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

August 8, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

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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.

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.

Tetyana Denford On Writing The Child of Ukraine and Talent vs. Timing

July 25, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: We're here with Tetyana Denford. She was the author of The Child of Ukraine, which released this month, and originally this book was a self-published novel, although it is very much also kind of memoir, family history, and the story of your grandmother. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that and a little bit about the background behind this book.

Tetyana: It's so nice to be here chatting about it. I'm always happy to chat about this story because it's so cinematic and so epic, it doesn't sound real, but it's based on true events. So when I published this book in 2020, it was originally called Motherland. There's a lot of stories about women, motherhood, daughters and mothers in that relationship, but also there is a statue in Ukraine called Mother Motherland. It's very famous because it's this woman holding a shield and a sword, and you can see it in the center of Kyiv. My grandmother, she practically raised me for about five years when my parents were working, so I would hear lots of stories about her family and her farm. And she didn't speak very much English, so she and I would exclusively speak in Ukrainian, which is my first language. And she would tell me all of these amazing colorful stories about escaping the war. There was a piece to the puzzle that I only found out about in 2015, and that prompted me to write the book, but her story was that she escaped her childhood home when she was 18 because her brothers were murdered by Stalin's police. They were collected and rounded up with a lot of other political activists, and they were thrown into prison and shot by firing squad. She left her home at 18 - never saw her parents again.

There was German occupation as well as Russian, and the lesser of two evils was to kind of help the Germans defeat the Russians. Do whatever you have to and then come back, and she never did, because it wasn't safe. So she was in a labor camp. She met the man who would be my grandfather and then they, after the war, fled to Australia, because Australia at that point was providing land and work for immigrants and citizenship after you worked the land for three years. So it had seemed like a good deal, even though it was in the middle of nowhere, in the Dust Bowl. They traveled there and something happened to her, without giving away any spoilers, it is quite a tragedy. And she was forced to make a decision that basically changed the course of her life. So they immigrated to New York. It kind of reads like a memoir, but it has a little bit of history, obviously, in it as well. And I had to thread all of these pieces together as a novel. I didn't know all of the very specific details. So it couldn't be a memoir, but I wanted it to cross a lot of genres, if that makes sense. I wanted it to be appealing for people who don't necessarily always read historical fiction. I didn't want people to look at it and go, "Oh God, it's gonna be really politically heavy or information heavy." There's a little bit of everything in it. And I think that's what people are connecting to. The general kind of umbrella feeling is that it's about a family, and it's about love, and it's about loss and motherhood, and parenthood and marriage.

Mindy: And those are all themes that apply across humanity.

Tetyana: I wanted people to be drawn to that. I wanted to prompt people even to ask questions within their own families. Because we grow up sometimes with grandparents and even great-grandparents, and we don't really, when we're younger, we don't actually ask them anything. We see them as these elders. We see them as a very specific role. And actually, this book, for me anyway, reminded me that they are also human beings with their own baggage, and that's so important.

Mindy: The lens through which we most often struggle is seeing our parents as real people. And I think though that it can complicate things much further when you have to actually think of your grandparents as real people who were young once and who were going through everything that you've gone through too and probably more. I agree. I think as youth we often feel like we're the interesting ones. It's like, no, actually, everything that you're doing, they already did, and we should be talking to them and getting their stories.

Tetyana: With the backdrop of war, I want people to understand that what is happening in real time, to not just Ukraine but a lot of cultures, is something that we have to learn about and ask questions of our parents, grandparents. Otherwise, how do we change the narrative? How do we raise children to appreciate their own living history right in front of them?

Mindy: It is very much forefront, and people that could not have told you what colors were in the Ukrainian flag now are intimately aware of it. It's part of the larger conversation now. It's not a new story. This has happened before.

Tetyana: Oh yeah. When all of these unfortunate events started happening in February, the mentality was, well, we're ready. We've been ready for this for decades. It's not anything new. These are the stories, almost in parallel, the stories that were happening to our grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. It's wildly upsetting that it's so similar, and it's the same playbook. I was speaking to a journalist friend of mine who's in Ukraine, and I was saying, enough is enough. Now we use our literature, our art, our activism. Now, this is the watershed moment. Now we are the future, the younger generation Ukrainians who are saying, "That's it." We are using social media to then push a new narrative forward. I was reading somewhere that I think this is the most photographed and recorded war in modern history. And it helps that we have a President who's not some dusty old politician, who actually represents the future, the modern young Ukrainians who are taking to these social media channels and saying, "Hey, pay attention."

Mindy: From what you're hearing from family and friends that are still over there or in the moment that are there every day, does it feel like it's different this time?

Tetyana: I think it's half and half. They're exhausted by it. It feels like the same thing over again. I think if they try and, it's difficult, but if they try and remove themselves from the devastation that's happening right in front of their eyes, they know that they have a much farther reach than they ever have when it comes to reaching the media. Western media is kind of complicated because sometimes it seems like it's playing both sides. But Ukraine is now being seen in a very different way. Maybe more in lines of the humanness behind who we are instead of what the media has portrayed us historically within the lens of a scandal, or gangsters, or mafia, or rent a bride. All of those things have been quite damaging and maybe now, even though it's so unfortunate what's happening, maybe now people are looking at us slightly differently. They assume that we're just some dumb bunch of farmers, when actually, we are wildly industrious, creative, intelligent - all these amazing things that nobody really kind of understood before.

Mindy: So you mentioned the media. You also work as a translator for Frontline News since 2014. So can you talk a little bit about that experience? And did that serve as motivation in some ways to work with your grandmother's material and get that family story out there?

Tetyana: That's an interesting question actually. Nobody's asked me that. I think so. When they reached out to me during the Revolution of Dignity, it was through a friend of mine who I went to college with. She very kindly put them in touch with me saying, "Listen, I know you speak Ukrainian fluently. They might need somebody." And then since then, it's been an absolute honor and joy to work with Frontline because they are one of the few news outlets that really push a very truthful and painful narrative. Not just Ukraine, but they expose a lot of what's happening in the world when it comes to politics and world events. I think it really maybe planted a seed without me really knowing that it did. I started working with them in 2014. 2015 is when I got the call from my mother about this massive secret within the family that nobody knew about, and I started writing notes. And then I thought, I'm the only one that can write this. I'm an only child. This needs to be recorded somehow. All of these kind of events, because it is... It was completely unbelievable and cinematic and I thought, "Okay, well, I can do this." But I do think that Frontline reminding me of what my insides were, and by that mean I've always been a proud Ukrainian. But I've never really had many opportunities to really fly that flag proudly in the sense that I was living in the UK 'cause I'd moved there with my English husband and we had started a family. And there was no Ukrainian community that I could connect with. So I was a little bit removed. But having that reignited who I was, deep down. And my grandmother was still alive then, and I was still in contact with her. And all these things started happening all at once. That, I think, really just started kind of blossoming within me. And then when I started going out on submission to try and get traditionally published, initially, with Motherland, I received so many amazing responses from agents, but at the time they're like, "yeah, historical fiction, especially about Ukraine, it's not gonna sell." Because it's timing. It's a business. I didn't take it personally, but I was still proud of the story, that's why I self-published. But now, all of these things are happening all at once. They converged in this massive mountain for me and for so many other Ukrainians. I'm just proud that I'm part of it, and part of this larger momentum and this group of people that are like, Okay, now let's all start paying attention.

Mindy: So coming back to the book and talking about the actual process of writing it. You said that your mother had contacted you, there was this family secret, and your grandmother was still alive. So were you able then to work with her in terms of the content?

Tetyana: I would have liked to. She blocked out a lot of the trauma for a lot of reasons, which people will discover in the book, but it was too painful for her. And the only thing that I could do was work with my mother on a lot of the information. And she would glean information, not just verbally, but she managed to find records - court records, documents - of what had happened to her in Australia. So that was the extent of my research. I couldn't go too deep with my grandmother because she, for over 60 years, she had completely erased the memory of what had happened to her. She had to block out what she had had to do and the people that she was in contact with. For her to survive her life, it had to have never happened. So when my mother confronted her with this information, and I say confronted, they met for a glass of wine and dinner a few times. And it took a while for her to get it out of her, and then my grandmother would talk to her. But it's not something that I think I would have felt comfortable talking to her about because it's older generation. You don't talk about that stuff with your grandchildren. Not even with your children normally. But my mother managed to get that. So I worked with my mother on research, and then I worked with genealogical records, Ancestry dot com as far as passenger lists. And I remember telling her I was writing a book based on the story of her life, and she looked at me and goes, "Mishka" - it means little mouse in Ukrainian - she goes, "Mishka, why would you write a book about my life? It's not that interesting." I remember thinking, she probably says that because there were so many women in her position at the time. Not just Ukrainian, but after the war, so many families that were separated, and so many people who were displaced, and women who had to go through a lot of trauma that was not recognized because it was a man's world, especially then.

Mindy: There is that narrative of, yes, there was this incredibly traumatic and momentous thing that happened to me, but I'm not special. It happened to a lot of people. That's harrowing that someone can have something that traumatic happen and for one thing, of course, have to block it out, but for another to just be like, "you know, it's not that special."

Tetyana: I look back, and I always thought, to my mind, my grandmother, and my mother, but my grandmother especially, just... I felt like she was made of steel. I know so many Ukrainians where we've had the same conversation. Well, you see it now. You see what Ukrainians are like. They are just relentless. I wanted to convey that in the book. Ultimately there's always a villain. Yes, there's a villain in my book, definitely. But the characters of my family made choices that probably were not popular. They sometimes became unsympathetic characters, and that's what I wanted. I wanted people to go on that journey and think, "I don't know how I would have behaved when all of this was thrown at me." I wanted people to feel conflicted and eventually sympathetic because my grandfather was, in real life, he was abusive emotionally. He was kind of even physically abusive. There was conditioning that led to that and we find that out in the book.

Mindy: So talking then about the path of publication for this book. You said that you had originally aimed for the traditional publishing model with this, and you didn't have any luck because timing, like you said. And that is a really typical story. And I think it is very interesting and one that is super relevant to my audience is that you can write something and it can be a great book, and it can be a wonderful story, and it can be something that a lot of people would connect with and find moving, and it can have great writing, and the narrative can be super strong. But if the market isn't open to it at the moment, it's not gonna land. So if you could talk a little bit about the process at the beginning with this book and then how it ended up where you are today.

Tetyana: One of my favorite things is talking about the process of writing and getting a book to publication, 'cause I've learned a lot. And what I imagined it would be turned out to be very different. One of the most important things is even when you're submitting, you have to give yourself the best chance you can. So your query letter, your email that you write to them as a pitch, it has to be so compelling and so good, and you also have to embody the business of getting a book to publication. You're not just some starving artist who sits in the corner and hopes for the best. You have to carry yourself in a way that engages an audience, engages the agents. You have to sell it. I was very lucky in the sense that when I was sending out the first three chapters of my manuscript and I had the query letter down, and I personalized each letter to each different agent. Because you do your research and you make sure everything is pointing to yes. It doesn't guarantee, but at least you feel good about what you're presenting. In the first couple of months, I received 12 full requests. It's a unicorn. Like, a full request is a big deal. And then the request came back eventually and they're like, "You have such beautiful writing, but we needs more of this, or we need more secondary characters. We need more tension. The market isn't great." There are all these kind of factors that were in the way.

Agents, I realized, are human beings. They're doing a job. It's not personal, and every single one of these agents that responded to me in kind, even though it was a rejection, they were so nice about it. A couple of agents actually wanted me to change the story and re-submit it, and I thought, "Oh, I'm not sure I can do that because this is based on a true story, and I know you wanna make it compelling and commercial, but I kinda wanna stick to what happens." They were all so lovely, and I made so many wonderful connections. And we are still friendly and still connected, and they are so supportive. And it made me realize that it's just one aspect of the business, and I see so many amazing writers who are waiting for the yes, waiting for an agent, and I thought to myself, am I gonna sit around and wait for somebody to open the door? Or am I gonna open it myself? Because ultimately, why am I doing this? Am I writing to be on a best seller list? Am I writing for the fame and the money? Because if that's true, I'm in the wrong business. I want to write a book to get it on a shelf.

I began the process of teaching myself how to self-publish, and I made a lot of mistakes along the way. I didn't hire an editor, so I was practically going blind after eight drafts. I started a Kickstarter just to raise money for upfront costs, like having a book designer help me with the cover. And to get a hard cover at the time, Amazon, it was not allowing hardcover books. And I wanted a hard cover book of Motherland. So I went to Lulu, which is a different self-publishing platform, and they allowed hard covers, but it was hard to work with them. When it was finally launched, and so many people supported me on Kickstarter, it was wildly powering, and it made me so happy that people wanted to read the story. I made money within the first couple of months. Again, it's not what I'm doing it for, but it was a little bit of validation, like people want to buy my words. I really want people, especially now, when we have all of these amazing platforms - like Amazon is now doing hard cover, can self-publish a hard cover. There are so many brilliant authors out there that don't need to wait. It's a very fickle industry. It's really hard. Yes, it's great to have an agent because they open doors for you to get into magazines and newspapers, and they kind of push and market. But knowing the behind the scenes, teaching myself the behind the scenes of what goes into publishing a book, then put me in a really interesting position to feel like not just a writer but having a business brain, and approaching it in a really knowledgeable way. And two years later, I get a call out of the blue, or an email rather, from the Hachette imprint, Bookouture, saying, "Listen, we're really interested in signing you." Now, again, I was like, "Oh, this is great," but a lot of writers jump at it, at the chance to be with a publisher. And this is direct to publisher. This is not an agent going to book a tour saying, "Hey, how about you publish my client's book?" They reached out to me saying, "your writing is so compelling," and they were so kind and it was so lovely. But when we had a meeting, I said to myself, "I do not want to be in a position where I'm hat in hand going, Yes, whatever you can give me, I'll take." Because I have a very specific vision about how I want to work with my publisher. And if they are not collaborative and they treat me like a cash cow, then I am very happy to keep self-publishing. And having that, being in that empowered position, I've got myself here. Now, what can you do for me? How can we work together? And they presented themselves in such an amazing professional and forward-thinking way, I was really happy. Eventually after a couple of meetings, they ended up signing me and again, it's not about the advance. It's not about the money and the fame and whatever. It's about getting people to be impacted by my work. That feeling is priceless. When people say to me, "Oh my gosh, I've handed your book to a friend of mine or the reading group, and they're asking so many questions about their own family," all of that is just beyond. That's exactly what I'd hoped to achieve as an author.

Mindy: So tell me about them finding you. How did Hachette go about discovering you? Were they looking for stories about the Ukraine? How did you pop up on their radar?

Tetyana: This is a little bit cynical, but I think publishers and agents were observing what was happening since February. I think probably were looking for the angle as to how we can get more voices and stories about Ukraine out there. The best thing you can do is amplify what's happening and not within a war narrative lens. It's about the humanity behind what's right next door. When February happened, I kind of went into high gear Ukrainian mode. I wanted people to understand that if they wanted somebody who was connected to Ukraine, but in a modern way, I'm one of those people. So I managed to make sure that all of my social channels were very focused on Ukraine creators, literature, art, activism. What I didn't want to do is put the focus on... Russia is evil, talking about Putin... All of that, it's so negative, that even though that was the reality, I wanted people to understand about who Ukrainians were. So I put myself in hyper-focus, and I'm pretty sure, if I'm not mistaken, that a couple of the editors at Bookouture were already following my Instagram and my social media. So they were aware of me because I'd only spoken about my family story over the years, but now it went into overdrive. And I think they were just kind of maybe monitoring me. Maybe I was the atypical writer. I'm very social media friendly. So I kind of cover all grounds, and I think they were probably, if I'm not putting words in their mouth, I think they were just interested in what I had to offer as far as kind of a well-rounded author that they might be able to work with.

Mindy: I really, again, just love that idea of you having a great story and good writing and a powerful narrative, but just the timing not being there. I was just looking at your Instagram. Obviously, that is where you're really super active. With that in mind, last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find the book, The Child of Ukraine.

Tetyana: I feel like I'm everywhere. I have a website, Tetyana Denford dot com, and you can find links to order any of my books. I've also self-published some poetry books. People can drop me their email there and that way they can stay updated. I'm on Twitter at Tetyana Writes - quite active on there, as well as my Instagram, which is the same handle at Tetyana Writes. I also do a show that I host called The Craft and Business of Books, and it basically interviews editors, publicists, agents, authors about the behind the scenes of their experience about being traditionally published and even self-published. I'm part of a documentary with Frontline News coming out at the end of the summer about what happened in Ukraine. It's not easy viewing. I love Frontline, and I think it's gonna be a beautiful and harrowing documentary. And The Child of Ukraine, you can find it on Amazon. It's out on audio, ebook, as well as print everywhere.

Tess Gerritsen On Writing A Series & Pleasing Your Fans... Or Not

July 11, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: We're here with Tess Gerritsen, who is the New York Times bestselling author of The Rizzoli & Isles series with Listen to Me returning on July 5th. These books have inspired a TNT television series, over 40 million copies have been sold, and this is the 13th installment in this series. First of all, I think as a writer, how do you keep something fresh when you've been working with these characters for so long?

Tess: It's sometimes a challenge, and I think what helps is to have a universe of characters. So you're not just dealing with one or two people, you also have the people around them - Jane's partner, Barry Frost, and Jane's mom and Jane's family. It's like a soap opera in some ways, because everybody's life is at a different point in every different book.

Mindy: I think it can be really helpful as an author, considering them as real people all the time, moving through real lives.

Tess: Right, you can't have them static. So in the course of these 13 books, we've seen Jane go from a single cop to married to a mom, and unfortunately, her pregnancy, I think took four books. Yeah, we've watched Maura fall in love and out of love and get into romantic issues. We've watched Jane's mother, who started off as a devoted wife and mom, suddenly get divorced when her husband left her, and now we're looking at her at a different stage in her life. So it is like real life. You watch your friends get older and you watch their changes, and it's always interesting.

Mindy: And speaking of Jane's mother, she is a fan favorite for sure, Angela, and she gets a mystery of her own in this installment.

Tess: That's right. I hadn't expected to write another Rizzoli & Isles book, which it explains the five-year gap, but Jane's mother started to speak to me in my head. She's always been a fun character for me, and I've loved watching her bloom as her husband left her and now she's finding her own feet. So Angela began to speak with her Boston accent, "If you see something, say something." And I thought, "Well, what is she seeing?" She lives in a suburban street, a little bit north of Boston, and it's a quiet neighborhood, and new neighbors have moved in across the street. But they are strange people. They keep their curtains drawn. They're installing bars on the windows, and Angela wants to know what is going on there. So that becomes her little investigation, which her daughter kindof poo-poos because it's just Mom.

Mindy: Right. That five-year gap - what is that like to return to these characters after such a long time?

Tess: It was fun to see what they're up to now. You get to see little bits of Maura as well, which I hadn't revealed. We know from earlier books that Maura does play the piano. She has a piano in her house, and we get to see her perform at a doctor's concert where she is a soloist and it reveals another part of her life or about her personality anyway. Maura is a perfectionist. She cannot stand to be publicly embarrassed. So this concert is a great deal of stress on her and just tells you a little bit more about this fairly complex and very self-contained character.

Mindy: You yourself, of course, have a background as a physician, and I kind of had an unusual route to a writing career, so my audience is mostly writers. If you could talk a little bit about how you came out of one professional world into another.

Tess: Writers come from all professions. Young people ask me, "What should I do to become a writer?" I tell them, number one is to live your life and to remember your experiences and to use that in your writing. I just happen to have a background in medicine. I wanted to be a writer when I was very young. I was seven years old, and I told my father I was gonna write Nancy Drew type books when I grew older. And he said, "That's no way to make a living." So being from an immigrant family where security is really important, he asked me, just think about science. I loved science already. I was interested in Biology, so going to medical school wasn't that much of a detour. But when I was in medical school and going through medical training, I knew that I was still a writer, and I would write short stories in my spare time. When I went on maternity leave with my first son, and I had a couple of months home, that's when I really got serious and wrote my first book. I know people are going, "wait, you had a newborn. How did you do that?" I had a newborn who slept a lot. So I was blessed in that way. He slept all the time, and I was able to dig into my writing. So that's how I got back into it. A couple of years later, I sold my first book to Harlequin Intrigue, which is a romantic suspense publisher. It was fun. It was great training. I wrote eight of those books.

Mindy: It is a very good example of how to, as you said, live your life. I absolutely love that advice. People ask me too, often, "how do you become a writer?" Of course, but also, what are those steps? And I think that it is imperative all the time to be aware that writing is part of the entertainment industry, and you don't have any more guarantees of success in that then you do of saying, I want to become a rock star or a famous actress or a professional athlete. It is very difficult. I think because it feels more accessible than those other things, I think a lot of the time people feel like the barrier to entry might be a little bit lower. Well, I always tell people that writing needs to be plan B. You have to be able to pay your bills, and there are no guarantees of success. So you obviously took the route of going to medical school. I have a degree in English Literature and Philosophy & Religion. So while I didn't necessarily go like a super useful route, I did end up working as a librarian for 14 years. And I just think it's very important to kinda walk that fine line between never giving up on your dreams, but also being aware that we do live in reality and our bodies need shelter and food.

Tess: Right. Well, the great thing about writing is that you can do it on the side. It needn't be your profession when you start off. You're a librarian. I know people who are airline mechanics and geologists. Every one of those people, they have a story to tell about their own profession. I, as a consumer of entertainment or a reader, love to get an inside look at places that I don't get to see. How does the geologist think when he goes walking through the woods and he sees something? There are so many puzzles that they can solve that I cannot. So I would love to read a book about a geologist who solves mysteries, or a librarian who sees something in the stacks that ends up being really important, or who has obscure knowledge that may just be the clue. So it's important to earn a living, to feed yourself, but also remember that while you're feeding yourself, you're learning things, you're experiencing things that nobody else knows, and that can go into a book.

Mindy: Yes, and speaking about things that people know or don't know, I'm sure that you run into this a lot, probably as you said a consumer, even before you were writing yourself. But as a person with a medical background, you have the opportunity to write the medical world correctly. But how often did you have experiences where you're reading something or you're watching TV and you're just like, "Oh no, that's really wrong?"

Tess: Yeah, all the time. All the time. And it's important also to know that writers make mistakes. I'm sure I make mistakes all the time, and an alert reader or a reader who's got a bee in his bonnet is going to tell you. They're gonna write you and tell you you made a mistake on that firearm, and that seems to be the number one source of mistakes for mystery writers - firearms. We always get something wrong, and the gun people will tell us, "No, you didn't - you got your caliber wrong, and there's no safety on that gun." The mistakes we make are the ones that we don't know, we don't know. I had a throwaway detail about a man who had a car in his barn that hadn't been driven. I just said it was a 1945 Ford. I got so many letters from people writing back to me and saying, "Don't you know they didn't make cars that year because we were finishing up the war?" And I didn't know that, but a lot of people did.

Mindy: Yeah, it's funny the things that you will be caught out on, and I certainly don't mind when people catch me on things, but it's embarrassing. Yes, 1945 they didn't make cars. I wouldn't know that. I don't think that many people would. I have never been near an ocean. I live in Ohio, we are super land-locked. When I was writing the end of one of my books, my characters are standing out on a beach out on the West Coast, and the sun is rising. So all the rays are bouncing off of the water. They're saying their goodbyes. It’s like a mother and daughter and she rides off... Well, not into the sunset, 'cause it's in the wrong part of the sky. What's funny, and you know because you live in this world, is that that made it through editing. It made it through proofreading. It made it through copy editing. It made it through everything. It made it to print.

Tess: Oh my gosh. Oh yes, that's scary.

Mindy: The sun came up on the wrong side of the world, and literally - and what's funny too, is that I've only had one or two people say something to me about it, so.

Tess: Well, the copy editor was probably asleep at the switch on that one.

Mindy: I mean, I would like to think that they were so wrapped up in the story that they did not notice the sun coming up in the wrong part of the sky. That's pretty big. That's a big boo-boo. I don't know if you experienced this as well. I notice things, and it doesn't necessarily have to be something I know because of my environment or my background, listeners are probably tired of hearing this, but I grew up in the Midwest, and I live on a farm and farming is always wrong. I notice things because I am a writer and because I do watch my own Ps and Qs so closely. I was listening to an audio book the other day, which is also a different experience, so you notice things. There was a door. It was an exterior door of a house and it was opening the wrong direction. Someone was trapped inside and they were trying to get out and they kept ramming their shoulder into the door. And I'm like, "Well, that's why it's not working dude, you can't...

Tess: Yeah, pull, don't push. I know.

Mindy: So do you find that sometimes that clinical eye, the editorial eye that you turn on yourself while you're working can interfere with your actual enjoyment of just reading?

Tess: You know, not very often. I don't read that many medical thrillers, maybe that's why. It's a little bit like returning to work when you read something that has to do with your profession. I wonder if that's true for other people. They don't like to read about their own profession because it feels like going back to work? It's part of the reason I don't watch medical shows on television. I get anxious. I don't really read the stuff that I would catch mistakes in, but when I do catch it, I think, "Oh." If it was a big error, I thought I would think, "Oh, you just didn't talk to the right people."

Mindy: When it comes to obviously writing your own books, you have that background. Do you end up running into areas where you need to do a little bit more research yourself or you've got to brush up a particular arena?

Tess: Oh yes, absolutely. I wrote a book back in 1999 called Gravity, which was set aboard the International Space Station. It was a medical thriller set in space, and that took two years of nothing but research. Going to NASA. Reading everything I could about medicine in microgravity. And I had as my premise that there is a series of disasters or a Titanic of space where everything goes wrong on ISS. Well, to know how everything goes wrong, you need to know how everything goes right first. How do things work? I got down to downloading blueprints of the International Space Station, which hadn't even been launched yet, and talking to medical doctors who work in aerospace medicine about the finer details of how do you do code blue when there's no gravity and how everything changes in space. That was very research-heavy, and the whole time I was terrified I was gonna make a huge mistake, but apparently, I didn't. It was probably the biggest challenge of any book I've had to write, having to do with research. I've also done some historical medicine in 1830, and that was another deep dive into things I didn't know about. I ended up buying antiquarian books, medical books from the 1810s, 1820s. How do you amputate an arm without anesthesia? And these old medical textbooks, oh my gosh, they were like computer manuals. They would tell you how many people you needed to hold down the patient. How you keep them under control, where you tie them down, because of course they're gonna be screaming and thrashing. How do you go about cutting off an arm? These are details that made it into the book because they were so dramatic. It was horrifying research, but it was also fascinating.

Mindy: Yes, absolutely. I remember reading a book. It's just called Birth, and it's just about the history of giving birth. Dear God, how are any of us still here?

Tess: Right, I know. Once you've had a baby, that's like, "Why would you wanna have another one?"

Mindy: Oh my Lord. I'm interested too, because one of my books is set in 1890 and it deals a little bit with medical elements, although it's more of like mental health, medical procedures in asylums. When you were writing and reading about medicine in 1830s, was your experience along the lines of, man, this is barbaric, or was it more like when you're doing your research, you're like and they were doing the best they could with what they had.

Tess: It was barbaric. It really was. You were better off not going to a doctor in 1820, especially if you were about to give birth. Lots of cases of child bed fever. Women just got infected while giving birth and they died, and they almost invariably died once they were infected. And the barbaric part of it is that they wouldn't have died if they had just given birth in the fields. It was doctors who are introducing these infections. Not washing their hands. Infecting women, whole wards of women, who would all then proceed to die. So it was, yeah, you were better off having your baby at home. Doctors also had a lot of strange cures and they would give things to cure people and end up poisoning them. In a lot of ways, Mother Nature was kinder than the human medical doctor was.

Mindy: Well, I think especially if you were a woman too, because the doctors were men. And I just remember reading there were men delivering babies that weren't looking because they didn't wanna see a women's genitals and I'm like, okay.

Tess: I guess. How do you do that anyway?

Mindy: Going back then to the medical world. You write medical thrillers. Are you ever going to be interested in writing about Covid or are you just like, you know what, let's leave well enough alone. I don't ever wanna hear this word again.

Tess: I'm avoiding the topic. I have to say that when we're in the midst of something, it's really hard to read about it. And also, we're living it. We all know what it's like. The way I'm handling Covid is in this 13th book, I write about it as if it's in the past. Jane goes in to interview the colleagues of a nurse has just been murdered, and she reflects on the fact that this hospital was a killing ground, just a couple of years ago. People were dying left and right of Covid. But that's about the only mention I have of it other than that nobody shakes hands in this book. That's probably not a safe thing to do anymore. We don't shake hands. And the victim, when she has her autopsy, it's revealed that she has some scarring from Covid pneumonia. But those are the only things that come into the story.

Mindy: When I'm reading, it's interesting to me to see the authorial choices about whether or not they mention it, whether people are wearing masks, whether they just omit it from their fantastical world entirely. I have not written it into any of my books yet, because in my worlds where I don't have to deal with reality, I go there for a reason. I don't know that I want to willingly take that with me.

Tess: Yeah, yeah.

Mindy: Like I said, you've been writing 13 books now in this series, and you have a duo at work here. When you're writing your different characters, how do you keep things balanced between Maura and Jane and do you consider fan favorites? Is there a preference? Do you get mail or have people contact either like, I want more of Jane.

Tess: Yes, you can't keep the balance. There are some books that are very more eccentric, and there are some books that really focus on Jane. Trying to keep the balance, to me, feels like turning it into a scientific equation. That's not really art because, as we know, our lives, sometimes one family is having a drama while the other one's relatively serene. So that's the way I've been handling it. This, I like to focus on one character's particular crisis. My book, Ice Cold, where Maura gets stranded in an abandoned town in Wyoming. Obviously that's gonna be Maura's story because she's the one who is facing the danger. And Jane's part in that that is, "How do I rescue Maura?" This particular book, it's more focused on Jane and her mother, Angela, because the theme has to do with mothers and daughters. When do we stop listening to our mothers? Maybe we shouldn't stop listening to our mothers, and I wanted to really focus on that relationship. Now Maura does have a role in it, and I know I'm gonna be getting letters from readers going, I want more Maura. You can't always make that balance happen.

Mindy: I agree. One of my favorite duos of all time, I love The X-Files. I never missed an episode. And there were great episodes that would focus more on Scully or more on Mulder. And I remember one in particular where Mulder is in the field and he's entirely alone and he keeps calling Scully, and she's like on vacation or something. And it's just her answering the phone every now and then. And then she's like, "Do you need me there?" And he's like, "No, no, it's okay." And it was really just kind of wonderful to see each of them developing apart from one another.

Tess: Yeah, right, I know. And the thing is, you can't write to please your fans because there will always be people who want more Jane, people want more Maura. And you can't please them both.

Mindy: I agree, and as a consumer in the world where we have instant feedback on social media, I have become in frustrated watching TV shows, in particular, but watching fan catering. I think about the writers, especially in a TV room, who probably wanna tear their hair out because I want things to be organic. I want things to happen as they, quote/unquote, should naturally. And I want the story to follow the path that is best for the story. And if I had feedback from 8 million people every week that I was being asked to take into consideration or do some bowing to certain elements that fans want to see, I know that, especially in any ensemble TV show, if there's a character that people universally disliked, you can count on them dying. And I don't like knowing that, because as a consumer, I don't get that surprise anymore.

Tess: Yeah, well, that's a big stress of working in entertainment today, is that you do get that instant feedback and it can be brutal. Before we used to have to deal with critics and that was bad too. But now you get nasty emails, you get all kinds of - reader reviews can be pretty bad as well. I try to avoid going on Goodreads because I find that those reviews sometimes are pretty awful. It can get into a writer's headspace and make it difficult to keep on working. That's something we all have to learn to, I guess adjust to, is instant feedback and instant criticism.

Mindy: Speaking of fans, what is up next for you?

Tess: Oh, I'm doing a book that's not a Rizzoli & Isles book. I live in a little village in Maine that's about 5,000 people. I became aware of the fact that there were a lot of retired CIA agents here. What do retired spies get up to? And so the story came to me of one woman who was retired, who finds a body, a dead woman on her driveway, and doesn't know whether this is related to her past work overseas. And she has to call for help from her former colleagues to help her solve this crime. It became fun because it's not just the world of espionage, it's also the world of retirees. It's the world of people who have all this experience under their belt, but have been sent out to pasture.

Mindy: Awesome, that sounds exciting. Why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find the new book, Listen to Me, which goes on sale July 5th.

Tess: Yes, you can find me on my website at Tess Gerritsen dot com. I am on Twitter at at Tess Gerritsen, and you can buy Listen to Me, number 13 in the Rizzoli & Isles book, pretty much everywhere.

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