to Hollywood.”
While there are “autobiographical undercurrents” in the book, Senna has a way of mining experience as a starting point and then letting the imagination and satire take flight. In writing fiction, “I’m looking for the story that didn’t happen within the story that did . . . taking a shred of truth and then mining it for the fictional possibilities,” she says. Her softly cutting, satirical sensibility is a key part of Senna’s brand and drives the process of transforming experience into fiction through embellishment and intentional provocation.
“I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton. And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”
The novel gains further complexity through its supporting characters, whose takes on making and selling art amid American racial dynamics represent different parts of Senna’s own experiences and perspective. One of these characters is Hampton Ford, a successful Black producer Jane meets with. While his name calls to mind the HBCU Hampton University and ties him to civil rights activist and Black Panther member Fred Hampton, it’s meant to be a bit ironic, conveying a certain kind of racial consciousness, while also drawing a contrast between Hampton’s upbringing and where he landed. “I thought of him as being born out of people who would have been inspired by Fred Hampton,” says Senna. “And now he’s like, working for a streaming service.”
As Senna explains, Hampton’s perspective is defined by “fear and the idea of scarcity,” a sense of precarity even in times of success. It’s the realization that, while “the white gaze looks at you [now] and says that you’re valuable,” as a Black artist, you know that being in vogue and in demand may not last: “A year from now, they may have moved on.” Senna says that this “sense of fleeting interest in your story” cultivates “a kind of desperation . . . that I think every writer of color has felt.” In the wake of the publishing industry’s retrenchment from its promises during 2020’s vaunted summer of racial reckoning, it’s easy to see how this perspective is reflected in a broader social reality.
While Senna is sympathetic to Hampton, her satire cuts sharper in other places. One of Colored Television’s defining passages is a gutting of a certain kind of tokenized nonwhite, neoconservative thinker often celebrated in white circles—a type exemplified by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer for The Atlantic who previously thought of himself as Black but no longer does. Williams once declared to Senna, she reveals, that her own identification as Black was “a legacy of slavery.” In the novel, Jane delivers the perfect takedown of Williams’ disavowal of race: “Once you declared you didn’t believe in race, it seemed, you had to declare this rather banal idea everywhere you went—so it became a way of believing in race even as you pretended not to believe in race. It was an ‘out damn spot’ situation—the more you tried to wash your hands of race, the more the bloody spots emerged.”
Senna’s point of view is informed by growing up as a mixed-race girl in Boston, where she came of age in the 1970s and ’80s. As she so effectively captured in her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History, those were turbulent and difficult times for her family and their community. Boston was infamously resistant to integration. “It was like [what] my mother calls . . . the ‘Deep North,’” she says. To get across what it was like to be a mixed-race person or a Black person in Boston at the time, she says, “you would have to say you were from Alabama in the ’50s . . . it was so racially fraught.”
Senna’s mother, poet Fanny Howe, is a prolific writer from a wealthy, white New England family. Her accomplished editor father, Carl Senna, is a Black man from a somewhat murky, unrecorded working class background in the South. The two had a contentious divorce when Senna was 7. After living through that tension, when it came time to apply to college, to Senna it felt “like leaving the scene of a crime.” She applied to schools in California, and chose to attend Stanford University, just outside Palo Alto and thousands of miles away from the difficulties of home.
Senna’s memoir was a bit of her own personal reckoning, and it stirred up pain that stuck around for a while. Today, she looks back on her hometown with equanimity, saying, “I go back and I sort of have a lot of affection for it.” The older she gets, the more she realizes, “that was a formative thing. I don’t think I would have had the same level of politics and consciousness had I been raised in a different kind of environment.”
She’s also glad to have returned to writing fiction, which gets her “closer to these eternal and subconscious truths about race and family. The problem with memoir is you can stick to the facts, but the truth of the story changes over time. Your relationship to the facts changes. . . . So the true story is always changing, but the made-up one remains true.”
Each Maghabol boy possesses a unique relationship to his cultural background. For example, Emil is an “assimilationist,” striving to replace his Filipino identity with an American one. On the other hand, his son, Chris, seeks out Filipino culture and tries to “self-educate” even though he’s coming from an outsider’s perspective due to his father’s parenting. How did you go about depicting these differences, with all their nuances?
As I wrote their stories, I had to put aside my own opinions to get into each character’s head. I tried to depict each in such a way that you understand as much as possible why they possess the attitudes toward their cultural background that they do, in order to grasp how each boy’s identity was forged from the struggle to survive within his specific personal and historical circumstances.
What drew you to the specific moments of Filipino and Filipino American history that you chose to spotlight, such as Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship or the 1965 Delano Grape Strike in California?
I wanted each storyline to be impacted either directly or indirectly by both personal and historical struggles because I believe that’s what happens in real life. I also wanted to touch on pivotal moments in Filipino American history that I wish I had learned about in school or at home instead of having to self-educate later in life.
At one point, Chris is conscious of the “privilege of distance” he holds in being able to stay ignorant of Marcos’ brutal rule. Could you elaborate on this concept?
The more directly a political situation impacts us, the more conscious we are of that situation because that knowledge can be necessary to survive. On the other hand, if our day-to-day existence isn’t immediately threatened, then it’s much easier to be ignorant of—or, to ignore—what’s happening, and fail to clearly see the ways in which everything is connected. While this distance can be literally physical, it can also result from other aspects of our identity such as socioeconomic status, gender, race, etc.
Enzo’s sections take place as the COVID-19 pandemic is starting, and you capture that time of isolation with such exactitude—staring at frozen Zoom screens, idly moving cursors around while on calls, doomscrolling, etc. What was it like to write about 2020?
For a while, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to delve into it. As I started to work on the novel, my editor and I talked about if it was too difficult to understand the impact of the pandemic while we were in the midst of it. There were also a lot of conversations in the book world about when people would be ready to read about the pandemic—some saying never! But as a writer, I often go back to James Baldwin advising us all to bear witness and am always asking myself what I can bear witness to. Ultimately, as someone both experiencing the pandemic for myself and teaching teenagers who were living through it, I felt like it had to be part of Enzo’s story.
What advice do you have for young people whose adolescence has been defined by the pandemic?
That’s a hard question, and I’m probably not qualified to answer it! But I’d say, think about how you experienced/continue to experience the pandemic, how it impacted you, how it still impacts you. Find ways to tell those stories and ways to listen to others’ stories.
Everything We Never Had often brings up the collective versus the individual: the power of unionizing; the safety to be found in numbers; even the contrast between how Francisco fished in the Philippines (casting nets together) and in America (each person using a fishing pole). Can you share some thoughts on this dichotomy?
Good catch! (Pun intended.) Community vs. individualism is a tension I’ve thought about a lot in my life. I’ve come to believe a balance is necessary—as individuals and as a society—to be healthy. Overreliance on one can be just as destructive as overreliance on the other. Of course, it took me a lot of lived experience and reflection to arrive at this belief, and it’s going to take even more trial and error to find out how to achieve that balance practically. And maybe my views will shift in the years to come. In the same way individuals like me struggle with this tension, so do cultures. That cultural/communal struggle, however, is much slower and harder to steer.
Speaking of fishing, it plays an important role—does it have any significance for you personally?
Growing up, I definitely went fishing with my dad occasionally. But that detail found its way into the story thanks to Roy Recio of the Tobera Project, who was a great resource for my Watsonville research. He emphasized the need to convey the manongs [early 20th-century Filipino immigrants] as more than just field workers and suggested the idea of fishing as something that could be shared across generations. I then thought about how each character’s relationship to fishing might change over time.
The novel explores several beautiful, warm friendships between male characters. Do you think there’s been growth regarding the ways boys and men are taught to interact with each other?
Yes and no. There’s definitely been progress in terms of topics like toxic masculinity, patriarchy and male loneliness hitting mainstream discourse in recent years, thanks to decades of work by feminists like bell hooks. Those are things we need to understand for there to be growth. I also personally see a lot more parents consciously trying to raise their boys to be fuller, more empathetic human beings. On the other hand, I think there are those who view such discourse as vilifying instead of healing because much of it—in the mainstream, at least—critiques without offering models of a way forward. As a result, some people have doubled down on a lot of those foundational identity markers of patriarchy.
Your descriptions are so poetic. What writers are you inspired by?
So many! To list a few, in no particular order: James Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros, Jacqueline Woodson, Patrick Rosal, Haruki Murakami, Jason Reynolds, Elizabeth Acevedo, Ocean Vuong, Sabaa Tahir. And so many others!
What made you decide to set the novel in California, Colorado and Pennsylvania? How were you able to create such distinct atmospheres for each setting?
I’ve lived in all those states and was, therefore, already familiar with them to some extent. I also generally liked the idea of the family physically moving farther east with each generation. I did additional research for the sake of historical accuracy, especially about Watsonville and Stockton, California. Primary sources such as photographs, oral histories and periodicals were invaluable when it came to visualizing the details of those times and places.
Randy Ribay explores several generations and their different relationships to Filipino American identity and culture in his expansive family saga, Everything We Never Had.
“I don’t think people realize how many librarians are being attacked,” Amanda Jones says from her home in Watson, Louisiana. “I used to think it was just a Southern thing. But I have friends in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Maine, California and New York who have experienced this.”
Jones, the author of That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America, seems an unlikely candidate to be caught in the crosshairs of a culture war. She grew up in a conservative Christian household in the deep red state of Louisiana. She lives in the same two-stoplight town where she grew up, right next door to her parents and her childhood home, and she works as a school librarian just a few miles down the road, in the middle school she once attended.
Her life changed on July 19, 2022, when she attended a board meeting at Livingston parish’s public library. Book content was on the agenda, which sent alarm bells ringing for Jones, who had been following censorship news across the country and in her parish. These conversations, she knew, “almost always targeted LGBTQIA+ stories.” Jones has taught queer kids who later took their own lives. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand in silence while we lose another kid because of something our community has done to make them feel less,” she writes. At the meeting, one library board member, Erin Sandefur, made objections to some young adult and children’s content, although, as Jones writes, “She never really articulated what her concern was, just that there was a concern to be had.”
“If people are going to label me an activist, I might as well act like one and show them what I’m made of.”
Jones, who was a 2021 School Library Journal National Librarian of the Year, was the first of about 30 to counter those concerns and speak up against censorship of queer stories, reciting a speech she wrote beforehand that included the words,“All members of our community deserve to be seen, have access to information, and see themselves, in our PUBLIC library collection.” Her speech was so on point, in fact, that she later received an email singing its praises from none other than Terry Szuplat, one of former President Barack Obama’s longest-serving speechwriters.
But her high didn’t last. Four days after the board meeting, Jones opened an email that said, “Amanda, you are indoctrinating our children with perversion + pedophilia grooming. Your evil agenda is getting print + national coverage. . . . We know where you work + live. . . . you have a LARGE target on your back. Click, click . . . see you soon. . .” Jones’ heart began pounding; she was completely in shock.
Then, her phone blew up with texts from friends and family sharing two Facebook posts: The group Citizens for a New Louisiana posted a photo of her making her speech at the board meeting, the caption accusing her of fighting to include “sexually erotic and pornographic materials” in libraries. Another post by local man Ryan Thames shared a photo from her professional website and accused her of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.”
The posts caught on like wildfire as people from her own community shared them on multiple platforms. Then they went national. Users “embraced comments laced with hate, and grew wild with speculation”: they called her a groomer and a pedophile and threatened violence. “I had worked so hard to build up a good reputation for myself,” she recalls. “It was so surreal, to go from such a community high, where you’re kind of beloved, and then in an instant, they’re like, ‘Oh, she’s that awful person.’” The posts, comments and threats kept coming.
Jones lived in a constant state of terror; she got a taser, pepper spray and security cameras. She slept with a gun under her bed. Word of the controversy began to spread, and before long, journalists took notice. One day Jones saw her face in the NBC news app. “This is really happening,” she writes of her thinking. “I’m an actual national news headline.”
She began thinking of her tormentors in Harry Potter terms, as her dementors. Channeling her inner Nancy Drew, Jones discovered that she was far from their only target. Her investigations revealed correlations between their outlandish online posts about libraries and librarians and various far-right campaign contributions. One of the ringleaders, she explains, is a leader of a dark money nonprofit. “I think he’s paid to do that. That’s his job: to stir up nonsense for politicians.”
The slanderous accusations are ongoing, at both a local and national level, many trumpeted by the group Moms for Liberty. Jones has suffered mental and physical repercussions, including panic attacks and hair loss, and ultimately took a semester’s leave of absence from her job to recover. “Even to this day,” she says, “if I get an email and I don’t know who is sending it, my heart starts racing, and that causes my adrenaline to spike.”
She eventually channeled her favorite childhood author, asking herself, “What would Judy Blume do?” The answer, she realized, was to fight back. She took her dementors to court. The judge ultimately ruled that they could get away with their disinformation attack because she was a “public figure.” Nonetheless, as Jones writes, “These people set out to destroy me, but they woke something up inside me that I hope never dies. The court labeled me a public figure and their lawyers called me an activist when I was just a school librarian. I figure, if people are going to label me an activist, I might as well act like one and show them what I’m made of—grit and perseverance.”
Jones has long known that perseverance pays off: She had originally planned to become an elementary school teacher, like her mother, but during her third year of college, reading the first three Harry Potter books steered her in a different direction, reminding her how much she loved reading. She began taking library science graduate courses, graduating in 2001 as a certified teacher and school librarian. Coincidentally, the librarian at her hometown middle school was taking a year’s sabbatical, so Jones filled in. When the librarian returned, Jones took a job as an English language arts teacher, knowing she wanted to stay at her beloved school. Eventually (14 years later!), when the librarian retired, Jones claimed her dream position.
As traumatizing as the online attacks have been, Jones has also received a tremendous amount of support, often from former students. She’s received well wishes from legions of people she doesn’t know, including numerous authors. She had the word “moxie” tattooed on her left wrist after Newbery Award winner Erin Entrada Kelly applauded her efforts, tweeting, “This is moxie. Sending my love and support to you, Amanda. I’m so proud you’re from my home state.” A few people, however, disappointed Jones, including some colleagues and several people she thought were her friends. But her family has provided constant support, and her conservative mother has accompanied her to library board meetings. After one meeting, during which a trans woman spoke about how books had saved her life, Jones’ mother commented, “You know, I think books can save lives.” “I’m like, ‘Mom,’” Jones recalls, “‘I’ve been telling you this for years.’”
“I hope I’m always evolving and learning,” Jones says. “The biggest struggle is wanting to defend myself publicly. Like when a lady told me a couple of weeks ago at a library board meeting that I needed to read Romans, I just said, ‘Ma’am, I’ve read the Bible twice. Thank you.’ You can’t argue with them. It’s pointless.”
There have been some glimmers of joy. She gets giddy about technical stuff, like seeing the copyright in her book. Jones says, “Not even in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would have my own ISBN in my own book, you know?”
“It’s odd to me,” she muses, “how big of a voice I had. It shows me that anybody can make a wave. I heard author Kekla Magoon say at a conference last year in New Hampshire that we’re like raindrops. If it’s just one, you might not notice it. But when we all collectively start falling, people start to listen. I’m hoping that by speaking out and writing this book that other people will speak up, and then more people will start to listen, and people will wake up to what’s happening to our libraries before it’s too late, before they’re all destroyed.”
Nathan Newman challenges readers to reckon with all the cruelties and joys of human interaction in their debut novel, How to Leave the House. Newman’s protagonist is a young man named Natwest, but he’s not the only central character: The novel intersperses Natwest’s interior narrative with the stories of the many people in his town whose daily lives butt up against his own.
Newman’s novel is transgressive and disruptive, an unserious look at serious things—in particular, how isolated we can feel when deeply immersed in our own problems. Here, Newman gets the main character treatment and shares their thoughts on art, storytelling, their neighbors and criticism in the internet age.
What is most likely to get you to leave the house?
Friends, a party, a trip to the cinema, an aquatic-themed fetish night—really anything social that might rescue me from the little cocoon of my writing room.
Do you know your neighbors? Do they know you?
I live on an estate with a somewhat uneasy and pretty diverse alliance of council flat owners, tenants, students, gentrifiers, care-service users. It’s always cordial. There is an estate WhatsApp group and everyone is currently unified against the midnight to 5 a.m. roadworks happening on the main street beside us. Nothing brings British residents together more than a good moan about the council—so that’s solidarity of some kind.
How to Leave the House follows Natwest throughout one day. Even though it takes place in his small town, the day’s happenings feel much like those of a big city, with horrors and chaos and hilarity around every corner, and human interactions that are intimate, intense and brief. Do you see similarities between big-city stories and small-town tales? Is How to Leave the House occupying both spaces?
I wrote the novel while living in London, right after my last year of university in Warwick (which is a very small town indeed). The spirit of both spaces is probably embedded in the book. Of course there are more stories on one South London street than could occupy a century’s worth of fiction, but I don’t think living in a small town is any different—except that you’re more likely to know the person you’ve just bumped into. The two are inextricable anyway: The bulk of How to Leave the House was written during lockdown, when London emptied out, and for anyone on the street it might as well have been a small town.
“Maybe all these binaries about art and life are just two punchlines to the same joke.”
Many chapters could stand as short stories. My personal favorites are about a dentist, a woman who dances a jig on her brother’s grave, and an egg fight. Which are your favorites and why? Yes, you have to choose.
Possibly Lily’s chapter—the one told entirely via text messages, imageboard posts and anonymous internet confessionals—because beyond her main story, there is a puzzle implanted in the heart of the section that nobody has yet cracked! Otherwise, Dr. Richard Hung, the dentist who is also an artist, but the only thing he can seem to paint is mouths.
Natwest is the apparent main character of the story, yet all these chapters have their own main characters. Amid our current obsession with main character energy, and the constant pressure to romanticize and glamorize our lives, how do you approach storytelling? How do you tell stories when everyone is the main character?
There are so many different people on the street, and they are all main characters in their own worlds—that’s a universal human delusion, and not unique to this generation (but it’s undoubtedly been massively exacerbated by the internet). Writing with this in mind seemed pretty sensible. My novel is told from the perspective of 15-year-olds, 80-year-olds, 30-year-olds and 50-year-olds, jumping between different classes, genders, races and sexualities with a freedom that hopefully explodes, or at least formally adapts this obsession with main character energy. When you’ve been born into the internet, and this is how you are encouraged to process the world, the alternating chapters of How to Leave the House feel like the most interesting approach.
Early in the novel, an imam tells Natwest that “there are two types of people in this world. Charlie Chaplins and Buster Keatons.” Natwest is told that he wants to be a Keaton but must accept his fate as a Chaplin, and we return again and again to the motif of Keatons and Chaplins. What does it mean to be a Chaplin but to wish you were a Keaton?
I think the binary that Imam Mishaal projects onto Natwest is a little false, a reflection of his own internal struggle between the worldly and the spiritual, and his inability to synthesize the two. The novel is constantly setting up dualities like this—doubles, oppositions, contradictions—and each character chooses their own way of approaching them. Maybe the real point is that there is no difference between Chaplin or Keaton—to slightly paraphrase a line in the book: Chaplin/Keaton, McCartney/Lennon, Hegel/Kierkegaard—maybe all these binaries about art and life are just two punchlines to the same joke.
When Natwest encounters his former teacher Miss Pandey, she challenges him to rethink art in a particularly wonderful discussion. “What would happen if you treated every work of art as perfect, and then worked backwards?” she says. “If you presumed that every ‘blemish’ or ‘failing’ or ‘irregularity’ in tone or pacing or structure or payoff was intended by the artist?” She says that such a mentality allows the world to “open up.” Do you approach art from this mindset, and if so, how do you hold on to that openness?
It’s an aspiration, and I don’t always achieve it! I think it’s also me-the-author being defensive, because a novel structured like this one—especially with the ending it has—is pretty vulnerable to some very obvious criticisms in the “‘irregularity’ in tone or pacing or structure or payoff” department. But any criticism is a difficult line to walk. There is a difference, I think, between coming to an artwork with an open heart and mind, and consuming something without any discernment. The internet has encouraged us to consume without prejudice, flattening out once and for all any distinction between high and low culture. A tremendous libidinal liberation—and partly what this novel is about. But we need some way of reining it in and finding a middle ground. I think that’s what Miss Pandey is arguing for.
On your website, you have reviewed other authors’ websites. Is it not a conflict of interest to review Zadie Smith’s website, as she was your mentor at New York University?
I think every author hates making their own website, but it has to be done. It seemed like a fun inside joke to give some tongue-in-cheek reviews of other authors’ websites as a result. It’s not serious at all. That being said, it’s true that I attended NYU for a single semester over Zoom before dropping out. During that period I learned that Zadie is incredibly defensive when it comes to her website. After I gave it an 8/10 she launched a defamation suit, and we are now in a pretty fierce legal skirmish—fortunately it looks like I’m going to win.
Debut novelist Nathan Newman harnesses main character energy in How to Leave the House, a novel that hops in and out of the heads of the many residents of a small town as a young man named Natwest breezes by them seeking a missing package.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of the National Book Award finalist The Undocumented Americans, has a lot in common with the titular protagonist of her debut novel, Catalina. Like Villavicencio did, Catalina attends Harvard as an undocumented student, and her broad ambitions could easily be imagined as the precursor to Villavicencio’s success. With the recent prevalence of autofiction by authors like Teju Cole, Gabriela Wiener, Karl Ove Knausgaard and many others, readers might wonder, how much of Catalina is Villavicencio?
This uncertainty, it turns out, is deliberate: “I always want the reader to not necessarily be sure what my intentions are as a writer,” Villavicencio says. She found a model in J.D. Salinger’s short stories about the Glass family. “Salinger definitely does this. . . . You start to think Salinger might be one of the brothers, he might be Seymour [Glass]. . . . And I liked the game of not knowing what Salinger was trying to do . . . but I always knew that I was wrapped around his finger.”
Like those Salinger stories, Catalina is wholly fiction, and Villavicencio sees the book as being in the same tradition as other novels with young protagonists like Curtis Sittenfield’s Prep and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Catalina, like a lot of college students, dreads the approach of graduation and can’t figure out what to do with the rest of her life. By capturing the tumult of young adulthood, Villavicencio hopes to provoke readers to make something out of their mess. Her goal in writing is “empowering those who need to be empowered, embarrassing those who need to be embarrassed.” In the ’60s when The Velvet Underground was playing live in New York City, it was said that anyone who saw them was inspired to start their own band. Villavicencio wants her writing to have that same effect, for readers to “think they have to go make something. . . . [To think] I feel so alive, I have to go do something now.”
Musicians who make their songs feel personal were a big influence on Catalina, especially Lorde’s album Melodrama, where, Villavicencio feels, “spilling guts out with precision and dedication” was a fierce act of artistry. Villavicencio wanted this book to “sound and feel like a breakup album or pop album,” and that inspiration comes across in Catalina’s potent mix of melancholy and moxie. Villavicencio likes to think of her work in relation to Taylor Swift as well, whose fans pore over her lyric sheets looking for clues to her personal life.
“What your family, Telemundo and García Márquez teach us are all different. These are faulty categories. . . . The American racial binary can’t imagine us.”
There’s an allure to this sense of intimate disclosure. Villavicencio wanted reading Catalina to be like eating popcorn or potato chips, to give readers that feeling of “you can’t just eat one,” she says. “You can discover something new in every sentence, but it can also just be really fun.” When Villavicencio was sharing the book with family and friends, the reaction of one of her partner’s family members, an older white woman without the same educational background as Catalina, was encouragingly positive. She told Villavicencio that she “really related to Catalina” and felt “included with the smart kids . . . in a way that she felt she’d been excluded before.” This kind of boundary breaking, where what might have been alienating is instead enjoyable, is the foundation of Catalina, as the titular character navigates a system designed for conformity yet manages to stay entirely her complicated self. “There’s something that feels very, very freeing about entering cultural institutions feeling like it’s all there for you to use,” Villavicencio says. “I don’t have to take on the values to be able to use it.”
There’s another kind of empowering boundary breaking at work here as well, through Catalina’s position as a Latinx novel. When Catalina’s parents passed away in a car crash, she was sent to live with her grandparents, who had immigrated to the U.S. before she was born. Raised by them in New York City, and unable to leave the country because of her lack of documentation, Catalina is thoroughly a New Yorker. Still, she experiences the city and the rest of the world around her through a different language, one indecipherable by Anglos.
This transcendent language is symbolized in the novel by the khipu, an Incan recording device made from knotted strings—a “tactile” form of writing, as Villavicencio describes it—which Catalina encounters at the campus museum where she works. Western scholars have never been able to decipher the language of the khipu, so it remains a mystery what exactly they were used to record. This evokes the divide between minority and majority communities, who are often illegible to one another both linguistically and culturally. But Villavicencio puts the symbol to a further purpose: On another level, the khipu illustrates the distance between oneself and “the parts of our ancestry we can’t tap into.”
“Who do you hold the door open for going into the store? The theoretical is comfortable. Lived experience is harder.”
Villavicencio speaks with a wary wisdom about “the impossibility of being Latinx,” pointing out that “it can mean anything! . . . What your family, Telemundo and Garcia Márquez teach us are all different. These are faulty categories.” In today’s political landscape, where everything hinges on identity, “there is an image for marketing,” she says, but it doesn’t account for the complicated ways history has and continues to play out. “The American racial binary can’t imagine us. You have to use these terms defensively and it puts too much pressure on them. [Identity] has to encompass everything.” She says that you have to “go down to earth, face to face, [think about] who do you hold the door open for going into the store? The theoretical is comfortable. Lived experience is harder. Theory gets us out of doing the real work.” She is certainly doing the real work in Catalina, and readers will feel its impact.
In her clever debut novel, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio writes in a tradition of blurring the boundary between art and artist.
If you had told T. Kingfisher a few decades ago that she would write a novel inspired in part by her love of Regency romance novels, she probably wouldn’t have believed you. After all, the author is best known for her work in horror and dark fantasy, two genres not exactly known for their similarity to frothy series like Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton or Evie Dunmore’s A League of Extraordinary Women.
Indeed, years ago when she discussed romance with a friend (who just so happens to be acclaimed Regency romance writer Sabrina Jeffries), Kingfisher was largely dismissive. “I had the unenlightened, snarky view of romance as just ‘girly stuff.’ ” Her friend pushed back. “She, very patiently, was like ‘Have you ever read one?’ ” Kingfisher hadn’t, so she gave one of Jeffries’ books a try. To her surprise, she liked it. More than liked it, in fact, despite the fact that “nothing actually happens; there are no explosions, no one is getting kidnapped.” So she read more, and she realized that Regency romances are set “just far enough away in history that it feels fantastical.” The subgenre also gave her a look into what she describes as a sort of shared universe: “A good Regency takes you to a world you know and that you’ve read lots of books in, so it’s fun comfort reading.” And because Kingfisher doesn’t read in-genre while she’s writing, Regencies eventually became what she’d read while she was drafting. “Since I write a fair amount of horror these days, I read quite a lot of [romance].”
“There’s a lot of people in the world who are just trying to get by and are just kind of beaten down, and they should be allowed to be the heroes of books too, dammit.”
Years later, Kingfisher decided that she wanted to dip her toes into the familiar “extended universe” of Regency romance and write one herself. “It sort of grows on you, and you think ‘I could do this,’ ” she muses. But it wasn’t so simple to switch genres. As a setting, Regency requires a lot of research, something that Kingfisher admits is something that she can do, but that she isn’t particularly meticulous about. “There are a lot of things that it never really occurs to me to even question,” she says, referencing tiny details like the invention of modern canning practices or the use of specific types of lamps.
Which is a problem if you want to write a Regency romance, she says. The genre has ardent fans, particularly costumers, who care very much about the historical accuracy of the work. “There are people who know exactly what kind of buttons are on things, what sort of boning is in the corsets and what year it came into fashion, and they’re all very nice people. The emails they send are not in anger but in sorrow.” By her own admission, she doesn’t really care about researching clothes, so Kingfisher decided not to write a Regency romance exactly, but “something that’s more fantasy-universe Regency, and it turned into A Sorceress Comes to Call.”
Kingfisher’s horror novel, a crafty reimagining of the classic Grimm fairy tale “The Goose Girl” set in a Regency-esque world, centers on two unlikely heroines. The first is Cordelia, a young teen whose abusive sorceress mother, Evangeline, is determined to ensnare a wealthy and well-placed husband. Usingher cunning, Evangeline lands an invitation to the home of her potential match, Samuel, a squire with a sizable fortune and a love of pretty women. Cordelia is timid and naive, a poor combination for a horror heroine. She initially flounders in her new environment, jumping to help servants with their work and struggling to do more than stutter in front of their hosts. Although she knows what her mother is doing is wrong, she doesn’t feel like she can tell the squire or his family that Evangeline is a murderess with the power to physically control people like puppets (a practice referred to as “making them obedient”). When asked about Cordelia’s nature, Kingfisher grins. “She was too timid. If she would have been the only protagonist, I would have just been yelling, ‘Grow a spine for the love of god and stab someone.’ ”
But, as Kingfisher points out, not every Final Girl is going to be a spunky master of martial arts who is ready to take on evil. “There’s a lot of people in the world who are just trying to get by and are just kind of beaten down, and they should be allowed to be the heroes of books too, dammit.”
Luckily for both the plot and Kingfisher’s patience, the novel has that second heroine: Hester, the squire’s 51-year-old sister. Where Cordelia is unsure, Hester is confident. Where the young girl is guileless, her counterpart has wisdom. The only problem is that Hester is also reluctant to act, understanding that her brother will make his own mistakes and that she cannot force him to make good decisions.
“She would not be a hero unless she was pushed out of her comfortable existence. She is perfectly fine where she is at the beginning of the story,” Kingfisher says of the middle-aged heroine. That is, of course, until the consequences of not acting are great enough to spur Hester into action, something that Kingfisher says is like the story of the world in microcosm. “A lot of things in the history of the world have been done because women of a certain age go, ‘Well, crap, now I have to do something.’ ”
That isn’t to say that Hester is perfect. She can be described charitably as curmudgeonly, and more realistically as resistant to anything that will make her happy. She is a spinster by choice, having turned down a marriage proposal from Lord Richard Evermore, a man that she very much loved. Hester was convinced that Richard would be marrying beneath him, both because of her lack of title and her bum knee. But when Hester calls on her former paramour for help to get rid of Evangeline, she gets a second chance at love. Although, as Kingfisher points out, she does “fight off that second chance very hard. There are people who are just determined not to do something that will make them happy. It’s frustrating, but we’ve all known them.”
Even if A Sorceress Comes to Call didn’t quite end up being a traditional Regency romance, elements from the era still sparkle within the dark firmament of Kingfisher’s fantastical horror. One of these is Cordelia’s obsession with etiquette. She quotes heavily from a real-life tome called The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness, consulting it for everything from how to make conversation with her hosts to the proper way to interact with her childhood friend. Cordelia’s constant check-ins aren’t just for her benefit, though. They’re for the reader’s—and for Kingfisher’s. Young ladies of the time had to follow Byzantine rules of etiquette, and as Cordelia struggled with the expectations of her new home, Kingfisher did too. “I didn’t know the etiquette of things either,” she says. And so Kingfisher mined TheLadies’ Book to assist them both. While many of the social mores outlined in the text struck Kingfisher as silly, she also recognized that “the author cared enormously about her readers and really wanted them to not be embarrassed.”
As she creates a rich tapestry of magic and alchemy, Kingfisher also weaves in a poignant depiction of abuse. Evangline’s power is manipulation, from taking control over another’s body to making them see things that aren’t there. As in many horror novels, there is no established, detailed magic system as there might be in a pure fantasy work: Evangeline’s magic is, instead, more like an elemental manifestation of her own penchant for abuse. “It’s inherently powerful and uncontrolled,” Kingfisher says.
But despite all that magic affords someone like Evangeline, it’s also precarious to try to practice it. The people of Kingfisher’s alternate Regency believe that magic is real, which makes it difficult for a sorceress to operate without being attacked by either non-magical citizens seeking to protect themselves or by their fellow magic users. “If a sorcerer were smart,” Kingfisher says, “they would never ever display any sign of magic whatsoever, and they would tell their children to never show any sign of it either.” One of her characters echoes this sentiment, saying that magic is likely “more trouble than it’s worth,” a statement that makes the author wonder if that character has magic in her own family. (She isn’t sure, wondering aloud during the interview if it’s possible to “have headcanon about your own book.”)
“A lot of things in the history of the world have been done because women of a certain age go, ‘Well, crap, now I have to do something.’ ”
To fight Evangeline’s power, Cordelia, Hester and their allies use a sort of alchemy rooted in the power of water, salt and wine. “I’m not sure where that came from,” Kingfisher says of the alchemical system, other than a question of “What feels vaguely elemental here?” As with Evangeline’s magic, the rules of alchemy are largely obscured, hidden in half-truths and metaphors within dusty tomes. Kingfisher points to the traditions of folk Catholicism as a possible influence. “My grandmother was a very devout Catholic,” she says, but was more of the “putting saint cards in the frame of the mirror type, not the going to church regularly type.” No matter its inspirations, the alchemy in A Sorceress Comes to Call is viewed with the same feelings of distrust and suspicion that Catholic practices would have been in Regency England (which was, by the time the 1800s came around, almost exclusively Protestant).
Despite A Sorceress Comes to Call’s dark subject matter, Kingfisher never abandons her signature dry sense of humor, something that she says is essential to the delicate balance of telling an effective horror story. While she admits that it’s an unavoidable part of her authorial voice, she also contends that the ability to know when to break the tension is an integral part of the genre. “I think it works in horror. It’s the same reason that the music builds, it’s very tense and then it’s the cat. It’s a cliche now, but you can only tighten the screw for so long before it just can’t ratchet any higher. You have to deflate some of it. People can’t just stay at the maximum level of paranoia the whole time.”
And indeed, without the occasional bit of situational humor—Hester and the household servants have a pointed tendency to interrupt Evangeline’s interludes with the squire at the most delightfully awkward moments, much to the sorceress’s frustration—A Sorceress Comes to Call’s dark ambiance would become stifling. As Kingfisher points out, deep horror and humor go hand in hand. “Did you ever watch M*A*S*H?” she asks, and she laughs as she says it. “People under stress crack a lot of jokes.”
Photo of T. Kingfisher by Henry Soderlund.
T. Kingfisher’s latest fantasy-horror hybrid, A Sorceress Comes to Call, takes inspiration from Regency romances.
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