welcome everyone to our author night here at south pasadena public library we're so thrilled to have you with us um and our special speakers um this evening is going to end our citywide reading program one city many stories that's been taking place over the last six weeks my name is kathy billings i'm the library director and it's my pleasure to just give you a little background on one city money stories and introduce our speakers so i'll start by explaining that library staff developed this program to provide an opportunity for the community to explore common ground through reading and discussion so we really hope that you've had an opportunity to read the books on our suggested reading list or take part in one of our book discussion groups tonight's event will feature two award-winning authors dancy senna and cherie smith in a discussion moderated by a third award-winning author ron kirchy who is south pasadena's poet laureate i would like to briefly introduce our speakers as i said and i will invite our viewers to visit our website where you will find more information about these authors as well as about one city many stories and the books that are on those reading lists um during the talk feel free to enter any questions we will watch those as the as the event is happening and and address those questions at the end um and so with that i will introduce our speakers uh georgie senna is the author of five critically acclaimed books of fiction and non-fiction and her first novel caucasia won the american library association's alex award and was also named the los angeles times best book of the year her latest novel new people was one of our featured one city many stories titles and so we're thrilled to have her with us tonight and sheree smith is the author of seven award-winning young adult novels including the 2009 california book awards gold medalist fly girl and her most recent book the blossom and the firefly was also a featured once in a mini story's title and finally our moderator ron kirchy was appointed by the city council as the first south pasadena poet laureate in june 2018 and since then we've done many things with him and he's written many special poems for special events including one city many stories and you can see that on our youtube channel um the author of many novels ten acclaimed poetry collections and a two-time winner of the pen literary award for children's literature so i again continue i thank our speakers so much for being with us and i will turn this over to ron thank you hi everybody my name is ron kirchy and i am the current port laureate of south pasadena no poems tonight uh i do want to start by saying how much fun i've had the last two or three weeks walking around south pasadena and bumping into people who have read the books and you see them in trader joe's and my wife and i are walkers or we'll see them in pavilions in line at the pharmacy and somebody will say oh gee i already loved that book or i read a review of that book or what do you think about this book or i listened to one of the library presentations it's been just kind of wonderfully fulfilling to have these books circulating sort of in the air as it were and above into people so here's the rules tonight the first rule is i really want to have a good time um i want us to talk i want us to get along for you for dansy and sheree any question that comes up you don't want to answer don't answer it uh um ask questions to me or or of each other and i promise the first thing i promise not to do is to ask you where your ideas come from because i've heard that so many times when we were able to travel i used to go to high schools and middle schools mostly and if i was on a little book tour i'd hear it a lot and at a certain point i just get snarky and say costco where i get everything so that probably won't be in the air tonight i want to start i have some um boilerplate questions which i can show you and we'll read from but i want to start with something not on the list i want to start with a quotation from flaubert who wrote madame bovary a terrific novel if you haven't read it for a while and here's what gustav said be regular and orderly in your daily life so you can be violent and original in your work does that resonate with you guys dancing sheree regular definitely i i love that um i think um i i lived in new york actually for many many many years and um all of my books i've written in the west and i finished in the west and i find it a lot easier here to kind of find that air that space around me to think um without the constant over stimulation and i think that's connected to what you're saying you know it's like you need to have a kind of routine there's a real kind of marathon feeling to writing a novel and you need to be able to be in that dearly ritual with it and it's it's a it can be thrown off by many different factors and so i think that kind of um creating space around your your thoughts and your imagination is is what it's about for me what about you cherie you know um i think that it depends it just depends it depends on the project it depends on um on um what's going on in my life because sometimes i think um you know i try to show up every day and sit down and do and sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't and then you have those days where you have every other thing to do but the ideas just keep coming and so i think it's a little bit like um you follow the muse um and in some days you sit there wishing she'd show up but um but yeah you know like it depends on where you are in the curve of the story i think like sometimes it's non-stop and you wake up in the middle of the night you know and you got to keep going so um i think that the madness can be in the work but that's also sort of great yeah yep for for me i mean let me talk a little more about myself than the average moderator because we're three writers but i won't do that too much for me i've been writing a lot of poetry lately and i just drea and i were talking about this earlier i'm just a blue guy i just get up in the morning i go to work seven days a week i must write 300 days a week three hundred days notice that's a lot that's incredible 300 days a year and the only violence you know um so that can be violent and original is in editing when you write as much as i do you know that not a lot of it is good i just throw stuff away every day and edit with the sword so you know that's my answer i find i'd pull punches with the violence like anything where i have to like i'm working on something now that is horror i'm i'm not a horror person i'm afraid of things and um my husband was laughing at me last night he's like oh i think this is hard for you to write because you don't want to get scared and like that that actually might be true so yeah i gotta take the gloves off next so that was a general question now i have a couple from the list um probably moderator questions the question the first one is tell us a bit about what inspired you to write the and if you want about your creative process what's the story density a little bit about what inspired you to write a little bit about your creative process um what inspired me to write the last book the one that was new people um was i always want to write the book that hasn't been written yet and the voice and world that i don't see out there you know i always feel like i'm trying to write certain worlds into existence and characters i haven't met before on the page and um and it's in dialogue with other works um and so for me i was trying to write a character who was um living in a very specific time of um identity crises and new york in the 90s the sort of gentrification of brooklyn um i always write about a world that i know but i like to stray from the world i know and find the story that didn't happen within it um within the story that did so when i'm thinking it starts with autobiography and it leads to a huge digression from autobiography for me i'm interested in strain from the truth which is why i write fiction more than non-fiction yeah sure i would say that uh well for this one it's curiosity i i tend to i write i'm genre fluid and um i chase down a lot of things that just spark my curiosity and blossom in the firefly um you know i came across an article about these girls serving as maids to kamikaze pilots and and i was wondering two things one is um what does it take to make you want uh willing to um take on a suicide mission um we've seen a lot of violence in the world in recent years a lot of suicide actions and i'm just like well what does that where does that start and then equally what would it be like to be a 15 year old girl who who sends men off to their deaths like every day that that um without any um you know all the support and comfort that we try to offer kids today um just non-existent in a time of war and um so really just it was just what would it be like to walk in those shoes um yeah i think that's probably why i write mostly i want to travel there like i want to go there i want to be there i want to see that but you went to japan right i did i did i spent a few days running around in the location where the book is set which i don't usually get to do so that was i thought it was necessary for this so i made sure it happened and it was invaluable yeah kirk has talked about them almost they use the word meticulous talking about your you know scholarship which i thought was absolutely afterward details in that book are fantastic thank you i think you know my um my first world war ii book fly girl um i did a lot of research and people seemed to respond to um you know all the details about its pilots again um women's air force service pilots and they really responded to that so i wanted to make sure that i got that into this book as well and then just to understand you know i think you need as full of pictures you can get and i do write some non-fiction so um and my mother was a librarian you know had a library science degree and i still have all of my you know junior britannica and adult encyclopedias so i was taught to do the research so that's what i do um i'm going to ask um a couple of questions to each individual author and we'll go back to a general one i got some stuff that i want to you know insert um it says considering the theme of reconciling past with present what elements of your story you consider to be the most relevant today considering the theme of reconciling past with present what elements of your story do you consider to be the most relevant today um one of the things that i discovered in doing my research are the you know there's three sides to every story um and since this is a story about japan and world war ii like i sort of had a sense of the american side of the story um and not a lot of information about the japanese side of the story when i went into it and what i learned was within the japanese culture there appeared to be three sides to the story there's a book called the long defeat that is an examination of post-war japan and um there is the story of heroism that the government puts forth there's a story of victimization that survivors and former soldiers families would put forth oh i was just following rules i was just following orders and then um the japanese press and the 80s started a narrative of culpability that you know we were part of this and i think the fracture we have right now in our society here in the united states um you know the very divided um uh voices we have in the political arena that's bleeding into the rest of our culture i think in 20 years you're going to be hearing like well i'm just following orders or as follows toeing the party line and you're going to hear um you know i was a victim and you're going to hear wait a minute we did this to ourselves and so if we could be conscious of that now and maybe use that hindsight from world war ii to today what might we be able to avoid you know yeah yeah for danzi this is a simple one what do you want readers to take away from new people the novel oh i i never want them to take away anything that they don't take away i mean i don't have a message i don't have a um sort of lesson that i'm trying to teach them it's um the reader does for me like half of the writing and i let them interpret from it what they want um so i i try to be really free and uncensored and um and i write to tell a really good story i'm always interested in kind of having the propulsion of a thriller but in a story about identity and a more intimate kind of story about um people's sense of himself in the world but with the kind of gripping plot so i i just don't i don't have like a message if you if you read the book and you come away with something um that's your your message i don't need to be opaque about it but i i don't i don't prescribe the message from my work yeah i was reading just today uh i wrote this down this is from zadie smith the book i know is white teeth he said i expressed myself with my friends and my family novels are not about expressing yourself they're about something beautiful or funny clever organic when it comes to self-expression go ring a bell in the yard if you want to express yourself yeah i agree it's a really different language yeah yeah i don't yeah i would i would feel that would be like you know really restricting to me as a writer to be beholden to like having a message or one sentence that i would say because the book is the message the story is the it's the point of it yeah i heard an author say if i had a message i would write it on a note card and hit exactly yeah that's right that's how i feel yeah that's how i feel i have a question i wonder um danzi like that said have you ever had someone come to you and say oh i really got x out of this book that was something that surprised you um yeah i mean i've had that in good and bad ways um like i had someone a really great reader say to me um that reading my work my body of work was the the first time she really was able to see being biracial being mixed race as its own culture um she understood herself to be part of a culture and it's like that that writing a world into existence i think has that power representation and writing someone's reality into being but um my first novel i remember when it first came out and it's about a mixed-race family in the 70s and the 80s and um new england black father white mother biracial daughters and um one of the daughters is more appears to look white and one to the world appears to be black and the new york times um subtitle to their review said two daughters of an interracial couple one white and one black and they kept repeating that throughout the article and i thought wow you really did not read my book if that's what you're coming out of this with so um yeah i think sometimes someone can say something and you're like oh my god i'm so excited that you took that from it i didn't even think about that and then sometimes they're like what book did you read you know yeah i wrote an early book a kid's book called the arizona kid and the boy 16 he goes to arizona it goes to tucson blah blah and one of the reviews said this book could have taken place anywhere right and the title would have worked yeah i know west virginia kid can't wait you know spinning off of what uh danzi just said i have a quote from connie dawes a uh poet and he talks about literature offering us the capacity to carry in us and express the contradictory impulses that make us human and i just really like that you know books that i like you guys books other books that i like are never just point to point but just all the clash you know people do i mean when we talked about um about new people uh it was a library talk and there were a bunch of us and we were able to chat and everybody just thought oh maria don't go back on when that fire escape what are you up to which name there's a bunch of great scenes in that book that was really a dandy both of them as a matter of fact yeah you want you want your character you want your characters to do bad things nobody wants to read about happy characters or happy couples nobody wants to read about people who have it all together it's a chance to get your characters into trouble and that's where the interest and excitement is and you know in the rest of the world you know we're all trying to be so virtuous and fiction should be a space where the paradoxes and the contradictions as you're saying come to life and people behave in ways that they don't want to or don't want to admit to and you know shame all of those things are interesting in fiction yeah and what about you in terms of that cherie do you feel oh you know you know i think that being honest um i mean i mostly write for young adults and being honest is key and so all of those messy things i mean i fi i get gleeful when when i can write a character who does terrible things because yeah i try to i'm such a girl scout so it's like it's sort of like oh i wish i could have said that you know and so that's really but i think um um you know yeah showing humanity you know like just being human i think is is fascinating and for for teen readers who are trying to figure out what that all means i think that's where the honesty of how messy it can be really needs to come in you know i would think especially with that age group it's really liberating and that's really what they want to read is that truthful yeah yeah they want someone to tell them what's actually going on and a book will do that but an adult will not quite often i have a book um and it sounds like i'm bragging there but i have a book called stoner and spazz it's the most stolen book in any why a library because you're telling it like it is yeah i mean you know the girl is addicted to marijuana she's got a potty mouth so kids just take it home you just don't look at home um just a little this is back to the general stuff and then i'll do one more each this is how much do readers expect authors you guys me to accurately reflect the whole of a culture and how do authors meet those expectations much do readers expect to all this to accurately reflect the whole of a culture or that's a month and how do authors meet those expectations if they do i'm curious to know how it is in in the adult literary arena but that's a really big issue in kidlet these days its own voices and writing within your lane um and i have never stuck to one lane um because i'm curious about the world and and writing is one of the ways that i explore it so it all depends on who your audience is someone who has no experience of the culture you're writing about might assume that's it like she must have presented the whole thing whereas someone who's intimately a part of the culture might be like you got this completely wrong or you got it maybe you got it right so my goal is to do the best job i can and be a um you know be a good house guest if i'm visiting another culture and so for this book you know i took some japanese lessons i did go to japan i did i have so many research books i talked to people i had somebody read through the book for the use of japanese language i had somebody else who was japanese and writes world war ii to look at the book and um i you know i had met people on the journey that i did not want to horrify with what i created so i try to do that i try to do the work to be respectful and and that book is even i've i am it started off with a japanese story structure like i wanted to pay honor to what it was start to finish um i don't do that everywhere mr foreign um it is yeah tenketsu um so i you know i i started there and then i tweaked with it because i knew it had to be palatable for american teens to read but i wanted it to have that feel and so far i've gotten good feedback on it um but you know i haven't always been able to do that kind of due diligence like i do the best that i can with my resources and um all apologies if i do something wrong i would actually love to learn from it do you get did you did you i'll ask dante in a second did you get pushback from people who said you didn't you didn't get it you didn't get it right not on this book um no um it's been actually pretty great my guide i had a guy translator in japan and she read the book and i was worried and she said that she's gonna use it with her um tour groups now um which was sort of interesting to and you know i tend to do enough research that when i'm walking around with a tour guide or someone i can tell them something they don't know right um and so that's sort of my goal like do more and then yeah so danzi do you get pushback did people ever say to you you didn't get it right well actually i have the opposite which is i mean every book i've written has featured a biracial female protagonist and um people assume that it's autobiographical because i on some very superficial level resemble the character and i'm always really um pushing back against that because i think that um especially for women of color writers you get read as autobiography if you resemble the character at all and that's something that white men authors don't have you can write 20 books about white male protagonists you'd be a white male and they'll see it as artifice or art or constructed but if you're me and you're writing about characters who are biracial women or girls suddenly it's just reporting from the streets of this experience and actually the thing i'm most proud about is that it's lies and then i made it up and that it's fiction and that i did not climb out on a fire escape and stalk a man and and that i could make you believe that and that i could make you feel you were there in the girl's body doing that or that i didn't i didn't pass as white i wrote about character passing as white those are experiences i've never had and i think you get that taken from you all the time as a writer and you you really have to protect the fact that you made it up and that's that's your job as an artist is to steal what you want from things you know and to stray from that and all of those things are possible on the page but as soon as you write something and you call it fiction it's fiction yeah that is fiction yeah i'm sorry ron no girl my first novel is called lucy the giant and it's about a girl um she's half native alaskan half caucasian and very tall and when i had my very first book launch i showed up at the bookstore and the book saw it looked at me and was like oh i thought you'd be taller yeah right like it had to have been you um yeah i'm a tall person who can feel like you don't have an imagination yeah exactly right no and i just i really refuse to accept that and and people have said to me like are you always going to write about biracial characters and i'm like do you ask white authors that that are they always going to write white characters because somehow that's seen as universal and mine is seen as a special category of experience is very limited and actually it's as universal as everything it's humanity i'm writing about i'm writing about people i was gonna say i have a poem about me working in a mattress factory when i was 18 years old and in the course of the poem i'm inspired to not work there but to move and and go be a writer someplace and people have said to me oh gee i'm really happy to hear that because it gives me some sense of who you were when you were younger and i say i made that up yeah and their faces fall and i stopped i've stopped saying that i've i started to say it was a hell of an experience working in that third match that's that thing about truth like you want the truth to be the emotional truth it doesn't have to be the factual yeah you know exactly yeah it's very liberating to let go of the factual and go into that other realm i think our president would agree all right i thought you'd be talking that's exactly so this is for cherie off of my sheet um how did you capture the layered nuances of japan culture and beliefs and can you take a step beyond extensive research i mean i just sort of added that yeah um japanese culture and beliefs it all began when i was a young girl in college at nyu um i took a japanese literature and translation class in college and um and it was a really tough nut to crack because i had this crazy old professor who wouldn't explain anything we would ask him questions and he would say i don't know you're supposed to teach me which was incredibly expensive and frustrating but reading those books i found when i decided to write this that um i knew more and more about writing in general and um had more access to information and that the the feel of those stories i remember my frustration in college was that japanese novels never end would just stop and i couldn't understand why and now i know there is this story structure kisho tenketsu which is sort of an introduction a deepening knowledge a twist and then a reflection on the things you learned in the first two parts in light of the twist and that's why they rest instead of really change and so um i wanted to work with that because it's a conflictless storytelling structure um unlike the traditional western three-act structure which is all about conflict and it was interesting to approach a story about an actual conflict right world war ii in a structure that had no conflict and so i think that is the underlying thing and then i always i love myth i love fairy tales and folklore so i'm always digging into the bones that are underneath every story we tell and um there were a lot of you know a few japanese folk tales that stood out as um they were turned into propaganda during the war so they shaped uh the male character the pilot character's uh journey but then i was delighted to discover that there are um parallels to i studied greek mythology when i was a kid and we're always paralleled in greek myths to some of the japanese myths so like the underworld and afterlife with rivers and i was able to dig into that too so i think that has something to do with it okay this is for dancing how does it obsession with quote the poet reflects society's view of black men dancing you're muted oh danzi you went away can you run mute oh you did you bad there you go and there i am okay oh sorry um i i i didn't really think of it that way as i was writing it um but like i said if that's what you took from it then um i yeah i'm always so interested in the way that people read the poet and um project maybe that on to it i i saw him to me like it was funny actually i was i was really laughing while i wrote this novel because it was so um ridiculous to me that she just kept pursuing the sky and reading all of this stuff into him that he wasn't really giving her back and um i saw him as like a very specific person um more than a representative of black men and i saw her as a very specific person but clearly their identities i don't think there's any character in the world that is not racialized doesn't have a gender doesn't have a history doesn't have a class background so like of course he is a black male in the 90s in new york city he's an artist he's aloof he's um he's sort of uh bewildered by her and i was interested also i think um in writing against the sort of typical narratives of um sort of i i was interested in female characters as like predators and on onto a male character and the sort of creepiness of maria was really interesting to me and exciting and i think it went against some of the types that i had read um and the type of dynamics between women and men and especially toward black men and like i i'm always interested in writing something that hasn't been represented very much and i just i i like out of control obsessive characters on the page but not in real life i don't want to hang out with her but i liked her as a character you like to write her you don't want to have to be with yeah i would hang out with her i liked her a lot yeah oh good i'm glad i wonder if because um he's referred to as the poet there's like an archetype sort of label on him that then makes him seem more of a of a cipher for all all black artistic men um like you know if we had given him if you'd given him a name he said damn like would that have changed people's perception conversely when you talk about flipping the script like when you have a um a man obsessed with a woman um nobody thinks that woman represents everything because there is already that archetype of the woman the girl the object of desire and um you know i think we're more likely to sort of say only true them that doesn't represent me that represents that other unattainable something yeah i mean one of the other things that that gets read into maria and and like i said none of this is wrong i just i i don't have a prescribed way of reading this book but i've i've heard a lot that she seems like conflicted about her identity or her blackness and like i never thought of that when i was writing her um i never i thought she was pretty clearly identified as a black person and she was very sort of funny about the fact that people saw her and didn't see her as black and she seemed like and that her mother who adopted her didn't want a white baby and then got this baby that was really light-skinned and was like damn you know like i i have to raise this like kid now um and so for me like the comedy of it was in the forefront of my mind but behind that are all sorts of subconscious things and i am really interested in racial projection and how people get read when they walk into a space and how that that experience of the external reading of you shapes your interior life so all of it's true and all of it's there i i would say well that leads me into the question on down my list someone found the phrase tragic mulatto and and wanted to know if that applied or to what degree to maria yeah i mean i i guess i don't really have any interest in a character who's not tragic and like not messed up so there is this trope of biracial characters always being written to have a terrible ending and to throw themself off a cliff because there was a lot of propaganda in that against interracial relationships they wanted to show us as being intrinsically damaged and intrinsically messed up um and i'm always aware of that as a as a kind of type that gets written into biracial characters but um to me i want to be able to write really damaged characters and they are mixed race characters and so does that make them tragic mulattos that would be really hard for me to write a character who had no problems and i wouldn't want to do that so you know i think that's a big burden for a writer to carry to have to always have to answer to that that type and to me my characters aren't desperate to be white they aren't all those things that were written into biracial characters that they are ashamed of being black like no no character i've written has ever felt that way um i'm writing from the character who is happy to be black and that's not their problem their problem is a human problem yeah yeah that makes sense she really looks like you have a question all sorts of things i'm like yeah well it is that thing of of um you know people love an issue book especially for an underrepresented uh community they're like oh it's got to be about the fact that you're underrepresented because of this thing and so you know dancing i hope you just keep writing all the tragic people you want regardless of your makeup so that people get used to the idea that you can be completely screwed up about relationships with with human beings without it being about race and uh i think that's the frustration is that they can't allow nuance if there is something you know visible that they can see that's just yeah like the burden of representation i think that writers of color face and that we have to carry that we and be positive image police and be representing our entire race rather than writing from a point of view of an artist who's writing about an individual who as you know you're talking about is screwed up because human beings are screwed up yeah and that's what makes them interesting so yeah thank you for putting it that way i yeah here's a little quote from the poet louise gluck who as we speak is polishing your nobel prize probably she went to goddard one of the places i teach well you know words of a failure she said i am suspicious of my existing ideas and i only need those to get beyond them into ignorance and then with luck beyond that into discovery ever found yourself making those steps existing ideas are only necessary to get beyond them into ignorance and then would look into discovery absolutely for me i mean i i often sell a a story on a pitch i can write a good sexy pitch it's like a movie trailer yeah yeah and and then i sit down to write and i go wow that won't work and then you have to let go of what you thought it was going to be to discover what it actually is and um that letting go can be hard sometimes because it can be scary like you know you're like well i promised them this and what's it going to be and so um yeah getting past that because the story wants to be born and the story is there and you just have to recognize i think it's like um i don't have children so i'm going to just make a i'm going to assume it's like i was a child so i could say like your parents have ideas about who you will be and what you should do and then you you know you horribly disappoint or you surprise or do whatever you're getting or both yeah yeah disappointed in that surprise but um like that is your stories do the same thing once you let them be who they want to be so i love that yeah i agree so it's it's it's true for me too i i remember going through those steps the spin-off that i was going to ask you is the writerly question um and just kind of tangential to this people have asked me oh once you get your characters established you know who they are and you have them talking don't they just pretty much take over and the rest of the book writes itself do you hear that did it ever happen it doesn't happen to me it i mean i have to labor over every line they never take over and start talking and and i'm just an emanuelensis writing as fast as i can anything once once that happened to me yes once i mean sometimes it happens in little spurts but once in uh in grad school i sat down uh with a pen and a pad and it was like um the character was standing next to me just out of my line of sight and they started speaking and i just wrote it down did i ever publish that no but i wrote it down i was like that's incredible i hope you'll come back you know but it was just the one yeah but i think dialogue is really um one of the places i most come to know my characters if i don't let them speak i don't fully know them so um and i think that's like i i think i struggle a lot with writing and especially the architecture of my novels um but the place i feel most joy is in dialogue and writing how they speak to one another and it's like the playwright in me or something is that i want to have these long stretches of hearing them speak and that's coming from me and and sometimes some days as you're saying sheree it like comes easier than others and moments flashes of hearing them really well but um i find that's the place where i'm most intimate with them and most understand them now i've heard you say that i'm gonna you know walk what i said back about myself because there there have been times when i've i had the momentum up and the characters are talking and they started talking in ways that i hadn't planned and i'm you know the hair my arm stands up i really like that and like you said come back again anytime you know drop by any time that's the rush of writing yeah it's like it is the rush of writing you suffer a lot for that moment too yeah yeah i mean it's relative but there's a struggle involved and then you have these moments and you're very joyful about it but imagine being an astronomer wanting to see asteroids or something go by and you got to drag all your equipment out every night set it up hope it's not cloudy and hope it happens yeah well i'll come down from my studio and tell bianca jesus had such a good day and in a day or so i'll come down and she'll say you know how did the work go and it was awful you know awful and then we have lunch and you know the next day comes yeah it's a little em four stroke quote i just wrote all these little quotes down um he enforcer said that he could write partly because he lived at a slight angle to the universe do you feel that sheree um you know it's interesting i don't i don't think i do but i probably do like when i realize that other people don't think the way i do or didn't see the thing or whatever then i'm like oh maybe i am different so um yeah i'm sure my husband would say absolutely um yeah but i i tend to think i'm more normal than i am yeah i think being an outsider and feeling yourself to be an outsider as a child is one of the greatest training you get to being a writer um and feeling alienated and all sorts of um feelings that you know you don't really like having at the time but those are your training ground for stepping away and being able to describe the world yeah and but when you're an adult lucky you have found a tribe that gets you so you don't feel as much like an outsider as an oddball as you did when you were a kid but that doesn't mean that you aren't it just means you found the other ones i linda the misfit toys yeah yeah and that's what college was for me i i met people who were more like me who liked what i liked and didn't think poetry was silly and you know and i thought oh my tribe well of course you get into that tribe and there's just multicultural inside all these white guys you know it's still one it's real very different here's a quote from marilyn chen it was a poet worth reading um who said this like five words i live in a world determined to erase me you ever feel that um i definitely have and i continue to feel that i don't think that um the culture is comfortable with my self and my world and the people who i am most identified with i think um that was you know in a way the impetus to write my first book was to write um myself into existence and they literally literally have erased people of mixed race um historically that it's literally not been allowed to be seen or the people who made people of mixed race like it's actually cut out of the story and it's unspoken and um and so i think but i think it's it's replicated in all sorts of ways with other people of color in particular or just complexity in the representations of different people and taking away the humanity and the contradictions and and all the things that make us human are are the ways we get erased um there's a great book i teach a class at usc um in representations of passing and performance in american culture and one of the books we look at is um by donald bogle it's called toms coons miami's mulattoes and bucks and it's all about images of black people in television and film and it's a really great primer for my students to be able to critically look at movies and television and not just consume these images they're getting when they see it as part of a historical um you know propaganda that that has been very very damaging so yeah the word i like in that in the uh in the quote was the marilyn chenko was determined oh it's relentless pressure that relentless pressure yeah it is relentless and it's it's um you know one of the things i'm doing now is i'm writing these non-fiction books about historical events or periods and i just um the next one comes out in december is what is the civil rights movement and uh and then i'm working on uh what is what was the harlem renaissance and the thing that killed me is these books are for young readers they're like third to eighth grade and um and i have i have 7 500 words to tell them a giant chunk of history and every act of editing kills me because there's something there that i want them to know and and knowing how much has already been erased knowing how much i'm learning doing the research for these books because it wasn't taught to me even though i had a lot of african-american teachers and um and you know a bunch of education learning things every day and so that's painful to me what we don't teach ourselves so i think it's kind of cool i think in new york there are actually freedom schools again teaching african-americans about their history so that they can move aware and enlightened in the world what are those freedom schools are they freedoms and so during the civil rights movement in the 1960s it um freedom summer a bunch of students went down to mississippi to teach african americans um well to educate them because the education system was was fraught is a nice way of putting it and so i've come across mention of freedom schools again um and i i don't live i live on the west coast so i'm not really involved i came across mention of it and i'm like i wanted i wonder what else is out there and i think that might also be a response to what's going on now it's on both sides a lot of people need education nice well here's a question from the audience as they used to say i'm going to read it off my screen has the response to your work on racial issues changed since george floyd protests and black lives matter as a response to your work on racial issues changed given those incidents i mean i don't pay that much attention to the response to my work and and i also haven't published a new book in a few years so i i guess um but i mean i'm i'm interested in the conversation that it sparked um and the idea that it's all new i think that people have been talking about this for a very long time in the margins and um suddenly you have like american express putting you know check your privilege on their website or black lives matter on their website and like it's a little surreal to like have been writing about whiteness and white fragility and black lives for my entire life and to see my father and people before him writing about this and um have it be so completely ignored and erased and and then like suddenly it's like you worry that it becomes um trendy and and that there will be this sort of high-pitched interest and and how how it will be sustained and how it will be integrated into the culture as a deep deep knowledge and awareness i i just wonder about that um what do you think sheree what's your experience with that well you know i i've had books that where fly girl is a light-skinned black girl passing for white to be a pilot in world war ii and um you know that book came out and it got some attention but when it came award time i think it was an uncomfortable topic and it's still uncomfortable yeah so that was an uncomfortable topic but the book was still popular and it's still taught because it talks about women's issues and all this other stuff um but suddenly black lives matter george floyd and i start getting emails from hollywood going so um you know we see you have this book we're somewhat in you know we'd like to know more and i don't know what will happen there um it would be great if a story got out there that you know has some staying power but as you said who knows it's it it's it's so i think the response is to keep writing yeah you know just keep writing and keep telling those stories so that there's always something because if this is just a moment then that will help fill the gap to the next moment and carry people along i will say the civil rights book i was writing it during all of this upheaval i had almost finished it we're in revisions and part way through the book we changed the title from what was the civil rights movement to what is the syllabus and then my editor who god bless her is a white older white woman she was like um your ending is too you need to like tell them what it's really like because i had this beautiful ending of john lewis and barack obama walking across the edmund pettus bridge and like a couple of good quotes and she was like nope and so that's out and now it ends with like a list of names george floyd brianna taylor like um the idea that this is not over and this is always going on and i'm glad i'm glad that we were able to change the end of that book and dedicated but um yeah it's it's life is a work in progress right at best you're coming up to the end of our hour but here's our next audience question i think it comes from someone interested in what we think of as creative writing and it's not the question is what is the best piece of feedback you've ever received on your writing so not the best piece of advice you ever got about writing the best piece of feedback you've ever received on your writing not editorial yeah whatever we want to interpret my first novel i had a lot of sections that were very poetic and i thought were so beautiful and they were in italics and my editor told me to cut them all and the book was so much better without them and i just remember like being like those those are my most beautiful moments and killing your darlings your darlings yeah yeah i like let the language distract from the story and i thought that the language was more interesting than the story but it wasn't yeah i i i've done that a lot and my editor at candle work would just what do you mean we will will you know mimic this nope good i love that yeah nope and i think okay you know no long phone conversations you know nothing no balm and gilead don't feel bad ronnie nope that's funny gift what about you yeah one of the things that comes to mind is um i have this novel speculative fiction book orleans and um i was writing it one point one per you know first person point of view and my editor my first editor on the book was like no i want it to be like this book i loved as a kid so it has to have three different points of view and i was like i don't think it can carry that maybe two but the third person doesn't have enough to carry a full third of the book but i tried to do it and then i was frustrated because it wasn't working and a friend of mine another writer rana reiko rizzuto she um she reads tarot i met her at um a writing retreat at hedgebrook in washington state and she said do you want me to read the cards for your book she hadn't read the book at all and i said yeah please i'm struggling on this thing and she holds up this card and she's like it's like a river with a rock in it she's like there's a rock there's something stumping the flow of your story and based on this card i see that there's three people and one of them doesn't belong there and i'm like i know exactly who you're talking about and this is crazy and thank you and now i can cut it and if he's if he complains i can tell him that the card said it was wrong i wish someone would do that a tarot card for me yeah that's a great thing me too me too i love that yeah so i think we're getting ready to say good night i think kathy will come in and tell me if it's not because we're in touch after eight um how are we doing kathy there she is we're good i think that it's um i think that if we're ready to wrap up we can we can wrap it up um the questions that came in over the ask a question i put in the uh chat so there are no more audience questions this has been fascinating you know having read these books and i know a lot of our staff have read the books and we've had our book discussions about these books and so it's just been wonderful to hear you guys talk about your work and the books um so thank you so much i'm really grateful and grateful to you ron for bringing your special perspective to this so thank you thank you all thank you guys yeah let's do it again yeah this is great thank you people can watch this this will be online to watch so we'll send out that link so anybody who missed it tonight will be able to watch it later thank you thanks everyone great to talk to you