A White Woman Wrote A Book About Slavery | Episode 165

Emmy Torrey, welcome to the Bookaholic podcast. Thank you so much, Deirdre. Glad to be here. Yes, and I am glad to have you here. So when we had our initial getting to know you chat, and once I had received Fox Creek in the mail, I was just so intrigued. And it already sounded like a book I really wanted to read. And, you know, historical fiction is is one of my favorite genres. And so time moved on and I said, well, it's time to prep for my interview even further. And so I picked up the copy of Fox Creek and I started to read it. And I will tell you, I have already fallen in love with this story and I'm only on page like twenty eight or twenty nine. But I've already fallen in love with the story, with the characters. I'm glad it's a trilogy. And it's really an amazing book so far. And I'm saying it's going to be amazing throughout. You are a debut novelist. You've written articles. You were in the children's book industry for many years. but this is your first adult literary fiction historical fiction um me i'm i don't know how you did it i mean you you are obviously a gifted writer uh because this book is already so lush and so real so i i'm giving it i'm giving it all away it's a wonderful book people go ahead and Just go ahead and put it on your TBR list. Go ahead. If you are a fan of historical fiction, literary fiction, go ahead and put it on your TBR list. Go ahead. It's going to be worth it. I promise you. Okay, so I'm getting ahead of myself. So even though you were in the children's book industry, dealt with publishing and all of this things how why did you say huh well now it's time for me to write a historical fiction all right well um let me just preface that with explaining kind of what my children's book um experience is it often we think of children's book authors we think of picture books i can't write a picture book to save my life um i admire those who can it's actually very difficult art uh instead i the youngest age group i've ever written for is 8 to 11 and that's a chapter book series but most of my books are uh novels for middle grade and high schoolers wow yeah so they they are so when i say children's book author uh you know it encompasses all of that from picture books all the way to 18 years old and picking up a novel oh okay so um you know i had i have written i think four uh novels all published through Knopf Books for young readers which is part of Random House um for uh ages 12 and up and um all all four books all four all very hard-hitting adventure historical novels oh wow so i was a little bit about those titles yeah so the first one that i did was called to the edge of the world and it was about the voyage of Magellan through the eyes of Magellan's fictional cabin boy his name was Mateo they leave Spain go around the world with 500 I think 500 and some odd men and uh and five ships and then they arrive back home with one ship and 22 men so a total voyage of survival and hardship and tragedy and um i don't know why but i really like historical fiction that just dives right in and gets to the heart of it and keeps people riveted because when i was that age that's what i loved to read um and survival and stuff like that and so you know it's not a stretch for me to then go into Fox Creek. In fact, I started writing Fox Creek in the 90s, so even before I finished To the Edge of the World and had that accepted for publication. So, you know, Fox Creek took me a lot longer to write. They were all voyage books, so all seafaring books for young men and they took me about two years for each one to write Fox Creek, Fox Creek from the time I first started researching it, it took me three years just to research it and then write it took me another two years and then during that time it wasn't a straight timeline of five years because during that time I actually contracted with Random House for these children's books so I had to stop Fox Creek, write these children's books and then get back to Fox Creek, so it was an up and down journey for me uh writing Fox Creek um and it these other books happened in between so that's kind of the story, yes absolutely you're right the the well it's not per se your writer's process it was just it was what happened you know it's not your chosen writer's process but that was the writer's process that you were given because of the contract with the other uh younger people's books oh wow so let's talk about research so just again as I said just being on um page uh 28, 28 or 29 of Fox Creek you can tell I was like what in the world did she do for the research of this book you can tell that you absolutely did your homework you know it's taking place so far in Louisiana the uh an area and you are inserting the French words uh there that i'm so fond of i love paris i love all things france french uh in paris and so you know you have that in there um then you know i don't know you're so far your your characters just really are embracing the time period that they are in uh whether black or white they're just all embracing that time period tell me about your must have been exhausted research process right and it was exhaustive you know i i was born in washington state and other than 10 years that i lived in europe which was very formative for me i've spent the rest of my life in washington state So I'm, you know, a northern woman and admittedly very privileged. I'm obviously white. So to have this idea for this book, this big epic that spans so many characters and situations in a state that I wasn't familiar with, I knew that I would have to just breathe this research until I knew it, as if I was part of that time. So I did. For three years, I just, I devoured not only fiction books, a lot of fiction books about it, but huge amounts of nonfiction. I have a bibliography, I kept a bibliography, I wasn't quite sure what a publisher would want, so I kept the bibliography, and it's 17 pages long in, like, 10-point font, and it includes everything from, you know, newspapers back then to videos, you know, letters that people wrote each other back then from Confederate officers, whatever it might be, all the way to, you know, your big scholarly books. on life during that time both about plantation life from white perspectives as well as as life as a black person in that era and I had to of course be familiar with how people spoke because how right you know how people spoke back then for both white and black was very different very different and and it was different in Louisiana versus let's say Georgia versus south carolina so you've got all those regional differences and i had to know i had to know my place you know the setting perfectly so i made numerous trips to louisiana i spent days in the the louisiana state university archives just digging through stuff and of course research back in the 90s was completely different than it is now you know absolutely ask myself questions like okay as an example if i'm if i'm a man and i'm writing a young lady a a letter of correspondence and of course they didn't have any other way of corresponding long distance other than through letters um yes you know how what's the proper way to do things what what is what is allowed or expected and what's not allowed and back then i would have had to go to a library research through card catalogs you know where would i find that kind of book and then if i if my library doesn't have it how do I get that book to my library and so weeks or months might go by before I get an answer and a book that I order may or may not have the answer that I'm really wanting and so scenes would have to be kind of sort of written lots of square brackets that I would go back and and find later and you know fill in all the blanks and then the book would come then I'd find my answer write the scene. Well, the other day I Google, if I'm a man and want to write a woman a letter in 1850 Louisiana, how's it going to happen? AI goes, bam, here's a book that you need to look at. And it was a book like universal letter writing in the 1850s for the American South. And I'm like, oh my God, I go right to archive.org and there's the book. And I can search for any words that I wow in an hour I have my answer yes totally different totally wow so wow everything I mean it was so when I knew I had researched all I could possibly research and that I was quite literally an expert on the subject then I started writing wow and you know as you as you were describing that process my mind immediately went to going to the library microfilm microfiche yes absolutely that's how i did my term papers yep you know back in the day and so uh yes absolutely you are so correct that the uh research now would be far different than what you started with uh back in the 90s so let's let me let me sidetrack for a second uh and talk about that because you've got two uh this is going to be a trilogy yes and you've got two other uh subsequent novels coming out for Fox Creek. So how has your research changed with those books? And what do you feel about the authenticity of research through AI or any other more modern techniques? Right. I did foundational research back in the 90s. So in a sense, I'm not needing to go back and redo that foundational research. I kept luminous materials on all these different subjects that I can still access. You know, what, what did a cabin look like? A slave cabin walk in West Feliciana parish in Louisiana back in 1850. I already know this. Okay. So I don't have to do it again. Um, but I am moving forward in my timeline. So I will still have to do some foundational research for a particular time. And then my third book will go up and through the Civil War. And that will be a lot of while I've researched the Civil War quite a bit, especially in that area, I will really need to research the Civil War before I have people going to war and doing that kind of thing. because I want to be accurate. So as far as the parts of research that I'm doing now, it's very small and it's very niche. And I really will go to primary sources. And for people who aren't familiar with primary and secondary sources, secondary sources are those that you might pick up from a library that says life in the, you know, life in Louisiana during, you know, pre-slavery days. And it'll be, you know, an author writing about that subject using all kinds of sources to develop what they want to say. Primary source is perhaps what that author went to to determine what they're going to write. It's going to be the letters, the diaries, the plantation journals written by the people who actually lived during that time. So when I say I'm going to go to primary sources to find my answers, the other day when I went to archive.org and I was able to find uh universal you know letter writing published in 1850 and i'm able to open the book to any page i want that's a primary source okay yes it's someone who lived during that time who's actively writing those letters and then they used uh real letters to show you what to do wow wow that is fantastic so you know it's like technology though can still be authentic because you can reach back uh to those archives instead of going to maybe a very dusty space you know flinging through pages and everything so yeah that's yeah that's that's the great part of technology yeah and i do think a lot of those dusty spaces have now been digitized so i'm able to find so much on the internet that was totally closed even in the early 2000s yes yes absolutely absolutely well now let's go on to this i'll take a little sidetrack here in 2023 um i was very fortunate um to do a huge european and african trip i spent two weeks in ghana africa and i was uh my family and i we were taken to the castles uh where the slaves soon to be slaves were brought to castles to be put on ships to come to America. We went to a place called the Last Bath. So these people were trekked for the most part walking in coffled across Nigeria. They finally got to Ghana um the last bath of this river and so this place uh what we did was with a guide we got into the river we got into the water we all held hands um and they called upon the ancestors my ancestors the people in my group's ancestors for the most part were in that river and they called upon the ancestors uh we got out and all of a sudden i just burst out crying a guttural animalistic howl almost and i just wept and you could hear me all across you know i mean anybody nearby uh could hear me just wailing if you want to use the word wail w-a-i-l that was that was me and it just was a lifetime culmination of learning about my history and feeling my history you know um not everyone black wants to feel that you know yeah and so um fast forward we've had in our family group circle a white woman who was writing a book about uh a slave and the reason why she was writing it is because the house she once lived in in Rhinebeck New York uh that was a historical site in which that slave lived so she wanted to write a book about it but i do remember in our discussions uh we kept going back and forth gosh how are we going to convince the audience convince the world that a white woman is honestly writing this book and not out of whatever so to say to you um and i think we've already set the tone and made a valid point that you've done such exhaustive research and the second thing is that you're the identification of this book is coming from a world of like we said research um and not out of I don't know, some type of flimsy situation, okay, just to make money. So I have stamped my personal, not that you need it, but my personal approval on this book and on this series because it's coming from a very authentic place. So how have you or have you had to defend the fact that you are a white woman writing this tome uh trilogy tome of slavery right um it's a complex answer uh and i'm glad it's a complex answer because if it was just a simple answer i'm not sure it would be true uh back in the 90s uh for better or for worse i was unaware of anything such as cultural appropriation it's become maybe that discussion was happening or maybe others were aware of it and i just was unaware i'm not sure but i didn't know about it and so when i had the idea for this book back in the 90s i because i have such a heart for issues of peace and justice. I just went with it with all my heart. I was so passionate about it. Um, excuse me. And so then I wrote it and, um, finished it in 2008, found an agent in 2009. And by then the, um, uh, the economy, I don't know if you guys remember, but we had that huge recession and this is a tome like you said and and none of the publishers would touch it because you know it costs way more to publish a tome than it does a skinny book and yet you can't charge that much more and so they said nope we pass and so my agent and I we put it on a shelf my life took another turn or two and then and then like in 2018 when I wanted to pick it up again after the recession ended I was terrified to be perfectly honest because by then these these discussions of cultural appropriation and so on were front and center and I thought oh my god I'm going to get eaten alive if I publish this book and and then in so I kind of sat on it for a little while in 2020 i you know the pandemic was in full swing so i did um three zoom calls with prospective agents because my agent had retired by then three zoom calls and i had my elevator pitch you know the the one or two sentence pitch that you give them that's supposed to you know help them ask questions then intrigue them there i am a white lady pitching about um a main character who's black and i could see the moment they understood who my main character was and where the setting was a curtain came down over their face it was immediate and i thought oh my God, this is unpublishable. And it broke my heart. And I thought my window is gone. My window to publish it has passed. And so it wasn't until 2024 when I realized that, you know, whether I get, as one friend put it, crucified or not, I think it's important to add my voice to the discussion because i have things to say about racial relations racial relations and i specifically not only have things to say i think that will hearten black people but that white people especially i think we're if you're white you are privileged that privileged white people need to hear and i think it's important um and so when i approach it that way with without the intention ever of drowning out black voices of just simply to the discussion that we can open this discussion and like you and i together have meaningful conversation that maybe will spark something in somebody that they go oh well i've never seen it that way before i've never understood it that way and they realize oh okay now i can move forward yeah so that's my take on it and and i hope that's helpful yes absolutely and you know i will say the reason why i told that story about me in ghana is that um and that not all black families are the same but if i came from a black family who talked we discussed we had discussions at the kitchen table we had discussions uh sitting in my parents' den. We always had discussions as a family. My mother told me about people from the past in our neighborhood or people from the past in our family. So we had discussions. We had race relations discussions. But as a Black person, somewhere, somewhere inside, it may have a different look, we are always thinking about race, always. Race, and maybe it's trauma, maybe it's, I don't know, protection, but we always have race on our mind in some type of format. And so, because that's how we got here. That's who we are. That's the stories of our family's lives it may be different stories but that is us and um so there's that but not i don't think so many white people think about race all the time because it's not part of their oh excuse it's not part of their it's it's not part of their trauma that that's a part and and for that white people are privileged that they don't have to think about the traumatic aspects of of race all the time we are always i mean when i say if you're white you're privileged because i've been pulled over by police officers before driving down the road not once when i've been pulled over have i thought to myself is it because i'm white right right or am i going to be shot and killed exactly exactly you know for for moving too fast you know uh my sons are now young grown men um but when they were pre-teens and teens and would be driving their cars and stuff around town you know we have had to have the talk there's no white mother that has to have the talk as far as that now i'm not saying white mothers don't have a talk to their say maybe their daughters about you know protecting yourself from young men or whatever have you you know that's another conversation but rooted in trauma is what we have to talk to our children about that the community service professional that's supposed to be helpful you might encounter one who is not you know so you know there's all that so when i started reading you know little monette she sounds so adorable and then the other young man whose mom is getting him prepared to go to town with missus and that sounds so hopeful and then both of these young people are betrayed uh you really got to the heart of the matter like you said about your earlier stories and what you were always wanting to see as a reader you you you punched it and and then now we've got two children two children in a terrible predicament that not a lot of adults would survive uh why do you want to give us that gut punch well i think it goes back to my writing for young adults you know kids nowadays they've got a short short attention spans and I've got three and at the time that I was writing these young adult novels they were um in their later teens you know unless you grab them and keep them they're gonna do something else and I knew this going into writing these books for kids and so you know I made it very gut punchy and you know chapters end on you know where you don't want them to end and so you've got to start the chapter because my gosh you know and i had a lot of kids telling me that they would read under the covers with the flashlight you know and i take that skill with me into my adult writing and and i don't want my adult reader to put it down either not that i end every chapter with a cliffhanger but it's it's unsettling to where oh okay wow um yeah so i'm not afraid of that and i know how to do it and so that's that's what i did and and one thing that as you were talking about uh the young man Cyrus the boy who's taken from his mother the mother thinks he's going to town to get fitted for some new clothes because he's growing so fast and missus takes him to town and sells him you know um that's from uh somebody's experience that i read about you know and that was a gut punch to me when i read that and i thought you know the cruelty of the woman who ruled it to this black family it was the only family that she had working for her you know she had a mom and and the two kids and she needs some money and she just grabs one of the kids and without telling the mom you know sells the child and the cruelty the depth of cruelty she had to have to do that is blows my mind i just absolutely and yet you know she's totally okay with it and to think of the trauma that the the mother especially experienced when missus comes home and the heartbreak god it's it's just unbelievable it's for for um kind of the relationship between black and white uh it's it's not all that bleak and horrible because it couldn't be that bleak and horrible and have life continue you know there has to be some balance somewhere and so I find that tricky balance but it is tricky you know yes absolutely absolutely so now we've got two more books coming out tell us the status of those two books okay well readers aren't going to be happy with me but but honestly I wanted to publish book one and see how it was received before I even started writing book two because I thought you know if no one's going to accept it from a white writer I'm I'm I just can't do this you know it's too it's too the the emotional cost to me for is too much and so it's it's been very well received it's won awards it yes it has gotten starred reviews from professional reviewers and that gave me hope you know i thought okay it is well received and so i'm neck deep in book two it's going really well i'm so excited of course i've got it all got it all the way through the end of book three i know where my characters live and breathe in me you know and they call some shots you know and sometimes i'm totally surprised by what they come up with and i just get goosebumps like and you know but overarching i know i know where it's going and so i'm neck deep and hanging there with me i will get it done wow that's exciting that's Exciting. So, hey, bookaholics, you've seen on the screen for the last few minutes a QR code. If you scan that QR code, it will take you directly to a copy of Fox Creek, which you can buy today right here on this interview. I do earn a very small commission, but it costs you no additional monies to support scanning that QR code and purchasing Fox Creek. so me we want back have yourself or anybody connected with you professionally reach out to me and let me know when it's coming out and send me a copy because i'm already i'm already falling you know i'm just already immersed i'm already immersed so emmy thank you so much for writing Fox Creek. Thank you so much. We appreciate you and we support you here on the Bookaholic podcast. Thank you, Deirdre. Thank you to all your listeners as well. It was my pleasure. It was so much fun to meet you. Thank you so much. Yeah, you take care.