Lynn Ng Quezon On The Value of Critique Partners and The Anxiety of Author School Visits

March 20, 2023 Mindy McGinnis

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Mindy: We're here with Lynn Ng Quezon, author of Mattie and the Machine, which released in November of last year from Santa Monica Press. One of the things that is really interesting, and I'm sure that my audience is familiar with this by now, is that I started out my life attempting to become a serious writer on a messaging board called Agent Query Connect, which is now defunct. However, it was such a source of knowledge for me and also just comfort. And there were so many people there that I relied on, and I know that they also relied on the boards. And I've had many of them on the show, and you were one of them. So, if you could talk a little bit about what it was like for you as an emerging writer to have that as a resource and to have a community. And for this episode, I really wanna focus on community and support among writers, and also connectivity and networking.

Lynn: There are tons of script writers in LA. I was writing middle grade and young adults, and trying to find somebody who wrote that category was really difficult in person. So I went to the internet, and I actually cannot remember how I stumbled upon Agent Query Connect. I was doing a search. I think I saw on the boards a young adults middle grade group was starting up. So I basically just approached the group and I said, "Is it okay if I just sort of like, watch you guys?" You're doing exchanges online. You're swapping manuscripts. I wasn't sure if I was ready to jump in on that, because all of you guys, at least to me at the time, seemed like you knew what you were doing, and I learned so much from the group. I learned how to give and take feedback. Everybody is really terrific about it, and everybody brought different things to the table. But the thing is, is that we all wrote different genres - quite a bit of Sci-fi. I was writing historical. A couple of other people are writing fantasy. Basically how I learned how a healthy critique group functioned was off of this. I've always been grateful for that. More than half of the group at this point has been published. Which is really amazing, I think.

Mindy: Real quick, because I am confident many of our old AQC board members are present and listening to the episode, share your screen name, if you would, so that everyone recognizes you.

Lynn: Okay, my screen name is Sakura Eries, a modification of my fan fiction writer name. I remember you as BBC with the black cat avatar. It's a little bit funny calling you Mindy because I think of you as BBC.

Mindy: So many people still do. I personally identify an area of my life as BBC. Just for listeners that aren't familiar, my screen name at the time was big black cat 97. And everyone affectionately referred to me as BBC, and then I have Le Chat Noir as my avatar. Even now, I'll get emails every now and then from people that'll be like, "Hey, BBC. I was just wondering," and I'm like, "Oh, yeah!" And then I've actually had a couple of times moving through the publishing world, if AQC happens to come up, and I'll be like, "Oh yeah. I was a moderator there, and it was very important to me." And they'll be like, "Oh, what was your screen name?" And then I'll, "Oh, I was BBC." And they'll be like, "Wait!" I actually had a pretty major editor at a pretty large publishing house who, at the time, had just been an intern and was kinda lurking on the boards, that was like "wait a minute. That was you?"

Going back to what you said about the proliferation of screenwriters where you were at the time and how that wasn't necessarily helpful to you - it is interesting to me. It is very specific, down to your age category and occasionally also the genre - although I can obviously swap manuscripts with my main critique partners at the beginning of my life as a writer who was also a critique partner, were RC Lewis, who writes strictly Sci-fi, and MarcyKate Connolly, who writes mostly fantasy, and I was writing post-apocalytpic dystopian that was very much realistic. There was no fantasy. There was no sci-fi. Yet, we were extremely efficient critique partners for each other. However, when it comes to age category, that I think you do need someone that is operating in the same arena as you because there are certain elements that are extremely important, and I can say as an editor, and I will have folks that are writing YA or even middle grade, and they will have a POV or chapters or even the entire book, is written from the perspective of an adult. No. No, that's not... That will not work. So, you do have to know the "oh no, no nos" are for that age category. And also just especially in the times that we're in now... Censorship being such a big issue. I just found out I've come under fire in another state here just this morning.

Lynn: Oh.

Mindy: Oh no, it's okay. It is to be expected, and I'm surprised it took this long.

Lynn: What's your state count?

Mindy: Missouri. Texas. Florida. Today, we added Pennsylvania. I'm sure that there are others that I just have not been brought to my attention yet. I've started to make it on to the lists. So it begins. I'm not saying that people should write in order to keep themselves safe from the censors, because also the censorship issue is something that we are talking about a lot inside of publishing. The average person, if they're not moving through the school system world at this point, probably don't know much about it. A new writer that isn't necessarily inside baseball might not be aware of some of the things that are going on. So, I do think it is important to be connecting with people inside of the age category that you're writing for, and if you can find someone within your genre as well, I think that's super important.

Lynn: I would definitely agree with that because when I moved out of LA and I moved up to the Bay Area, and I was connecting with the local writers here, my first group that I connected with... They were doing chapter book and picture book. I was the only YA person there. That was really awkward. They were very nice people, they were. Giving feedback was difficult 'cause I didn't read the age group. They didn't know how to give me feedback. That relationship lasted two months, but I need to find another group. I was fortunately able to find a local group that was able to join. We do mostly YA. They're great. What you said makes absolute sense because we all write different genres as well. One of them was doing horror. Another person was doing fantasy. Another person was doing magical realism, but we're all writing middle grade/YA. SO even though the genres are so different, we kinda know what the audience is. I don't have a teenager. I'm not a teacher. I don't have that experience. The people that are in my group, they have teenagers, one of them was a teacher, and another one... He works with children's theater. So we are able to exchange information that way, and at least I can sort of keep abreast what's going on. You probably, since you're still working at schools, you probably know a bit more than me.

Mindy: Well, one of the things I try and that I counsel other people that do write, young adult specifically, is not to worry too much about slang in particular or also whatever platform happens to be at the time. Because it'll date your book so seriously. So, for example, the very first novel that I ever wrote that was YA, I was in college. So we're talking late 90s. A major part of the plot unrolled over communications through AOL Instant Messenger. 10 years later - AIM doesn't even exist anymore, and nobody knows what it is. You know, Facebook was huge. Now it's not. Everybody was on Twitter. That's kind of fading. And the teenagers, they are on Instagram, and they are on TikTok. I learned very early on - don't be specific. Don't mention music. Don't mention a specific social media platform. Don't use specific slang. And traditional publishing is gonna take 18 months to two years for that book to make it into print anyway. And in two years, what you said in that book might be comical. That is a very specific facet of YA, and that is one of the reasons why, like you said, I do think it is important that we operate closely or within the arenas of people that are also writing something at least similar to what we are writing. Moving on then, I wanna talk about finding that group and the importance of the critique partner and tying that in with your own journey. So talk to us a little bit about Mattie and the Machine, and how you moved forward from AQC and into the realm of the published author.

Lynn: For Mattie and the Machine, I had queried at that point three manuscripts and they all got trunked. It's part of the journey of the writer, and you just sort of had to keep on going. What happened was I decided to try something completely different, and so I moved up to 19th century America. When I wrote my other manuscripts, it was because I really was in love of that ancient Greek era. But what happened was, was that I was flipping through this set of mini biographies about famous women, it's called Girls Who Rocked The World, and I happened across Margaret Knight's biography. I hadn't heard of her before. I fell in love with the character, but I knew nothing else about the era. And the thing about historical is that... And you know this, because you wrote a historical yourself, you have to get the set correct. I spent a lot of time trying to get the set correct. So, she was an inventor that was famous for two things. One is that she was a child inventor. And the second thing is that there was a lawsuit involving a machine she invented, but a man stole the design. And so she had to go and sue this guy in order to get the patent rights back. And so I saw that story and I was like, "Okay. I have to write the story." I went so far as to go to the National Archives on the other side of the country to get the lawsuit records. Dig them up. These things are like hand-written from 1870, and I transcribe them all. And then I wrote the whole thing out. I got the patent for the machine, and so I broke that all down. This is how this thing was built, how it functioned.

The thing is, is that I have to re-mold this for a modern audience. There's things that I was trying to write on the page portraying her correctly as an inventor and about this whole lawsuit. Some of the texts I would lift directly from the deposition documents. This is what I put out in front of my group. And so what they really helped me to do, because I am an engineer and I have an engineer brain and I sort of look at things a certain way, they were able to sort of reel me back and go, "This part is okay, but you're writing a certain way and then you get to this point, and it's like you just jumped back two centuries." That's how my group really helped me. I spent two years researching it. Two years writing it, and I spent two years querying it. And to be quite honest, I didn't think it was gonna get picked up. When I was getting towards the end of the two years, I was like, "I'm gonna get up to 100 queries, and I'm gonna send out 100 of them. If I don't get anything after 100, then I'm just gonna end it." On Manuscript Wish List, that's where I found Santa Monica Press. They had an open call for submissions, and they were looking for young adult historical. I'll put it in and just see if they pick it up. And it got picked up. I was still sort of cautiously optimistic pretty much up until the ARCs got sent out.

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Mindy: With historical, we tend to go really deep in the weeds and we wanna explain why this is the way it is. And we want our research to get on to the page, and that doesn't necessarily make for interesting reading.

Lynn: I will agree on that. I went a bit in that direction, and I needed my critique group to reel me back. And actually there was another scene where she accomplishes this first big goal, and so now she can move forward and my critique was like, "That's it? She's not going to have a celebration? She need to have celebration." Everybody was saying it. So the thing about critique groups is like if one person says it, out of a group of five, it's kinda like up to you to decide if you wanna take it or not. But if everybody's telling you that, then you really have to pay attention. So there is actually like...

Mindy: Absolutely.

Lynn: ... half a chapter in Mattie and the Machine that was not part of the original. I was not intending to put in there, but because my critique group was basically screaming at me, "You need to put this in there!" I put it in there, and it made it a better book.

Mindy: You need those critique partners to tell you where you're doing too much and where you are not doing enough. You can't see it to yourself. Tell me a little bit about how you feel now, because you had a quite a long journey. It was a lot of work for you. I was working for 10 years to get an agent, and I know that you had a similar timeline and similar struggles to me in terms of moving from being an aspiring writer to being a published author. So, how does it affect your process now? Are you continuing to write? Do you feel a lift of pressure or do you feel more?

Lynn: So I feel a bit more pressure because Santa Monica Press, my editor has been awesome. I feel so much gratitude for them for picking my book out of the slush pile. I mentioned before, I'm not that great with social media. Trying to figure out how all this works. Promoting a book now is difficult 'cause I just got on to Instagram. I looked at TikTok, and I sort of went away screaming. I don't know that I should admit that, but it's like trying to figure out how to give Mattie the best chance out there. So, I have my first school visit scheduled for next month. That's both exciting and terrifying. At the time that you were launching, the whole thing was like blog tours, stuff like that. I don't... Do people even do blogs anymore?

Mindy: Not really.

Lynn: All the stuff that I learned before about the time that you and MarcyKate were debuting. You're my first batch of people that I knew that were actually moving on so I was like, "Oh, this is what they're doing. I should keep track of it." It took me 10 years. And now I finally caught up with you, and now the landscape's changed. So, I'm grateful for you having me on this podcast. I really appreciate that. But yeah, I'm still trying to figure out how that part of the business works. It doesn't really affect the writing part because I'm still writing. That part I feel like I know pretty well, and at the time that Mattie and the Machine got picked up, I was like 75% of the way through another manuscript which is a completely different genre. So I'm just chugging along on that. That is sort of like a comforting space, 'cause I've been in it for 10 years. I know that part. Being motivated to write is not that difficult. We'd exchange a couple of emails about school visits. Because you've worked in a school environment, maybe it's not quite as terrifying for you. I went to school in California in the Bay Area, and we never had authors visits at my school. I don't even have that to fall back on. I don't know what they're supposed to be like.

Mindy: Yeah, well. I mean, I can tell you... So on the social media front, I've said multiple times on this podcast. I'm gonna say it again. I don't think it sells books. It connects you to your readers, and it can help people aware of you as a human being and maybe aware of your book as well. But I don't think it matters, if I'm gonna be totally honest with you. I think it's a nice to have it because people will reach out to me. People that have read my books will send me a message on Instagram or they'll DM me, usually Instagram. I answer everybody. It's like I will absolutely have a conversation with anyone. So, that is how I use social media these days... Is more of connectivity. It's not gonna sell books. If you happen to go viral for whatever reason, and usually that's gonna be a TikTok, then good for you. But the truth is, I'm not even present on TikTok. I have an account. I've made three or four reels. I'm not gonna put myself into it. I don't care enough, and it shows if you don't care. I've absenteed myself from that platform. If other people wanna make TikToks about me, cool. That would be super helpful. Please do it.

But when it comes to school visits... Yeah, high school's hard. High school's hard when you're in it, and it's really hard to walk back as an adult. And if you have any trauma from high school, it will hit you in the face again. Working in a high school for 14 years was the most beneficial thing to my writing career. Understanding teens today. Being connected with them. How they think and feel and move through the world today, which is completely different from how I moved through the world in the 90s. But also, people are still people. Teenagers are still teenagers, and they wanna have fun. They wanna laugh. They don't wanna be condescended to, and they don't want to feel like you are imparting a lesson. They don't wanna feel like you are making a point and teaching them something. My most successful school visits are one where I just go in. I talk about my book, but usually in terms of... I'm not trying to sell them my book. I talk about whatever the book is about. With Heroine, I talk about where I got the idea for the book, and then I talk about my research a little bit. And I talk about the opioid epidemic. I just talk around it, and I get them interested in the idea 'cause they don't... They know when they're being marketed too. That's what I do. Man, I love doing it. I miss being with the kids. I miss being in front of the kids. I love interacting with them. So man, I love school visits. I'd do one every day. I know that they're scary, and I have the benefit of 14 years of being in front of them, being ready for their comebacks, and being ready... 'cause some of them are gonna give a shit and it's like... I got good, as a librarian and then as a sub, at fending them off and coming back at them in a way that is appropriate and also respectful towards them. But just like a little bit of back and forth, and then they're like, "Oh, okay. You're cool." I mean, it's a tight rope. It's a tight rope. Last thing, we just talked about social media. So I know that you are putting yourself out there so that listeners can find you and follow you there. Why don't you let people know where they can find you online and where they can find Mattie and the Machine.

Lynn: You can find me online at Instagram, ngquezon, N-G-Q-U-E-Z-O-N. My author website is at NgQuezon dot wordpress dot com. So that's N-G-Q-U-E-Z-O-N dot wordpress dot com. And if you go over there, you can find information about where to find the book, and also there's reader's resources. So stuff about Margaret Knight. I did all that research. So for anybody who is interested in geeking out about those particular details about 19th century women or Margaret Knight, the inventor... There's some drawings. Just in case somebody really wants to know have all these parts work. Dumped them into a Reader's Guide, and so that's something that you can also download from my website. And then in terms of where Mattie and the Machine is available, you can find it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound... Basically, if you wanna find all the other places, you can also look it up on my website.

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

Louise Kennedy on Coming to Writing Later in Life & Short Form vs. Long Form

December 26, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: We're here with Louise Kennedy, author of the novel Trespasses which is a forbidden romance set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. So because my audience is primarily American, if you could just even illustrate what the Troubles are.

Louise: Okay, first of all, Mindy, thank you very much for having me. The reason for that is that it was first used in the early 1920s. So the part of Ireland that I was born and raised in, in the northeastern corner, has really seen a lot of sectarian conflict - basically conflict between Catholics and Protestants. In the early 1920s this erupted, and someone then called it the Troubles. Then in 1969 rioting happened as a result of civil rights marches that were handled very briefly by the police. A journalist apparently referred to it as the Troubles - said that it resembled the Troubles of the 20s, and I think that kind of stuck. So that's why it possibly sounds like a strange term. So I suppose from 1969 until mid to late 90s, three and a half thousand people were killed and very, very many more were injured as a result of sometimes sectarian violence and sometimes state violence. I grew up in a small town on the edge of Belfast Loch during those years.

Mindy: My family's also from the north. It's something that I've always educated myself about and tried to learn about for a lot of different reasons. Of course, obviously part of like the history of my family, but it is also very much a wonderful backdrop for so many things. Romance and of course, fighting and families being torn apart. It's also a true story. These things happened, have continued to happen. Setting this story, setting your novel Trespasses in this time and in this environment, is so interesting to me and to so many people. Like it's just compelling stories. But also it's somewhat based on your life. Is that correct?

Louise: My family owned a bar in a town that was predominantly Protestant. We belonged to a small, tight Catholic community. The town had a very large British army base on the edge of it, which wasn't particularly troublesome until the Trouble started. And then that meant that there were vast numbers of extra troops had been sent in by the British government. My family - we have to tread a fairly fine line in dealing with these British soldiers who were coming in in a place that was very mixed. You know, there's another thread in the story, which is, you know, Cushla, the main character, her role in the book as a primary teacher. I was probably seven or eight in 1975, the year in which the book is set, and I could have been one of Cushla's pupils. So the school day, you know, that the children in her class have is very much like the one that I had. The story is completely fictional, but maybe to compensate for that I felt it was really important to make everything else as true to what those days were like as possible. The news reports in the book correspond with what actually did happen in the news on corresponding days in 1975. All of those other aspects of the world, I tried to make them as real as possible.

Mindy: I wanted to talk to you about the fact that this is your debut novel. Have you always wanted to be a writer? Is this something that has always been present for you or is this a later decision?

Louise: I don't know if I could even call it a decision. So I suppose maybe when I was a young child, I read a lot. My mother kept me very well supplied with books. Maybe when I was around seven or eight, I had a teacher. She used to do these with everyone in the class where she made me play a piece of classical music and ask us to write about it. Which was fairly ambitious of her. But we did write some things, and she was always really encouraging. But that was probably about the last bit of encouragement I got. I borrowed money and trained as a Cordon Bleu cook when I was about 21. And yeah, so I spent nearly 30 years cooking and running restaurants. I always read a lot. So when I was 47 a friend of mine asked me to join a writing group with her, which I thought was a ridiculous idea, but I went along and tried my hand at writing a short story. When I brought it to the group, they were insanely encouraging.

Mindy: And so Trespasses is your debut novel. And you already mentioned so you were a child in the 70s when the Trespasses is set. So you're now in your 50s, and you've written your debut novel. So what is that like?

Louise: Well, it's sort of great, I have to say. You know, I've had people ask me before, and I think there are some people who are of the opinion that maybe publishers are only interested in youth. And I really didn't find that to be the case. I had a collection of short stories that came out last year. So I mean, I guess I had a little bit of practice with publication with that. I think it's never too late. I think it's kind of a great exercise also in just kind of blundering along whether you think it's a good idea or not. I think I possibly couldn't have done this in my 20s, to be honest. I think I wouldn't have been able to sit in a room and have my work critiqued. I think I would have had a lot less to write about then. Now, that's not to say there's other people in their 20s. But just for me, I don't think it would have worked.

Mindy: So you think that like life experience for you was such a major part of helping to build that?

Louise: Yeah, I think so. I think all of the reading I did really helps. You know, I think as a reader we don't just take in story. I think we take in the shape of things and techniques, or there's even knowing what it is that we're taking in. So I think that that probably had a huge influence on me. It's probably just about practice as well. The Irish writer Anne Enright said, "You know, just treat it like yoga or anything else that you do all the time. If you habitually turn up, there's a possibility that something's going to happen on the page."

Mindy: I agree with that entirely, and I agree very much about reading being a huge part of being a writer. It's always a big part of my life. And that's something I like to tell people because obviously you are someone that has extensive training and extensive experience in the restaurant business. You are not someone that has training in writing. You don't have like a background or a special degree.

Louise: I did come to writing late, and actually the year after I started, I did do an MA in creative writing and then I did a PhD. But those would have been recent. So, I think really what I was trying to do for myself then was I felt that I'd left it very late, not too late, but I felt that I'd left it late and I wanted to learn as much as possible. So I think maybe very quickly it had become quite serious for me. So I did enroll in an MA when I was 48 and then the PhD the following year. I think maybe very quickly I realized that writing was going to be very important to me and it seemed very serious. Not that I ever thought anyone would ever pay me to do it or that anybody would ever publish me, but I just wanted to have some sort of structure around the deadlines and things.

Mindy: For you, it was something that you discovered could be a part of your life and a pretty major part of your life outside of your career.

Louise: I joined a writing group in January 2014, but I probably wasn't at a really great place with my current life as a chef. So myself and my husband had been running a restaurant for around six or seven years. It had opened during the recession and it just got worse and worse and more and more difficult. I think things probably had to be fairly bad for me to even consider trying to write. It wasn't that I thought it was ever going to materially solve any of our problems. I was ready for something that was going to take me out of myself, and I think that writing really did that for me.

Mindy: So you're utilizing it as an escape very much.

Louise: I could sit in a corner and scribble away making things up instead of checking the bank balance. It was fantastic.

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Mindy: So then tell us a little bit about Trespasses.

Louise: So Trespasses... It's set in 1975. It is about a young Catholic teacher called Cushla Lavery. By day, she teaches a class of seven, eight-year-old children. In the evenings, sometimes she helps out in the pub that her family owns. So Cushla is in the bar one evening on a quiet night - a stranger walks in. His name is Michael. He's a barrister. He's a lot older than her. He is a Protestant, and also he has a wife.

Mindy: So when it came time for you to say, I think I want to try my hand at a novel, what was it that made you decide this? This story. This setting. These people.

Louise: For a few years this young female character in the north of Ireland was wandering into stories and bits of things that I'd written. And it wasn't Cushla, you know, maybe sometimes the character would be quite different. I think maybe that this character was sort of playing on my mind. You know, just the idea of placing her in the seventies. And I think maybe the thing about the north that I'm really interested in is a relatively small number of people were directly involved in the fighting, but yet it affected everyone else every single day and every single thing that they did. So I just wanted to maybe show how this young woman, you know, she's had all the normal feelings like sort of desire and frustration with her mother and you know, the role of these constraints on how people lived back then. In March 2019, I got a diagnosis for malignant melanoma and I had some surgery and I knew I was going to be off work for a few months. Partly to take my mind off whether I might be dying or not, I suppose, I decided to try and write a thousand words a day. And I figured that if I managed to do that most days that I would at some point have a draft of a novel, and that's what happened. So I guess within about three months I had something that... A fairly crazy first draft.

Mindy: That's exactly my process as well. Thousand words a day and you keep that up long enough and you will have a novel eventually.

Louise: Absolutely. And I think also, I'm sure you find this too, that even if what you've got is an awful mess, I think that some of that energy and that momentum of the writing every single day stays on the page - even after you've cleared up all the mad stuff.

Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. And I think too, something that one of my friends says is "you can't edit what doesn't exist." You can fix it later, but do your thousand words a day until you have a novel. And then worry about fixing it.

Louise: Trying to do that at the moment. That is definitely the way to do it because when I write short stories I don't do it like that at all. I tend to just like torture myself over every paragraph for days on end and then move on to the next one. And it's sort of hellish. The discipline of turning up and working every day is the way to do it, isn't it?

Mindy: Yes, it is. Do you find that writing short stories then is harder than writing a novel? Because I certainly do.

Louise: I think they're really hard. I think because they're so unforgiving. I mean, you don't get away with the spare words - nevermind a sentence. You don't get away with like a big range of images. It all has to be working towards the same thing. I think tone is so important. I'm very slow at writing short stories, and I find them extremely hard. I also think that when they work they're the most beautiful things on earth. The idea of a draft of a novel... I just think it's a lot more freeing. I mean, that's not to say that it's easier, but it's just very different, isn't it?

Mindy: It is. You've got a lot more room to build your characters and establish your plot and build your environment. You've just got more space - "more forgiving" is the way you put it -and I think that's absolutely accurate. Then as someone who has become published and just like really changed the career path very suddenly later in life, what is that like? What has that been like?

Louise: It's been kind of amazing actually, because I never thought I'd ever earn a penny at this. I never thought anybody'd want to publish me. I probably needed a bit of encouragement. First of all, in my writing group and then maybe in my MA class. And then after that, pals of mine who are also students in Queen's University or was doing the PhD. I think I really wanted that. But like I was absolutely thrilled if something was accepted into a journal or if it placed in a competition. All along I thought I was just kind of doing it for myself. It's been really actually kind of incredible. Although I live in an ordinary town in the northwest of Ireland. It rains a lot. I have two kids who are 22 and 19 who are both students in Dublin. I need to get out and do some digging in my garden. I mean, my life, it's no different than it ever was. It's just that sometimes I get to go to festivals, or I get to have lovely chats with people like you. And sometimes it feels like somebody else did it. I don't know.

Mindy: I often feel like somebody else did it. When I look at my books that I've published, I'm like, "huh, that's interesting."

Louise: Exactly. It's like, how did I even do that? Like, was I even there?

Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. So now that you've moved into the realm of being a published author, does it change how you approach writing now that you're not just writing for yourself anymore?

Louise: I think maybe it's okay. I wrote a collection of short stories, which is published in the UK and Ireland last year. I didn't really look on that as a collection until really quite late in the process. I wrote that crazy draft of Trespasses. My editor in the UK saw it was three chapters and a synopsis. She didn't see anything until I'd done about five drafts. So I did kind of feel as if I was writing on my own. But also there was the obligation there because I was under contract. I was really worried at the start where I thought, "oh my God, is this going to just like stifle me completely and, you know, instill me with so much terror that I won't be able to do it." But actually it was okay. I'm hoping that it's going to continue to be okay. I'm trying to write another novel at the moment. I when to say trying to... It's just that my melanoma came back, so I'm getting some treatment for that as well. Although it's going really well, but it's just, you know, there are appointments and things. You know, I was worrying for a while. I was thinking, "oh, I'm not writing. I'm not writing." And then one day I sat at the computer and everything was all better. I mean, I suppose the cure for not writing is just to write, isn't it?

Mindy: Yes, it is. Well, and like you said, you have that discipline of showing up and sitting down and writing every day. And if you do that, I think it doesn't matter who you're writing for or why you're writing. You're still writing.

Louise: Exactly.

Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find the book Trespasses and where they can find you online?

Louise: Trespasses ... I think it's going to be at all bookshops. Is it All Good Bookshops? You can find me on Twitter, Kennedy Lulu. I'm also on Instagram a bit, and I think it's Louise.Kennedyy with two Y's.

Dr. Tara T. Green On Black Women As Activists, Performers, and Women With Desires

August 8, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.

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Mindy: We're here with Dr. Tara Green who has degrees in English from Louisiana State University and Dillard University. She has 25 years of teaching experience. She is currently a professor of African-American Studies at the University of Houston. Two books came out recently - Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson as well as See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era. So I'd like to first talk about your book about Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Most people probably aren't even aware of who she is, and if they are, it is probably in relation to her ex-husband, who is the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. I'm from Ohio and so Laurence Dunbar is someone that we talk about a lot here, and usually in a highly positive light. So if you'd like to just talk a little bit about the book, L ove, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, which is available from Bloomsbury.

Tara: Thank you for allowing me to be on the show today. I grew up in the New Orleans area, and I did not know about Alice Dunbar-Nelson. I was not aware of her work until I was a student at Dillard University. Just so happens I was an English major. I can still remember reading her work for the first time. Actually, I think I remember the impression that I got from her work. I can't even remember which short story I read, and that was when I found out that she had graduated from an iteration of the institution that is now Dillard University. She graduated from Straight University. Some years later I would wonder, why did she leave New Orleans to marry Paul Laurence Dunbar? Because I knew that colorism - the discrimination that occurs because of people of color, this is something that we deal with in various communities. Lighter skin people have a certain kind of privilege, and she was in New Orleans and she was very light-skinned. So why would she marry Paul Laurence Dunbar, who was a darker skinned man, even though he was a famous man? And so the book really looks at not only their relationship from her perspective, but the life that she had as a political activist, and as a teacher, and as a child growing up in New Orleans before she even met him. And then he was not actually her ex-husband, but her first husband. She would become his respected widow after his death. Then she would marry two other men, but she would continue with her careers as a suffragist, a political activist with the Republican Party. She just did so much. She was a member of the Black Women's Club that was certainly committed to the uplift of the black race at a time of severe and overt discrimination, not only in the south, but in other parts of the country as well. So there was so much to learn about her, and it took me 10 years to pull that project together.

Mindy: That is a real work of the heart then. That's a ton of research, a ton of dedication, a ton of delving into an area that I think people are really kind of beginning to understand. So many women, especially minorities, moving in the background, moving in the shadows to be active and to take risks and do the things that they did. And we don't even know their names.

Tara: Yeah, and she was just one of many. It's kind of easy to point to her in some ways, because she was well-known. And she was well-known because she kept her husband's, her first husband's, name in the air, if you will. So she became the one who had the access to his royalties because she stayed married to him. That was the smart thing. And she kept his last name even when she married twice more. She was one who was in the spotlight, but there were hundreds of black women who were involved with the Black Club Women's Movement in rural towns and larger cities in the country. And their names we do not know, but they were fighting for a better United States of America.

Mindy: Talking about doing that research and working on something for 10 years - how do you go about putting together all of that information? And how do you decide what makes it into the book? Because I'm sure, just as a novelist, I know how much research I do to write fiction and how little of it actually ends up in the book. Give me an idea of what that process is like when you're working on non-fiction and obviously just really dedicating yourself to research.

Tara: It was quite the challenge, and I think that's why it took 10 years. I would think that I was finished. I would send it out. Readers would say, "We don't like this because of these reasons," and it was usually because I didn't have enough. It was never because I had too much. Develop here. Why didn't you say this about that? So her archives, most of her materials were sold to the University of Delaware, and that was my starting place. They have housed diaries, scrapbooks, unpublished works, published works and their various iterations, letters. So all of these materials were available. There were some scholars who had done some work but no one had written a biography. So how do I come to it and make those decisions? I have to look at and think about what has already been published. So that's, of course, part of the research, and then I try to, as much as possible, trace a chronology. I also had to consider my audience. What is it that an audience - who does not have the training that I have as a literary scholar - what is it that they would need to know? So I would find myself repeating things at times and saying things that I might not ordinarily say if I had a primary audience of literary scholars who may have known her work, or maybe history bluffs who know loads of stuff about what happened in Wilmington, Delaware at a specific time, because that's where she spent most of her life. So I had to think for multiple readers, and that was something that I had not done before. So this was a different journey for me as a writer.

Mindy: And when you're talking about having to consider what else has been done, like what work is already out there, that's not so different from writing fiction where you really do have to consider the market. You can't just be someone who is like, I'm really passionate about this one thing and this one person, and I want you to be too. It doesn't work that way.

Tara: Yeah, and publishers will not publish if you're going with a certain kind of press. But publishers won't publish unless you can tell them that there's a market and then who that market is. So saying, "Oh... Well, this is unique and nobody has written about this before" - I just read an editor say this on Twitter - that's ridiculous. If this is so unique and no one has written about it before, there may be a reason for that. The marketing becomes really important. I really had to think, not so much as a person with this PhD in English. I had to use that to do the research, because I've been doing archival work since I was in graduate school. So I knew how to do that research, but writing that research in such a way that it could be an interesting story and to introduce to readers all of this work that people generally just don't know anything about because either it hadn't been published or, as you said, they just don't know Alice Dunbar-Nelson. They know Paul Laurence, but they don't know her. So how do I talk about her work and talk about it in such a way that it shows who she was as a person, who she was as a political activist, and who she was as a black woman living at a specific time.

Mindy: So many corners and so many pieces of the puzzle that create a whole human being. And yet also, you said you had her archives. So you're working with not only a person who is highly present in the public arena, but you're also attempting to construct part of a personal life as well. To bring about that whole picture. To bring about all of those elements together to create a whole person, and I think that can be extremely difficult when you're dealing with a historical figure that you also admire and uphold.

Tara: Yeah, and because I've done that before to write shorter biographies - I did that, I wrote about black men and their relationships with their fathers in a previous text - I knew that I could not get emotionally attached to her. That was really important. Try to see what she saw through her perspective and to tell that story, but to remember that I'm a biographer and that I'm not Alice Dunbar-Nelson. So that was extremely important to me because I've had a situation where I got too close to the subject and found myself crying and hoping that - this was actually with Malcolm X - and hoping that he wouldn't get killed at the end of his biography, which is ridiculous, right? Because the man was murdered in 1965. But I got so attached to him. I don't usually talk about that. It may even be obvious in my work. And I think I'm as protective of her as I would be with any black woman subject that I'm writing about, but not to the extreme that there are times when I say, "You know, that just wasn't right, honey. That was ugly, what you did there," right? I try, there are times when I just try to be objective and say, "This is what happened." She has affairs and she's married, and people have taken me to task. Well, that's what happened. She's a bisexual woman. I talked to Christian woman who have questions about that. That's not my issue. My mission is to present the facts in the story. This is who she was.

Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. You're a biographer and you are bringing the truth to page. And a whole life, a whole person, is never going to always be pretty, and that's just the way it is. It doesn't matter who you're looking at, I don't think.

Tara: Yeah and that's what makes us interesting.

Mindy: Absolutely, I agree. I mean, God forbid, I don't want anybody to ever write my biography. Jesus, no. But I'm from a very, very, very small town in Ohio, and we actually have an author who was from here. Her name is Dawn Powell, and literally no one knows who she is. She is lost in the shuffle. She's an amazing novelist. She was friends with Tolstoy. She is just this really cool person that had a really cool life and did some amazing things. But she also had some tragic things in her life and some things that were questionable to certain groups of people. And when I read her biography - similar feelings, because I do feel drawn to this person who is a writer like me, from an extremely small town. She actually wrote a short story about the town that I live in and am from. I have a great affinity with her, and I can be emotional about her. But nobody is canonized here. We're all just people.

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Mindy: So I wanna talk a little bit too about See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era. So tell us a little bit about what that book is about and the spectrum of everything that it covers.

Tara: Again, it goes back to my interest in biography and the lives of black women at a particular time. In many ways, it's certainly in conversation with the Alice book, as I call it, L ove, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. I almost wanna call it a sequel, but it's funny because the Alice book came out of January and this book came out in February. But again, I wrote Alice over a 10-year period, and this book was written maybe in the seventh, eighth year, I started writing that book. And why did I start writing that book? Well, because Alice Dunbar-Nelson gave so much of herself to activism, to uplifting the lives of black people, and of course, changing perspectives about black people in the United States of America. She was, along with those other black activists, the kind of American that we would want to see. She wanted a better country. She dies, though, in 1935. She had some ailments. She was in poor health for much of her life, and part of that probably came from the abuse that she suffered in her marriage with Paul Laurence.

But I began to wonder what about black women who are making a life and they put themselves first? Who did that? What did that look like? So then if the community or the race benefits from the work that they're doing, that's great, but what if it's not their priority? And so that's why they're in conversation because I wanted to look at black women from a different perspective, and this also comes with the fact that over a ten-year period, I'm also getting older. So my perspective is changing as well. And we have the Black Lives Matter movement, Obama's re-election, and so all of our country is changing in the time in which I'm writing. I looked at four black women: Lena Horne, Moms Mabley, W. E. B. Du Bois' daughter Yolande Du Bois, Memphis Minnie, who's a blue singer. So four black women from different walks of life who were born in the late 1800s, who lived late 1800s to 1900, who lived maybe into the 70s, 80s - Lena Horne lives a little bit longer - but what did it look like for these women who live their lives.

Moms Mabley was a comedian, so she certainly brought pleasure to others. She was very successful as a comedian. She was also a lesbian at a time in which same-sex relationships... people could find themselves being jailed. But everybody knew that she was a lesbian. So we have her. We have this eloquent woman in the form of Lena Horne, who was also a civil right movement. Memphis Minnie, very little work on her, but she was someone who was a pioneer in country blues music. As her name suggests, she was a southern woman. So I always wanna include some perspective on Southern-ness in my work because I'm from the south - for generations now. And I wanted to write about her music and what it meant for this blues woman to talk openly about finding pleasure in sex, what she would do if a man mistreated her. So I really enjoyed listening to her music and invite others to do so as well. And then we have Yolande Du Bois, who was a black woman of privilege, being of the upper class. Her father was the most renowned scholar in the country with an international reputation. I'm able to track her life through letters and found out so much about her because, like Alice Dunbar-Nelson, I wanted to separate her from this famous man and to look closely at who she was and what did pleasure look like for her. I enjoyed writing, and I finished writing it during the first year of the pandemic. So it ends with me discussing what pleasure looks like for me during a particular time. I guess I would say all of my books are my favorites because I wrote them. But that was a book that I feel like I'm glad that I wrote it. I started writing it before a pandemic that we didn't know what's coming, but that I was able to finish it at that time because I needed to finish it at that time. That was the book that I would have wanted to write during a pandemic.

Mindy: When we talk about women's desire, women's sexuality, and just women even having desire, I feel like to a lot of people, amazingly, this is still news. And I think that's ridiculous, number one. But being a woman and moving through the world and declaring that you do, in fact, have desires and have specific things that you are or are not attracted to, or that you have wants in the first place, it still seems to be kind of a shocker for a lot of people. And there's an extra wrinkle there when you're a person of color. So if you can talk about that a little bit. That would be fascinating.

Tara: Well, yeah, I do talk about in the introduction that we have to consider for black women this history in the United States and other parts of the world, also the history of slavery and of rape. And so then how do black women define themselves outside of that history? So what's the impact of that history of that trauma? Black women are often placed into these stereotypical categories. And so then if a black woman, especially if she's light skin, desires to have sex or desires to be looked at as a sexual being, then she's probably thought of then as this Jezebel figure. This slut. This woman who we see it now as being the welfare queen, the welfare mother. She has all these children. There are no fathers, and it's because she's just irresponsible. I think even in conversations about abortion and the impact that that has on black women, that in the back of the mind when we discuss the greater impact on black women, that stereotype is still going to force its way through. If black women are greatly impacted and they need abortions, then it's probably because they are more sexually irresponsible in this animalistic way than women of other races. We always have to deal with this history that was thrust upon us. This is the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade - one of many legacies of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. And so what I had to do was to discuss that, but I couldn't stay in that. I do talk about what pleasure looks like for black women. It can be laughter. It can be being with a lover of choice, of consenting to that. Or during the pandemic, you know, for some of us, it could be something as simple as cooking. It could be listening to music or performing. Performance means so much - it's multi-layered. So those are some of the things that I get into in the book.

Mindy: I think it's so true, what you're saying about the pandemic kind of helping us to find other sources of pleasure, I think, in life. And yes, touch is amazing. And having a partner or someone that you're with... those are all wonderful things and I wouldn't trade them for anything. I think the pandemic really made us sit down and think about other ways to fulfill ourselves. So you were talking about using the time to write the book and it was the specific book that you needed at that time. I was similar in that I undertook some projects that normally I would not have done. This is my shut-in time. This is my sphere. This is my cone, and now is the time for me to do the introspective work and work on myself too, in a lot of ways.

Tara: Those are times where I think that we were asked to redefine ourselves. So some people gained weight, for example, during the pandemic. And I decided that that was gonna be the time where I was going to lose weight, and I began to do a lot of walking. And I had moved into this neighborhood a year before, and I was the person of color in the neighborhood. And this was also the time in which Ahmaud Arbery is shot jogging through a neighborhood in Georgia. So when I talk about walking, walking isn't just a pleasurable experience. It's also an experience where I have to navigate how I understand that the world sees me. And all of this is in the book. Because if I have to experience this in 2020-whatever, think about how these black women are having these kinds of experiences in the early 1900s. One aspect that I'm also talking about is black women's performance versus the voyeuristic perspective that she has to deal with and navigate - that challenge of the voyeuristic perspective. Which on one hand could mean, for someone like Moms Mabley, if the audience is looking at her, then she's making money off that. If she's not on the stage, what happens when she's walking around. Lena Horne has this wonderful line in her biography where she says there were times where she just hated white men looking at her when she performed. Now, her second husband was a white man. So we look at the multi-layers of complexity. What it means to be a black person in America - how some things change but some things are just the same as they always were.

Mindy: We all just have to listen to each other, because you took the opportunity of the pandemic to walk and to exercise and you lost weight. I did too. I started running during the pandemic, which I'd never done before, but my story as a white woman is completely different from yours. And the story of a man who says, "I'm going to start jogging during the pandemic," of a white man that makes this decision is completely different from the story of any woman, and a black man's story is completely different from the white man. It's just... I know that's all simplistic. I know I am not making any large discoveries here. It's just something that I am constantly reminding myself because you started to talk about - yeah, I started running and I wanted be like, "Oh my gosh, me too!" And then I'm like, “Oh yeah, but it was a completely different experience on your end, I'm sure.”

Tara: Yeah, it's the kinds of things that we have to think about before leaving. Of course, never leaving the house without a license. Putting on a t-shirt of the university where I work and not wearing other kinds of t-shirts that may present in certain ways. But certainly, I never would walk around that neighborhood without having the university t-shirt on in the biggest letters that I could have, these large letters. I would make sure that I have that t-shirt on because it showed that I belong to something that people respected.

Mindy: Wow that is so fucked up. I know you know that, but shit. Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find any of your books, but most especially Love, Activism, and the Respectable Life of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, which is available from Bloomsbury as well as See Me Naked: Black Women Defining Pleasure During the Interwar Era.

Tara: Well, there are links to my work and more information about me at www.drtaratgreen.com. Those books are available by the publisher. See Me Naked is available through Rutgers University Press. As you've mentioned, Bloomsbury has the Alice Dunbar-Nelson book. They are available through online book stores, but I always encourage people to purchase their books from independent book stores - local independent bookstores. But you can also, if there is not a black-owned bookstore in your area, and that may be the case, then go online because there are many black-owned bookstores, such as Community Bookstore in New Orleans, which you can order from online. And I'm just saying New Orleans because I'm from there, and I've done a book signing there. So I know that they'll take care of you.

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