Hear interviews with authors Monica West and Brittany Ackerman. West talks about Revival Season, a story about a Black evangelical family and a crisis of faith. Ackerman chats about The Brittanys, a novel about teen friends growing up in Florida. We also discuss our picks for books set where we were born.
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A transcript of this episode is available at the end of our show notes.
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The Desk Set is brought to you by the King County Library System. The show is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, and produced by Britta Barrett. Our theme song is "I Know What I Want" by Math and Physics Club. Other music provided by Chad Crouch, from the Free Music Archive.
Transcript
Emily Calkins:
You're listening to the Desk Set.
Britta Barrett:
A bookish podcast for reading broadly.
Emily Calkins:
We're your hosts, Emily Calkins.
Britta Barrett:
And Britta Barrett.
Emily Calkins:
On this episode, we're talking about books set where you were born and books by Black authors. So first up, I'll interview Monica West about her debut novel Revival Season, which follows a Black evangelical family over the course of a summer that changes all of their lives.
Britta Barrett:
And then I talk to Brittany Ackerman, the author of the book The Brittanys which follows a series of 14 year old girls coming of age in Florida, which just so happens to be where I was born.
Emily Calkins:
Then we'll talk a little bit more about books set where we were born, and how you decide exactly what counts as set where you were born.
Britta Barrett:
Let's dive in.
Emily Calkins:
Thank you so much for being with us today.
Monica West:
Thank you for having me. A little bit about myself, I'm originally from Cleveland, Ohio, and I currently live in Oakland, California. I teach high school English. I started Revival Season in 2012. A little bit about the book is it's a story of a 15 year old girl named Miriam Horton who suffers a crisis of faith after witnessing a pretty brutal act that her father does. And about the summer that happens afterwards, and all the things that unfold for her or change her understanding of the world after that event.
Emily Calkins:
So one of the things I really loved about the book is the way that it honors the character's faith without simplifying it. So for the characters, faith healing is a big part of the story. And for Miriam, there's no question that faith healing is real. Even in her crisis of faith, she believes that it can happen even if it's not always working. So I'm curious what shaped your approach to writing about faith and doubt.
Monica West:
Yeah. Miriam, even in her crisis, even in her real definitive moments of real doubt about her dad about his powers, about her powers. I think that because it just shaped her, she just never really questioned it. And even her questioning, still didn't have the possibility that it didn't exist or that it wasn't real. Her questioning never went to that place. Why I wrote about faith and doubt was that, number one, it's such a tricky, tricky topic to write about. And I thought it'd be really interesting to work through because I don't read books about this type of subject, because it's a taboo subject.
Emily Calkins:
Faith and religion, organized religion is not something that's treated seriously very often in fiction. And I'm curious about the revival scene and sort of the revival circuit that the family goes on and how you wrote those scenes. Did you go to revivals? What did your research look like?
Monica West:
Yeah. So I have been to revivals, and then also did a ton of research as well. And they're definitely a thing that still happens, not in the ways that it happened in the past. But I was interested in this idea that Miriam's family, the Hortons, just feel really out of time, throwbacks to a different era. And so the idea of bringing back something that feels way older, or that has an older tradition felt really in line with who this family is, and what they do and what they're about. And it just felt really natural for them to do something that feels really kind of old fashioned, traditional.
Monica West:
And so I did a ton of research about historical revivals, about the purposes of them, about the ways that denominations use them. And then my own experience with some revivals to put those scenes in there. They galvanized faith or belief, I think that's probably the best way to think about it, this moment of frenzy, and all these emotions on display in this really public way.
Monica West:
And it felt like such a really rich place for Miriam to have questions about something put into place that's really public, not just for her and her family, but also, that's their family's business too, in some ways. Which feels a little icky to say, but I felt like the revival setting was the perfect place for her to explore something that feels like a really private conversation about doubt and belief. But that she would explore that in a place where there are a lot of people there and her dad's on stage. And she sees him like a stranger and yet also very intimately knows what these events are and what they're like and what they're for. And so it just felt like a really rich, fertile area for me to go deeply into thinking about.
Emily Calkins:
So you talk just a little bit about Miriam's father there, and that relationship was so interesting to me because it's so complex, she deeply admires him, especially at the beginning of the book. She's also afraid of him and she kind of resents him. Even at the beginning when she's just getting into this crisis of faith, she resents she's being held out. Her brother Caleb is invited in, he's sort of the natural successor for her dad, even though she has this deep faith, and she's very knowledgeable. The relationship between her and her father is so deeply integrated with her own faith. And I'm curious about how that relationship reflects patriarchal systems in religious communities in general, or evangelical communities in general, and how it's unique to this particular pair of characters.
Monica West:
Yeah. There's this interesting way that Miriam knows her father in a very, almost superficial way. She knows him really well, in the sense that she's an observer, and so she watches everything, everything he does, what he says, his gestures. So she knows everything about the revival sermons, everything about the way he heal, she's such a watcher. So she knows him in that way and she's terrified of him.
Monica West:
I think that when she watches him, there's love there initially, but the book begins with her having witnessed something pretty horrific the year before that she can't shake. And so had I started the book, maybe two years prior, I think there would have been much more love and admiration for him and less fear. And that is kind of morphed into, "I'm really unsure of who my dad is and what my dad can do." And then that whole thought spirals all the way through the rest of the book, which is, "Oh, I've seen him do things now. I want to believe that he's good, I want to believe that he is righteous and just, I want to believe that he is holy, and I kind of can't anymore."
Monica West:
And then the ways that she's overlooked from the beginning, she is so devout, and she's so loyal, and she's so dutiful, and she's connected to the faith in such a way. And that doesn't matter with the dad at all. I think so that for me, feels like it mimics the patriarchal structure in evangelicalism and Christianity. The idea of a woman or girl in her case, but soon to be a woman, taking the helm of something that she knows so well, not even being a consideration. And I think that the connection kind of boasting about the name Miriam, and then this idea of how Miriam's overshadowed by Moses biblically. And how for her, she knows pretty deeply early on that she will never be invited into the study. Her dad will never nurture the leadership in her that's there. And the way that he'll do it in Caleb, who doesn't seem as interested in it as Miriam does.
Monica West:
And it just me echoes a ton of that patriarchal dynamic, where you can be the best at this and in this structure, and in this context, and in this system. If you're not male, it doesn't matter. And so that's, I think one of the huge things that Miriam is grappling with. This idea of the fear of her dad, the nascent belief that she's developing in herself, the doubt that's growing in her about her dad, and then this profound sense of rejection. This, "You will never see me for who I am, you will never see me in my fullest." And how frustrating that feels to her to be on the flip end of that.
Monica West:
But it does seem to echo so many things in evangelical Christianity and Christianity in general, where, "Well, you're not male, so you can do things, but just not the things that I do. You can do some other things." You can lead up a group of women to do something, you can do some other things that to them feel frivolous, but Miriam doesn't want that. And she has to kind of really grapple with that. She's fighting against a big system and not just her dad.
Emily Calkins: I was thinking about power and the way that people wield power in the novel, and I think Mrs. Cade is a really fascinating character in terms of the way that she wields power through these back channels that are open to her as a woman. Can you talk about that character and power and gender.
Monica West:
The way that people have access to power in the book, the gendered ways that people have access to power. And Mrs. Cade plays the role that is given to her. She's a midwife and uses that in her favor, to basically gain access to this family in ways that no one else outside of the family really can. She's not in those closed door rooms where the men are talking but she's adjacent and she's always around and she was a believer in Samuel initially. And so she knows the family really well, she knows Samuel well, and is really skeptical, especially after she delivers Isaac, and realizes the extent to which, "Oh, this is bad." I mean, I think knowing it and the fact that it wasn't a surprise to her was a pretty clear thing that Mrs. Cade wasn't shocked at what was happening and what was going on behind closed doors and she knew the reasons why. So I really liked playing with that sense of power for her.
Monica West:
And then similarly, Miriam is trying to kind of negotiate, navigate that power. Miriam watching Mrs. Cade wield power and what she's able to do, I think she recognizes Mrs. Cade's status in the way that she does have access to power and those channels and what that looks like for her.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. I love that character. And almost kind of the flip side of it is Joanne, Ma, who's Miriam's mother, who is also I think, just a fascinating character. In some ways, she's the only one of them who might be able or still maintains this connection to the secular world, the rest of the world that the children are so isolated from. And she shares that with Miriam through literature and a little bit through music. She's got a little bit of an escape route if she wants one. And yet, she doesn't seem to have any power or she doesn't choose to wield any power or very rarely does she. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that character and sort of the inspiration for her and her role in the novel.
Monica West:
Sure. For Joanne, she knows that her life before Samuel, with her dad and her upbringing and the violence that she saw, once she came over to Samuel, she kind of just came all the way in. She was so thirsty and hungry for something that felt real and different. And there's a part in the book when I explore this idea that Miriam thinks about for Joanne, what it was like to kind of find God and find a husband at the same time. And that this idea that she didn't separate Samuel from God, and this was I think, Samuel needed, he loves the fact that she worships him and he needs that. And she has her doubts, but she's choosing to stay. And I grappled with that the whole way through, which is why does she?
Monica West:
And the night when she almost doesn't, the night when she leaves, or tries to leave and Miriam catches her. I think she just feels so profoundly responsible for her family and her role in what has gotten so bad. She's not innocent in a lot of those things and so I feel like there's fear in her. She's also an abused woman, she's an abused wife, and Miriam wants her to be stronger, and Miriam wants her to stand up, and Miriam wants her to act on power. And they have these really small rebellions, these moments of listening to music that's secular and dancing in ways that the father wouldn't like. These moments, I feel really transgressive for them.
Monica West:
But beyond that, I think Joanne, I know she feels like she doesn't know she can leave, or she doesn't want to leave. But I think Samuel's done a number on her in the sense that she feels what would she do without him? What'd her life be? She met him when she was a teenager, and then she just got wrapped all the way up in his life. So what does that mean for her to then not be a wife? Would it mean for her to start over with her kids? And I think that she can't even begin to think that. She grapples with all those things and yet, there's a sense that she's going to stay, and it's sad, but she's going to stay. And she knows who she's married to and she's going to stay.
Monica West:
The ending was the hardest thing in the world to write. And I'd written I don't know, 15, 20 endings. And when I wrote this one, I said, "Oh, that's it. There it is. I felt it." The open endedness of it, I think is really frustrating some people but also for me felt like it fit with the book in the sense that I don't give you answers about whether or not these feelings are real. You decide what you believe about Miriam's gift, you decide what you believe about what the father can and can't do, that it's real at all, or if it's just a show.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. I mean, I like an ambiguous ending in general, because I think that's how life is. It's very rare that we get this neat, tidy package. But I think you're right, to me, it just works so well because the whole novel is about faith and doubt and not having the easy answers. And so it puts the reader in that position of okay, you have the information that you have, and now you have to decide also. I'm wondering if your work of spending time with high schoolers informed Miriam's character at all, because she feels like such a teenager. So much of what she's going through is about just that normal coming of age stuff.
Monica West:
I've been a high school English teacher for 13 years. It's so funny that I live in the adult world, but I spend the majority of my time with 14 and 15 year olds, and so I understand them pretty well, even when I don't understand them, I still get them. So yeah, a lot of my Miriam stuff came from the fact that I work really closely with people her age.
Monica West:
And what I love about that age is that it is everything is possibility. For kids and the kids I teach, it's the age in which you're trying to differentiate yourself from your parents and your family, where you understand some things about the world. You think some things are true, where you're deciding your own truth, and your own values and your own beliefs, and the things that matter to you. And you are just hoping to just kind of feel that out. And so for Miriam, this whole idea of coming into this power, this understanding of herself, goes very much in line with what I see 15 year olds going through all the time with politically, ideologically, religiously, emotionally. And so that felt really connected to my experiences with high schoolers.
Monica West:
And the other thing is the part where you decide to differentiate yourselves from your parents, and to see them as fallible. And when you first see your parents as people, it is a pretty... Humbling is probably the wrong word. But it's a pretty stark moment when you see their mistakes and you see that they aren't perfect. Until you differentiate yourself from your parents and you see them as fallible, and as messy, and as people. And for Miriam, it is huge for her to see her mom and her dad.
Monica West:
I mean, she saw with her dad first. I think her belief in her mom is kind of shattered over the course of the book. Her belief in her dad was shattered the previous summer. And she still wanted to hold on to hope but they begin the revival season with Miriam in a place of doubt. And then she becomes hopeful after the first revival, and then that hope is dashed pretty quickly after. And it just feels so in line with what I watch my kids go through every single day.
Monica West:
And then it's also the balancing act between devotion to them and to what they believe and to the comforts of how you were raised. And doubt about did they do the right thing with me? And what could have been different about how they treated me or how they loved me or how they dealt with me? And so all that stuff feels really present for Miriam, which is on every scale with every kid I've ever worked with in some form, it's there. So teaching high school is definitely informed Miriam's age and her character.
Emily Calkins:
And are you working on a new novel now?
Monica West:
I am. It's about this spiritual leader, he's kind of a cult leader. He is this leader of this group called The Way, he converts only women, he marries them as he pulls them more and more away from their life. They're dealing with this idea of loyalty to him, and what they believe him to be as they're watching him become something different and someone different. So I tell the book from the perspective of three of his wives and what they see and why they stay, their complicity in what he's doing and what he's done. Just kind of this idea of watching this person that they've made a god fall, and how they all respond to it.
Emily Calkins:
Well, that sounds fascinating. I would love to read it. And then our last question we always ask, what are you reading now?
Monica West:
There's a book by this author called Kelsey McKinney, called God Spare the Girls. She writes from this perspective of these white Southern Baptists is a very different evangelical community than the Black family that I read about. Really interestingly connected in some ways about the fall of a leader. So I'm reading that one and enjoying that. And then after that someone compared Revival Season to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus which I've never read and so that's on deck after God Spare the Girls.
Emily Calkins:
Well thank you so much for being with us today. It was really fun to talk to you.
Monica West:
Thank you so much for having me. It was really great to talk to you also.
Brittany Ackerman:
My name is Brittany Ackerman and I am an author. I'm the author of The Brittanys. I am also a teacher at a performing arts school, I teach everything from English comp to creative writing to applied logic and critical thinking, archetypal psychology, literature classes, just everything, anything and everything that involves writing and discussion.
Britta Barrett:
The Brittanys is your debut novel, but your first published book was a memoir. And I'm curious if the process of self excavation and interrogation, if you came across old diaries or yearbooks that helped you get into the headspace to write from this character's perspective.
Brittany Ackerman:
I don't have any of that stuff anymore. It got lost to transferring over computers. So I really just had these memories and experience to go off of. Because this is fiction, the novel, and I wasn't trying to get everything right and make everything perfect, I just wanted to capture the feeling of that time and the kind of quiet anxiety. I really did have five friends in my friend group named Brittany. But we didn't go on these kind of adventures and misadventures. It was kind of more just we all knew each other and sometimes we would all hang out together, but it wasn't like it is in the book. And I kind of was imagining, "Well, what if it had been? And what if these relationships were everything? And really defined that time in my life?"
Britta Barrett:
When you're writing five young women, all have the same name who existed in a kind of monoculture? How do you go about differentiating the characters? Were you playing with any of those archetypes of teenage girls?
Brittany Ackerman:
I wanted each of the friends in the book to embody a different kind of archetype. There was definitely one of the friends that's more motherly, and then there's a friend that is more sexually advanced than the rest of them. There's one that's definitely sillier. And then there's one that's kind of a tomboy and isn't really into boys yet and doesn't even really know what that's going to look like. And I feel like it kind of worked out in a way where all the friends make up one perfect personality, having all the little traits here and there. But separate - that's why they have these experiences that they go through because they need each other through that time.
Britta Barrett:
I think Heather's is maybe the easiest, shallow comparison, but tonally, it has this quality that I don't think we have a good word for, which is like a cringer recognition. It's not exactly nostalgia, but just being put back in your adolescent feelings like, "Oh, yeah, it's like that."
Brittany Ackerman:
Yeah, there is a feeling in the body that you have when you read about those experiences or you watch them in movies, that it's like a visceral thing. And someone needs to coin a term for it because you're right, it's not nostalgia, necessarily, but it's almost like whatever the opposite of catharsis is or something. You're reliving that moment and you feel it. And you just have all of those growing pains over again that you are experienced and maybe tried to forget about, but they're still there deep down inside.
Britta Barrett:
And I think even the most totally average girlhood is a kind of body horror. I'm thinking about that scene where she's essentially assaulted near the lockers, the way that she's processing that.
Brittany Ackerman:
Yeah. So I had an experience similar to that one. And I remember just my mom just picked me up and then I had to just go on about my day, and there was no debriefing, there was no crying to her about it. And it felt like everything that I went through had to just be tucked away. And it's really unfortunate because I carried a lot of that with me. And it's definitely added to my anxiety and it definitely adds to the anxiety of the character in the book. It's like then, her mom is like, "How was your day?" And she just freaks out on her. When that's a totally normal question to ask your teenage daughter after school.
Britta Barrett:
Yeah. And their relationship with parents, I found to be really interesting in the book. In many ways, many of the parents are quite absent, whether they're away for work or just not keeping super close tabs on their kids. At the same time they do feel like a very strong presence that the characters want to please and want to meet often high expectations. Whether that's for achievement in school, or having the perfect look, that appearing to be perfect is maybe more important than being perfect.
Brittany Ackerman:
In my time growing up, it was definitely the parents wanted us to do well and achieve and be the best or be the best looking or to be all of that, even though that's impossible. But they didn't really want to hear about our day to day just struggles and problems. "We were we in detention?" Who cares? "Did you eat?" Who cares? It was more just, "Let me know the big things that are happening, and just don't be too terrible." My mom was a stay at home mom. But usually both of the parents in the other households were working full time and weren't really around and were kind of absent and the kids were kind of a latchkey kid, and they just had free rein of the house. I mean, that's what the character of Jensen, her parents both work and they kind of just do these crazy things, but they don't get punished. No one's getting grounded, no one's learning any real hard lessons here.
Brittany Ackerman:
And I don't know if it's because of where I grew up, the time I grew up in, the socioeconomic climate of where I grew up in, but it's funny because that was always the house that I wanted to go to, because I wanted to get away from my mom just watching our every move. We all wanted what the other person had. I mean, I know there's a scene in the book, my avatar is ogling over this character's collection of perfumes, and Juicy sweatsuits and jeans. And just all of these things. When I had a closet full of my own stuff too, but it just feels new and different when it's somebody else's, and especially someone that's a little bit more popular than you and a little bit more advanced than you. And just seems more like they know what they're doing when you just feel like you're so lost and you feel like so not popular and not cool and not advanced.
Britta Barrett:
People can probably gather it from context clues that the story is set in the early aughts, so a lot of the references to specific fashion or lip gloss, situates it very much. Is the year 2004?
Brittany Ackerman:
It starts in 2003. And then there's New Year's is in the end of the first act of the book, and then we go into 2004. So those were the years I was writing around. I'm really distilling a lot of my experience as a teenager into just that one year, because I just felt really connected to trying to do a year in the life.
Brittany Ackerman:
Me and my editor Anna Kaufman, we really didn't want to ever say specifically what year it is. Obviously, like you said, people can guess and people can figure it out with the references. But I did want it to feel like almost timeless, floating in that early aughts time period, but didn't really need to be tied down to a specific date. And we did that together because we wanted people to say, "Well, okay, even though I'm a teenager now, but I still can relate to this," or, "Well, I was actually a teen in the '80s, but I still relate to X, Y and Z." And I wanted it to just be more nostalgic feeling than like, "Oh, well, you had to have been a freshman in high school in 2003, or you're not going to get it."
Britta Barrett:
Well, as someone who grew up very much around that time and in this setting, it's literally super close to home for me. But I do think it'll be appealing to many people beyond that narrow age range. I'm curious if you've noticed things like there's dELiA's X Dolls Kill collaboration that early aughts fashion has already come back around for a new generation of kids. And how it's felt to sort of see low rise jeans and butterfly clips sort of back in the cultural consciousness?
Brittany Ackerman:
I've seen a lot of like these makeup tutorials from that time and this is something that I feel in my body. When I think about how much makeup I used to put on my face, just tons of concealer and foundation and so much blush. And I know people do the contouring thing now but I honestly feel like they're trying to make themselves look natural. And the look that we were going for was not natural. And I remember it was really in to wear these rhinestones on your face around your eyes. And my mom wouldn't let me do it, so I would have to hide them in my backpack and then put them on when I got to school and then take them off before I went home. Or this baby blue eyeliner that I had from MAC, it was like the first thing I ever bought from MAC. I don't know why I picked baby blue but it was a look.
Brittany Ackerman:
And it's cool to see the next generation having fun with that stuff when for me, it wasn't necessarily fun and experimental, it was more like I was doing it to try to fit in. And there was an obsessive urgency about it. Like, "I have to have this pair of shoes, and I have to wear my hair like this, and I have to wear my makeup like this, or else..." Especially going to a private school where we had uniforms. It was accessories and makeup, that was just everything, it was all you had. But to see people playing with it now and having fun, it's cool. And it's cool to see them making these fun little videos and taking fun pictures and it feels light-hearted not like making fun of it, which that would kind of feel bad. So yeah, I'm all for it.
Britta Barrett:
There's a lot of brand consciousness and label dropping throughout the novel, which I was just curious, was that reflective your high school experience? The having a specific handbag or like a Tiffany choker, and those were like the talismans of teenagers at the time?
Brittany Ackerman:
I love that, I love talismans. Yeah, totally. I mean, like I said, it wasn't so much about, "Oh, we're experimenting with our style and it's all fun." It was you have to have this or you're just out. These are just objects and we treated them like they were a meter of our class or something or of our goodness in the world. If you didn't have what everyone else had, you were just left behind. And now as an adult I don't want to have things that everybody else has, it's much more special to have something different and to stand out or just to not be a clone and just have the same sneakers like everyone else, or the same Tiffany's choker. It feels so much better to be an individual and to have people be like, "Wow, I really love your style, because it's so unique," not because it's just in fashion, or it's just expensive, or it's just what everyone else has.
Britta Barrett:
And like the character you moved from New York to Florida. How old were you when that happened? And what were some of the big differences you noticed in the culture?
Brittany Ackerman:
So I think I was like eight or nine years old. And yeah, we moved to South Florida, my parents were kind of done with New York, they couldn't stand the weather anymore and the change of season was just really harsh. And school was also getting really, really expensive. There was so much money in New York and the school that I... Because I was in a private school in New York also. And kids would get beat up if they didn't have certain things, whereas in Florida, someone will just tease you until you cry. But in New York, it was getting really bad. And so I think my parents wanted to just pull us both out of that. Kind of felt like I needed a change too.
Brittany Ackerman:
And even though things were clique-y in Florida, it felt more accepting, still clique-y and still expensive and still an emphasis on objects and belongings and status. It somehow felt more open and more accessible, having - being named Brittany and having me be in that friend group definitely helped. I don't know how I would have survived if I was just a Lauren or something.
Brittany Ackerman:
But the major difference was just the weather. I mean, I never dreamed that I would have a house that had a pool in the backyard where I could go swimming in December. I mean, it was crazy. And so I loved it. I loved like oh, we're going to be... We can go to the beach if we want, there's so much more to do it felt like. Or now as an adult, I'm like, "Oh, there's nothing to do in Florida. There's absolutely nothing to do besides go to the beach."
Brittany Ackerman:
In South Florida where I grew up, I went on a couple dates with guys where they would take me to the beach at night but you're not even really allowed to be at the beach at night there. It's supposed to be closed, you'd have to sneak there and risk getting arrested or getting in trouble, getting a citation or something. And yeah, I mean that's why we frequented malls so much or just anything to get out of our houses but that's what we had, that's what we had access to. We would hang out in a Taco Bell parking lot. These rich kids in their BMWs just posted up eating a Crunchwrap at two in the morning.
Britta Barrett:
I'm wondering how you approached a sense of time from a teenager's perspective. One of my favorite lines is when the protagonist is talking about a boy who I think is just a few weeks or months younger, she's just turned 15. And she's like, "I can't even imagine dating someone who's 14, what a baby." And her friend is sort of pushing back on that idea. She's like, "But I've done so much growing in the past couple weeks. So I'm older now."
Brittany Ackerman:
Yeah, I mean, that moment felt a little cringey to write too, because it's like, "What? Now you're too good for someone that's two months younger than you?" But I think that it really feels true to that desire of these characters to be older and to just be adults, even though you're not an adult when you're 15, or 16, or 17. Or I mean, I barely feel like an adult in my 30s. But there was this huge desire to just be older. And then once you get to a certain... When you get to that next level, when you get to turn that next age, it's like, everyone younger than you just doesn't know and they're not cool, they don't get it and you're just above and beyond.
Brittany Ackerman:
So I think that I tried to make the writing reflect how different even just one year in someone's life can change, how many things can really happen. Even if a lot of them are just going to Subway and piercing your ears, there's so many emotions within all of that that happen. And that's what I was really trying to encompass. And that time can feel so heavy and thicker and just bigger when you're that age. It feels like every single thing that happens is so important and it's just over the top and just dramatic. And then, as an adult now, why was that such a big deal to me? Why did I freak out about that? I don't even talk to these people anymore. I don't know them. So different perspective as you get older.
Britta Barrett:
And one of the style choices you make is to include these sort of glimpses into the future in italics. What made you want to include those moments? And how did you decide the fate of the characters?
Brittany Ackerman:
I had the one in there at the end with the narrator and Jensen and kind of a flash forward of Jensen's character. My editor, Anna, she was like, "Oh, try this with some of the other people in the book, where did they end up? Where does the narrator imagine them? Does she know where they end up? Let's try to give some closure on some of these characters." And so I just tried to start placing them throughout teenage friendships, a lot of them are very temporary, and they're not forever. But I think it's still interesting to get a little glimpse or a little window into the future.
Britta Barrett:
And Jensen, in particular, I kept waiting for a culmination of their friendship to maybe escalate to the kiss that they don't ever really have.
Brittany Ackerman:
I think there's something about female friendships that are just so, so special. And I think what I was trying to do was just show that the lines of female friendship can just be so blurry and so messy. How complicated they can be even as adults, but I mean, in my experience as a teenager, you want to be inseparable from that person. It's like your sister, but not. It's like you'd call each other you're, "Oh, this is my best friend. This is my best girlfriend." But it's more than that. It's like a friendship that's more than a friendship.
Brittany Ackerman:
Sarah Gerard reference, she has a really great story called BFF that's in her book, Sunshine State. And there's a really great line about, "I knew like when your period was coming, that's how close we were." And what you were talking about before, how this adolescence is a lot of body horror stuff. To teach someone how to use a tampon and to practice kissing, that is the most intimate stuff that you can do, and you feel so close to them.
Brittany Ackerman:
And so I kind of wanted it to feel a little obscure in that moment. Does the narrator want to kiss her? Are they going to kiss? Does the friend want to kiss her? I think that to resolve those questions, I never really got answers to those questions so I can't really resolve them. But I like the tension of it and I like that it still feels hopeful and it still feels like they're... Because the other part of the book is them kind of drifting apart. And now they've even kind of drifted closer back together than maybe they were before. Their relationship feels more real and more genuine than it did before.
Britta Barrett:
So give us a flash forward for you, what's the next book that you're working on?
Brittany Ackerman:
So I am kind of working on a little bit of a sequel with The Brittanys. So it's pretty much going to be the same narrator but different time in her life, different characters, and I'm writing about the college years. So I went to college in the Midwest, I went to Indiana University, and I was in a Jewish sorority. And it was my first time away from home, really. I mean, I had done like a summer program at UCLA when I was actually 15. But this was like my first time moving and my whole life was uprooted and changed. And I'm still in the beginning stages of it, but it's kind of another year in the life. But this time they are in their junior year of college so everyone is about to turn 21 and they're still going to frat parties, but then they're, "Are we too old for the frat? Should we just wait to go to bars?"
Brittany Ackerman:
And I'm also amping up a lot of the anxiety stuff and my personal experience in college when I went to a therapist for the first time and started on medication. And I know that's like briefly touched on in one of the flashes in The Brittanys, but I want to make that even more of a character and in and of itself in the next book. So that's what I'm doing right now. And it's been really fun and quite hilarious to write. And it's been really wild.
Britta Barrett:
We always like to ask, what are you reading now or what are some recent favorites?
Brittany Ackerman:
I just finished Gina Nutt's Night Rooms, which was one of my favorite nonfiction books I've ever read. It was really beautiful. And in like a very fragmented prose style. And then I'm actually right now I'm reading McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh. And it's the only book of hers that I haven't read and I have been saving it. And it's about this sailor at sea that is a drunk. And it's kind of crazy but it's also what I just needed to read right now. And I also started Sarah Rose Etter's The Book of X, which is another kind of fragmented novel. And it's really, really well done so far. It has that quiet anxiety that I just love in my narrators. And yeah, I'm loving that one too.
Britta Barrett:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for chatting with me today.
Brittany Ackerman:
Thank you so much for having me. It was such a great time getting to know you and getting to talk about the book.
Emily Calkins:
Do you have some favorite Florida set books that sort of capture your experience of growing up there?
Britta Barrett:
I would say that the person who best captures the suburban teenage aches that I had growing up in Orlando, is probably John Green. Paper Towns, the main character lives in the Orlando suburbs. And then in Looking for Alaska, the main character leaves that location to go to a boarding school. And I can completely relate to the desire to leave [crosstalk 00:44:19]. Like John Green, I'm very lucky that my childhood was pretty normal and comfortable. But I shared his experiences of not feeling super connected to my peers or the culture there. And sort of looking beyond the edges to see what else might be on offer in the world. But I do think that a lot of what informs the perception of Florida is fairly cartoonish. It's like the state is being drawn by those like boardwalk caricature artists. And there are some authors who I think do a better job of describing a Florida that's more familiar to me. Are you familiar with Kristen Arnett?
Emily Calkins:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Britta Barrett:
Her work is definitely worth checking out.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, I read the first one Mostly Dead Things. That's the one about the family that owns the taxidermy shop. And it was hard to read because the main character is so depressed, and I don't think she really realizes it. But the characters are really well developed and they're really interesting. And it is like a really interesting look at sort of, if you're a person who's not from Florida who thinks of Florida as beaches and palm trees, it's definitely not that Florida. But it feels like a very specific place. Yeah, she's a really interesting writer.
Britta Barrett:
She wrote this incredible essay for Lit Hub, called "The Problem with Writing About Florida. I just want to read a little bit from that. "There are certain types of essays I don't like and they all have to do with Florida. They're written by people traveling through the state or Floridians who now consider themselves former. Both of them are trying to get to the root of whatever mystical strange forces at work in the state. I'm ready to hate whatever the author is going to say before I get to the end of the first paragraph.
Britta Barrett:
Florida isn't like other states, but you've heard that before. Some of what we are is just terrible. Got a lot of crime and racist, shitty cops. People here voted overwhelmingly for Trump. I'm trying to build something new in this essay but the honest truth is that some of the bad stereotypes are accurate. Do you need Florida Man so that you're able to listen to a Florida woman talk about home? Every time you say something bad about this place, you're talking about me. My heart, my body. If Florida is a joke than aren't I the punchline? Orlando is wet, sticky, violent. It's the place where you learn the contours of your body through sweaty shorts and tank tops. It's a damp, cold bathing suit pulled down around her ankles while you pee in a friend's bathroom at a pool party."
Britta Barrett:
And it goes on and on and on, but I feel like she just nails it. I'm curious too, if readers are more or less interested in hearing from people who also were born where they were born and are writing about it as an own voices perspective. Or want to read people who have moved to or traveled to a new location, which kind of gives a fresh set of eyes, I'm thinking about both Lauren Groff and the author I spoke with Brittany Ackerman moved from New York to Florida.
Britta Barrett:
And that's a pretty common path, we have a lot of people who move from New York to live in Florida at retirement or earlier. And I think they both do a good job of having these sharp observations about a place because of the fact that they're sort of fish out of water when they just arrived and there's this big cultural contrast to what they're used to. We have different experiences of the same place. And in a lot of ways South Florida is very different from Central Florida.
Britta Barrett:
But I think what the book captured maybe even more than the location was locating the character in a place in time. So being a 14 year old girl in the early aughts, that's what resonated most for me about the book because the location, the way she describes there aren't any seasons here kind of adds to the stagnancy, I guess I'd say. And the fact that these kids are being raised in what are sprawling suburbs, but still manages to feel kind of suffocating, because you can only really go as far as your bike will take you. And the radius of teenage life is often fairly limited. That the environment didn't play a huge role in the story itself, although it was certainly culturally familiar. Did you read Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation?
Emily Calkins:
I did. Yeah.
Britta Barrett:
Love the Southern Reach Trilogy. So if anyone has seen the film, or read the book, you can probably imagine your mind, there's this territory that characters in the book are entering into that doesn't behave normally. It's beautiful and scary and unusual. And how would you describe that region?
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, it's sort of almost like an alien planet but it's on Earth. It's sort of behind this force field and when scientists arrive there, the natural world doesn't behave as we expect the natural world to behave on Earth.
Britta Barrett:
And the author Jeff VanderMeer, I believe he still lives in Florida. He certainly went to school in Gainesville. And that location was directly inspired by a hike he used to take in a wildlife refuge in North Florida. It totally makes sense to me how that would get translated into fiction as this dangerous, beautiful, unsettling place.
Emily Calkins:
When I was thinking about what books I wanted to talk about when I think about where I was born, I was thinking about the way that different books kind of capture different elements of the place that I was born. And some are more focused on the natural world and others are more interested in sort of the human experience of living somewhere, whether that's the history of that place, or sort of the contemporary situation in that place.
Emily Calkins:
So I grew up in Spokane, which is on the other side of Washington State and I've talked about that on the show before, I think. But it's interesting hearing you talk about Florida and the different parts of Florida because Washington is really divided. There's Eastern Washington, which is on the eastern side of the Cascades and then there's Western Washington, and they're quite different. In a lot of ways, the natural world is very different. It's much drier, it's higher elevation over in Eastern Washington, and then the sort of built and human world is very different too. And in fact, when I was thinking about books that really sort of captured Spokane and Eastern Washington, I actually think that there are even books set in North Idaho, or even into Montana, that are more evocative to me of growing up in Spokane, or sort of what we call the Inland Northwest.
Emily Calkins:
So a couple of books to me that aren't technically set where I was born in Spokane, but are set nearby that I think really capture the feeling of the place. The first is The Miseducation of Cameron Post, it's set in Montana. And it's sort of a coming of age story about a woman, she's caught kissing her best girlfriend when she's like 11 and it's the same night that her parents die in a car crash. And those two sort of things become intertwined for the rest of the book. And she's sent to a conversion therapy camp, that's really pretty terrible. But there are some really gorgeous scenes about summer in the Inland Northwest and sort of the hot, dry, these languid days where you're a kid and you don't have a lot to do or places to be and just kind of what it is like to amble around in the hot dry summer that really felt like the summers that I knew in the Inland Northwest.
Emily Calkins:
For people who are still looking for a book for this category, place is sort of a generalized term. It can be the city where you were born, or if you were born in a city or in a rural place that is really hard to find something set in that specific place you can go broader, you can go to the state, or you can go sort of regionally.
Emily Calkins:
Really what I was hoping that people would get from this category is an opportunity to kind of experience what I think is so special about reading about a place that you've lived, a place that you remember, it's sort of a dual pronged experience. On one hand, you get the joy of recognizing a place that you've been. And I think particularly if you're like me, and you come from some place that doesn't appear that often in popular culture, it's really exciting to read about Spokane because it means that that sort of zing of familiarity, you don't get very often. So much of the media that we consume is set in New York, or it's set in LA, but to read about the place that you grew up, feels really special.
Emily Calkins:
And then I think there's also sort of this wonderful way that reading someone else's work set in the place that you were born, lets you learn about it or have a different view on it as well. So that's kind of what I was hoping that people would get. And whether that means that you're reading a historical novel set where you were born, or if you're reading nonfiction about something that happened there. There's lots of different ways to approach it.
Britta Barrett:
Do you have any books by authors who were born and raised in Washington about Spokane?
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, so a couple of my favorite Spokane authors Jess Walter and Sharma Shields. I don't know if they were actually born there but they were certainly raised there and then both left, and then came back as adults and writers. And I definitely feel again, like I think Spokane has a little bit of a chip on its shoulder, and I say that with immense fondness with that same chip on my shoulder. So I feel like a lot of hometown pride, getting to see them write about the town.
Emily Calkins:
And I think it's interesting because they do it in very different ways. Jess is a very realistic writer. His work is mostly sort of historical fiction. I've talked about The Cold Millions before, but he also has almost like a crime novel. I mean, I guess it is a crime novel called Citizen Vince that's about a low level criminal who is getting ready to vote in his first election. And it's set in 1980 in Spokane, and the little glimpses of recognition. So this character Vince works at this donut shop that I used to go to, the legendary donut place Donut Parade, that's now sadly closed. RIP Donut Parade. That's the kind of place that you know about and you get the cultural importance of it if you're a person who lived in the town. But then in The Cold Millions, Jess has clearly done a lot of historical research. And that was really fun, because it meant that I got to learn about Spokane in a way that I hadn't really.
Emily Calkins:
And Sharma's books are much more out there. She incorporates elements of the fantastical, though I wouldn't really call them fantasy. And her first book, The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac has big sections of it that are set in Spokane. And what I really like about those books is the way that she writes about the natural world. So Spokane is basically like high desert. There's these Ponderosa pines, there's all of these desert flowers that bloom. It doesn't get a lot of rain, it's at a pretty high elevation. And I think The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac in particular really captures that natural world as well as all of these sort of funny cultural things that you can only appreciate. I mean, I think they work in the book either way, but I think there's a different kind of appreciation that you bring to them when she's writing about the parade that happens every year or that kind of thing. But it's very different approaches to writing about the same place, which I think is an interesting experience.
Britta Barrett:
Are there any other books set here in greater King County area that you'd like to suggest?
Emily Calkins:
One that I think is really an interesting read is called Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. And it is set during the WTO protests in 1999. So I don't know how much that was in the national news. But the World Trade Organization held a conference here in Seattle in 1999. And I think people were really becoming aware of sort of the environmental and economic impacts of globalization. So there were a ton of protests downtown in Seattle.
Emily Calkins:
And this is all fictionalized. But the protests started out peacefully and then became non peaceful. And it's a fictionalized account of those, but it follows different characters who come. So there's someone who's a delegate from a small country in Southeast Asia and he's like it's really important that he get to this meeting. And then there are several different protesters, there are multiple police officers. So the police ended up clashing with protesters in a way that was pretty unfortunate. And it covers all of that. But I think if you lived in Seattle, at the time, or even if you lived in the Northwest, where it was really, really big news, you'll remember enough to be really interested in it. And if you didn't live here, it's sort of an interesting look at Seattle, this long history of sort of social justice, protest, environmentalism, anarchism in the northwest, and sort of how those things met at this particular moment. So that's an interesting one.
Emily Calkins:
I'm really curious to see what readers choose for this. I heard from a staff member who found a book written by her childhood doctor that we had in our catalog. So there's lots of good stuff and I hope that people will share what they read about the place that they were born with us.
Britta Barrett:
And how can they find books about where they were born?
Emily Calkins:
So probably the easiest way, because this is such a specific question is to submit a BookMatch match request. So go to kcls.org/bookmatch. And let us know that you're looking for a book set where you were born, tell us where you were born, and we will create a list of titles just for you. Another way you can get help with this request or with any kind of book suggestion is to go to your local library. So all of our libraries are now open for in person service, and the staff would love to help you find a book about the place that you were born or any other questions that you might have.
Emily Calkins:
We have a full slate of author events planned for the fall. So we've got coming up in September, we'll be talking with Chef Edward Lee, who's the author of a book called Buttermilk Graffiti that's all about cuisine all over the country. He took a road trip and talked home chefs, restaurateurs, people who own grocery stores and it looks at the way that different immigrant cuisine has come together to form a uniquely American food scape. And he'll be talking to Matt Lewis of Where Ya At Matt. So I'm really excited for that one. So keep your eyes open for that on our social media channels and on our website.
Britta Barrett:
Yeah. And whenever possible, we will add conversations with authors to our podcast feeds. So stay subscribed, look for those and happy reading.
Emily Calkins:
Happy reading.
Emily Calkins:
You're listening to the Desk Set.
Britta Barrett:
A bookish podcast for reading broadly.
Emily Calkins:
We're your hosts, Emily Calkins.
Britta Barrett:
And Britta Barrett.
Emily Calkins:
On this episode, we're talking about books set where you were born and books by Black authors. So first up, I'll interview Monica West about her debut novel Revival Season, which follows a Black evangelical family over the course of a summer that changes all of their lives.
Britta Barrett:
And then I talk to Brittany Ackerman, the author of the book The Brittanys which follows a series of 14 year old girls coming of age in Florida, which just so happens to be where I was born.
Emily Calkins:
Then we'll talk a little bit more about books set where we were born, and how you decide exactly what counts as set where you were born.
Britta Barrett:
Let's dive in.
Emily Calkins:
Thank you so much for being with us today.
Monica West:
Thank you for having me. A little bit about myself, I'm originally from Cleveland, Ohio, and I currently live in Oakland, California. I teach high school English. I started Revival Season in 2012. A little bit about the book is it's a story of a 15 year old girl named Miriam Horton who suffers a crisis of faith after witnessing a pretty brutal act that her father does. And about the summer that happens afterwards, and all the things that unfold for her or change her understanding of the world after that event.
Emily Calkins:
So one of the things I really loved about the book is the way that it honors the character's faith without simplifying it. So for the characters, faith healing is a big part of the story. And for Miriam, there's no question that faith healing is real. Even in her crisis of faith, she believes that it can happen even if it's not always working. So I'm curious what shaped your approach to writing about faith and doubt.
Monica West:
Yeah. Miriam, even in her crisis, even in her real definitive moments of real doubt about her dad about his powers, about her powers. I think that because it just shaped her, she just never really questioned it. And even her questioning, still didn't have the possibility that it didn't exist or that it wasn't real. Her questioning never went to that place. Why I wrote about faith and doubt was that, number one, it's such a tricky, tricky topic to write about. And I thought it'd be really interesting to work through because I don't read books about this type of subject, because it's a taboo subject.
Emily Calkins:
Faith and religion, organized religion is not something that's treated seriously very often in fiction. And I'm curious about the revival scene and sort of the revival circuit that the family goes on and how you wrote those scenes. Did you go to revivals? What did your research look like?
Monica West:
Yeah. So I have been to revivals, and then also did a ton of research as well. And they're definitely a thing that still happens, not in the ways that it happened in the past. But I was interested in this idea that Miriam's family, the Hortons, just feel really out of time, throwbacks to a different era. And so the idea of bringing back something that feels way older, or that has an older tradition felt really in line with who this family is, and what they do and what they're about. And it just felt really natural for them to do something that feels really kind of old fashioned, traditional.
Monica West:
And so I did a ton of research about historical revivals, about the purposes of them, about the ways that denominations use them. And then my own experience with some revivals to put those scenes in there. They galvanized faith or belief, I think that's probably the best way to think about it, this moment of frenzy, and all these emotions on display in this really public way.
Monica West:
And it felt like such a really rich place for Miriam to have questions about something put into place that's really public, not just for her and her family, but also, that's their family's business too, in some ways. Which feels a little icky to say, but I felt like the revival setting was the perfect place for her to explore something that feels like a really private conversation about doubt and belief. But that she would explore that in a place where there are a lot of people there and her dad's on stage. And she sees him like a stranger and yet also very intimately knows what these events are and what they're like and what they're for. And so it just felt like a really rich, fertile area for me to go deeply into thinking about.
Emily Calkins:
So you talk just a little bit about Miriam's father there, and that relationship was so interesting to me because it's so complex, she deeply admires him, especially at the beginning of the book. She's also afraid of him and she kind of resents him. Even at the beginning when she's just getting into this crisis of faith, she resents she's being held out. Her brother Caleb is invited in, he's sort of the natural successor for her dad, even though she has this deep faith, and she's very knowledgeable. The relationship between her and her father is so deeply integrated with her own faith. And I'm curious about how that relationship reflects patriarchal systems in religious communities in general, or evangelical communities in general, and how it's unique to this particular pair of characters.
Monica West:
Yeah. There's this interesting way that Miriam knows her father in a very, almost superficial way. She knows him really well, in the sense that she's an observer, and so she watches everything, everything he does, what he says, his gestures. So she knows everything about the revival sermons, everything about the way he heal, she's such a watcher. So she knows him in that way and she's terrified of him.
Monica West:
I think that when she watches him, there's love there initially, but the book begins with her having witnessed something pretty horrific the year before that she can't shake. And so had I started the book, maybe two years prior, I think there would have been much more love and admiration for him and less fear. And that is kind of morphed into, "I'm really unsure of who my dad is and what my dad can do." And then that whole thought spirals all the way through the rest of the book, which is, "Oh, I've seen him do things now. I want to believe that he's good, I want to believe that he is righteous and just, I want to believe that he is holy, and I kind of can't anymore."
Monica West:
And then the ways that she's overlooked from the beginning, she is so devout, and she's so loyal, and she's so dutiful, and she's connected to the faith in such a way. And that doesn't matter with the dad at all. I think so that for me, feels like it mimics the patriarchal structure in evangelicalism and Christianity. The idea of a woman or girl in her case, but soon to be a woman, taking the helm of something that she knows so well, not even being a consideration. And I think that the connection kind of boasting about the name Miriam, and then this idea of how Miriam's overshadowed by Moses biblically. And how for her, she knows pretty deeply early on that she will never be invited into the study. Her dad will never nurture the leadership in her that's there. And the way that he'll do it in Caleb, who doesn't seem as interested in it as Miriam does.
Monica West:
And it just me echoes a ton of that patriarchal dynamic, where you can be the best at this and in this structure, and in this context, and in this system. If you're not male, it doesn't matter. And so that's, I think one of the huge things that Miriam is grappling with. This idea of the fear of her dad, the nascent belief that she's developing in herself, the doubt that's growing in her about her dad, and then this profound sense of rejection. This, "You will never see me for who I am, you will never see me in my fullest." And how frustrating that feels to her to be on the flip end of that.
Monica West:
But it does seem to echo so many things in evangelical Christianity and Christianity in general, where, "Well, you're not male, so you can do things, but just not the things that I do. You can do some other things." You can lead up a group of women to do something, you can do some other things that to them feel frivolous, but Miriam doesn't want that. And she has to kind of really grapple with that. She's fighting against a big system and not just her dad.
Emily Calkins: I was thinking about power and the way that people wield power in the novel, and I think Mrs. Cade is a really fascinating character in terms of the way that she wields power through these back channels that are open to her as a woman. Can you talk about that character and power and gender.
Monica West:
The way that people have access to power in the book, the gendered ways that people have access to power. And Mrs. Cade plays the role that is given to her. She's a midwife and uses that in her favor, to basically gain access to this family in ways that no one else outside of the family really can. She's not in those closed door rooms where the men are talking but she's adjacent and she's always around and she was a believer in Samuel initially. And so she knows the family really well, she knows Samuel well, and is really skeptical, especially after she delivers Isaac, and realizes the extent to which, "Oh, this is bad." I mean, I think knowing it and the fact that it wasn't a surprise to her was a pretty clear thing that Mrs. Cade wasn't shocked at what was happening and what was going on behind closed doors and she knew the reasons why. So I really liked playing with that sense of power for her.
Monica West:
And then similarly, Miriam is trying to kind of negotiate, navigate that power. Miriam watching Mrs. Cade wield power and what she's able to do, I think she recognizes Mrs. Cade's status in the way that she does have access to power and those channels and what that looks like for her.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. I love that character. And almost kind of the flip side of it is Joanne, Ma, who's Miriam's mother, who is also I think, just a fascinating character. In some ways, she's the only one of them who might be able or still maintains this connection to the secular world, the rest of the world that the children are so isolated from. And she shares that with Miriam through literature and a little bit through music. She's got a little bit of an escape route if she wants one. And yet, she doesn't seem to have any power or she doesn't choose to wield any power or very rarely does she. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that character and sort of the inspiration for her and her role in the novel.
Monica West:
Sure. For Joanne, she knows that her life before Samuel, with her dad and her upbringing and the violence that she saw, once she came over to Samuel, she kind of just came all the way in. She was so thirsty and hungry for something that felt real and different. And there's a part in the book when I explore this idea that Miriam thinks about for Joanne, what it was like to kind of find God and find a husband at the same time. And that this idea that she didn't separate Samuel from God, and this was I think, Samuel needed, he loves the fact that she worships him and he needs that. And she has her doubts, but she's choosing to stay. And I grappled with that the whole way through, which is why does she?
Monica West:
And the night when she almost doesn't, the night when she leaves, or tries to leave and Miriam catches her. I think she just feels so profoundly responsible for her family and her role in what has gotten so bad. She's not innocent in a lot of those things and so I feel like there's fear in her. She's also an abused woman, she's an abused wife, and Miriam wants her to be stronger, and Miriam wants her to stand up, and Miriam wants her to act on power. And they have these really small rebellions, these moments of listening to music that's secular and dancing in ways that the father wouldn't like. These moments, I feel really transgressive for them.
Monica West:
But beyond that, I think Joanne, I know she feels like she doesn't know she can leave, or she doesn't want to leave. But I think Samuel's done a number on her in the sense that she feels what would she do without him? What'd her life be? She met him when she was a teenager, and then she just got wrapped all the way up in his life. So what does that mean for her to then not be a wife? Would it mean for her to start over with her kids? And I think that she can't even begin to think that. She grapples with all those things and yet, there's a sense that she's going to stay, and it's sad, but she's going to stay. And she knows who she's married to and she's going to stay.
Monica West:
The ending was the hardest thing in the world to write. And I'd written I don't know, 15, 20 endings. And when I wrote this one, I said, "Oh, that's it. There it is. I felt it." The open endedness of it, I think is really frustrating some people but also for me felt like it fit with the book in the sense that I don't give you answers about whether or not these feelings are real. You decide what you believe about Miriam's gift, you decide what you believe about what the father can and can't do, that it's real at all, or if it's just a show.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. I mean, I like an ambiguous ending in general, because I think that's how life is. It's very rare that we get this neat, tidy package. But I think you're right, to me, it just works so well because the whole novel is about faith and doubt and not having the easy answers. And so it puts the reader in that position of okay, you have the information that you have, and now you have to decide also. I'm wondering if your work of spending time with high schoolers informed Miriam's character at all, because she feels like such a teenager. So much of what she's going through is about just that normal coming of age stuff.
Monica West:
I've been a high school English teacher for 13 years. It's so funny that I live in the adult world, but I spend the majority of my time with 14 and 15 year olds, and so I understand them pretty well, even when I don't understand them, I still get them. So yeah, a lot of my Miriam stuff came from the fact that I work really closely with people her age.
Monica West:
And what I love about that age is that it is everything is possibility. For kids and the kids I teach, it's the age in which you're trying to differentiate yourself from your parents and your family, where you understand some things about the world. You think some things are true, where you're deciding your own truth, and your own values and your own beliefs, and the things that matter to you. And you are just hoping to just kind of feel that out. And so for Miriam, this whole idea of coming into this power, this understanding of herself, goes very much in line with what I see 15 year olds going through all the time with politically, ideologically, religiously, emotionally. And so that felt really connected to my experiences with high schoolers.
Monica West:
And the other thing is the part where you decide to differentiate yourselves from your parents, and to see them as fallible. And when you first see your parents as people, it is a pretty... Humbling is probably the wrong word. But it's a pretty stark moment when you see their mistakes and you see that they aren't perfect. Until you differentiate yourself from your parents and you see them as fallible, and as messy, and as people. And for Miriam, it is huge for her to see her mom and her dad.
Monica West:
I mean, she saw with her dad first. I think her belief in her mom is kind of shattered over the course of the book. Her belief in her dad was shattered the previous summer. And she still wanted to hold on to hope but they begin the revival season with Miriam in a place of doubt. And then she becomes hopeful after the first revival, and then that hope is dashed pretty quickly after. And it just feels so in line with what I watch my kids go through every single day.
Monica West:
And then it's also the balancing act between devotion to them and to what they believe and to the comforts of how you were raised. And doubt about did they do the right thing with me? And what could have been different about how they treated me or how they loved me or how they dealt with me? And so all that stuff feels really present for Miriam, which is on every scale with every kid I've ever worked with in some form, it's there. So teaching high school is definitely informed Miriam's age and her character.
Emily Calkins:
And are you working on a new novel now?
Monica West:
I am. It's about this spiritual leader, he's kind of a cult leader. He is this leader of this group called The Way, he converts only women, he marries them as he pulls them more and more away from their life. They're dealing with this idea of loyalty to him, and what they believe him to be as they're watching him become something different and someone different. So I tell the book from the perspective of three of his wives and what they see and why they stay, their complicity in what he's doing and what he's done. Just kind of this idea of watching this person that they've made a god fall, and how they all respond to it.
Emily Calkins:
Well, that sounds fascinating. I would love to read it. And then our last question we always ask, what are you reading now?
Monica West:
There's a book by this author called Kelsey McKinney, called God Spare the Girls. She writes from this perspective of these white Southern Baptists is a very different evangelical community than the Black family that I read about. Really interestingly connected in some ways about the fall of a leader. So I'm reading that one and enjoying that. And then after that someone compared Revival Season to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus which I've never read and so that's on deck after God Spare the Girls.
Emily Calkins:
Well thank you so much for being with us today. It was really fun to talk to you.
Monica West:
Thank you so much for having me. It was really great to talk to you also.
Brittany Ackerman:
My name is Brittany Ackerman and I am an author. I'm the author of The Brittanys. I am also a teacher at a performing arts school, I teach everything from English comp to creative writing to applied logic and critical thinking, archetypal psychology, literature classes, just everything, anything and everything that involves writing and discussion.
Britta Barrett:
The Brittanys is your debut novel, but your first published book was a memoir. And I'm curious if the process of self excavation and interrogation, if you came across old diaries or yearbooks that helped you get into the headspace to write from this character's perspective.
Brittany Ackerman:
I don't have any of that stuff anymore. It got lost to transferring over computers. So I really just had these memories and experience to go off of. Because this is fiction, the novel, and I wasn't trying to get everything right and make everything perfect, I just wanted to capture the feeling of that time and the kind of quiet anxiety. I really did have five friends in my friend group named Brittany. But we didn't go on these kind of adventures and misadventures. It was kind of more just we all knew each other and sometimes we would all hang out together, but it wasn't like it is in the book. And I kind of was imagining, "Well, what if it had been? And what if these relationships were everything? And really defined that time in my life?"
Britta Barrett:
When you're writing five young women, all have the same name who existed in a kind of monoculture? How do you go about differentiating the characters? Were you playing with any of those archetypes of teenage girls?
Brittany Ackerman:
I wanted each of the friends in the book to embody a different kind of archetype. There was definitely one of the friends that's more motherly, and then there's a friend that is more sexually advanced than the rest of them. There's one that's definitely sillier. And then there's one that's kind of a tomboy and isn't really into boys yet and doesn't even really know what that's going to look like. And I feel like it kind of worked out in a way where all the friends make up one perfect personality, having all the little traits here and there. But separate - that's why they have these experiences that they go through because they need each other through that time.
Britta Barrett:
I think Heather's is maybe the easiest, shallow comparison, but tonally, it has this quality that I don't think we have a good word for, which is like a cringer recognition. It's not exactly nostalgia, but just being put back in your adolescent feelings like, "Oh, yeah, it's like that."
Brittany Ackerman:
Yeah, there is a feeling in the body that you have when you read about those experiences or you watch them in movies, that it's like a visceral thing. And someone needs to coin a term for it because you're right, it's not nostalgia, necessarily, but it's almost like whatever the opposite of catharsis is or something. You're reliving that moment and you feel it. And you just have all of those growing pains over again that you are experienced and maybe tried to forget about, but they're still there deep down inside.
Britta Barrett:
And I think even the most totally average girlhood is a kind of body horror. I'm thinking about that scene where she's essentially assaulted near the lockers, the way that she's processing that.
Brittany Ackerman:
Yeah. So I had an experience similar to that one. And I remember just my mom just picked me up and then I had to just go on about my day, and there was no debriefing, there was no crying to her about it. And it felt like everything that I went through had to just be tucked away. And it's really unfortunate because I carried a lot of that with me. And it's definitely added to my anxiety and it definitely adds to the anxiety of the character in the book. It's like then, her mom is like, "How was your day?" And she just freaks out on her. When that's a totally normal question to ask your teenage daughter after school.
Britta Barrett:
Yeah. And their relationship with parents, I found to be really interesting in the book. In many ways, many of the parents are quite absent, whether they're away for work or just not keeping super close tabs on their kids. At the same time they do feel like a very strong presence that the characters want to please and want to meet often high expectations. Whether that's for achievement in school, or having the perfect look, that appearing to be perfect is maybe more important than being perfect.
Brittany Ackerman:
In my time growing up, it was definitely the parents wanted us to do well and achieve and be the best or be the best looking or to be all of that, even though that's impossible. But they didn't really want to hear about our day to day just struggles and problems. "We were we in detention?" Who cares? "Did you eat?" Who cares? It was more just, "Let me know the big things that are happening, and just don't be too terrible." My mom was a stay at home mom. But usually both of the parents in the other households were working full time and weren't really around and were kind of absent and the kids were kind of a latchkey kid, and they just had free rein of the house. I mean, that's what the character of Jensen, her parents both work and they kind of just do these crazy things, but they don't get punished. No one's getting grounded, no one's learning any real hard lessons here.
Brittany Ackerman:
And I don't know if it's because of where I grew up, the time I grew up in, the socioeconomic climate of where I grew up in, but it's funny because that was always the house that I wanted to go to, because I wanted to get away from my mom just watching our every move. We all wanted what the other person had. I mean, I know there's a scene in the book, my avatar is ogling over this character's collection of perfumes, and Juicy sweatsuits and jeans. And just all of these things. When I had a closet full of my own stuff too, but it just feels new and different when it's somebody else's, and especially someone that's a little bit more popular than you and a little bit more advanced than you. And just seems more like they know what they're doing when you just feel like you're so lost and you feel like so not popular and not cool and not advanced.
Britta Barrett:
People can probably gather it from context clues that the story is set in the early aughts, so a lot of the references to specific fashion or lip gloss, situates it very much. Is the year 2004?
Brittany Ackerman:
It starts in 2003. And then there's New Year's is in the end of the first act of the book, and then we go into 2004. So those were the years I was writing around. I'm really distilling a lot of my experience as a teenager into just that one year, because I just felt really connected to trying to do a year in the life.
Brittany Ackerman:
Me and my editor Anna Kaufman, we really didn't want to ever say specifically what year it is. Obviously, like you said, people can guess and people can figure it out with the references. But I did want it to feel like almost timeless, floating in that early aughts time period, but didn't really need to be tied down to a specific date. And we did that together because we wanted people to say, "Well, okay, even though I'm a teenager now, but I still can relate to this," or, "Well, I was actually a teen in the '80s, but I still relate to X, Y and Z." And I wanted it to just be more nostalgic feeling than like, "Oh, well, you had to have been a freshman in high school in 2003, or you're not going to get it."
Britta Barrett:
Well, as someone who grew up very much around that time and in this setting, it's literally super close to home for me. But I do think it'll be appealing to many people beyond that narrow age range. I'm curious if you've noticed things like there's dELiA's X Dolls Kill collaboration that early aughts fashion has already come back around for a new generation of kids. And how it's felt to sort of see low rise jeans and butterfly clips sort of back in the cultural consciousness?
Brittany Ackerman:
I've seen a lot of like these makeup tutorials from that time and this is something that I feel in my body. When I think about how much makeup I used to put on my face, just tons of concealer and foundation and so much blush. And I know people do the contouring thing now but I honestly feel like they're trying to make themselves look natural. And the look that we were going for was not natural. And I remember it was really in to wear these rhinestones on your face around your eyes. And my mom wouldn't let me do it, so I would have to hide them in my backpack and then put them on when I got to school and then take them off before I went home. Or this baby blue eyeliner that I had from MAC, it was like the first thing I ever bought from MAC. I don't know why I picked baby blue but it was a look.
Brittany Ackerman:
And it's cool to see the next generation having fun with that stuff when for me, it wasn't necessarily fun and experimental, it was more like I was doing it to try to fit in. And there was an obsessive urgency about it. Like, "I have to have this pair of shoes, and I have to wear my hair like this, and I have to wear my makeup like this, or else..." Especially going to a private school where we had uniforms. It was accessories and makeup, that was just everything, it was all you had. But to see people playing with it now and having fun, it's cool. And it's cool to see them making these fun little videos and taking fun pictures and it feels light-hearted not like making fun of it, which that would kind of feel bad. So yeah, I'm all for it.
Britta Barrett:
There's a lot of brand consciousness and label dropping throughout the novel, which I was just curious, was that reflective your high school experience? The having a specific handbag or like a Tiffany choker, and those were like the talismans of teenagers at the time?
Brittany Ackerman:
I love that, I love talismans. Yeah, totally. I mean, like I said, it wasn't so much about, "Oh, we're experimenting with our style and it's all fun." It was you have to have this or you're just out. These are just objects and we treated them like they were a meter of our class or something or of our goodness in the world. If you didn't have what everyone else had, you were just left behind. And now as an adult I don't want to have things that everybody else has, it's much more special to have something different and to stand out or just to not be a clone and just have the same sneakers like everyone else, or the same Tiffany's choker. It feels so much better to be an individual and to have people be like, "Wow, I really love your style, because it's so unique," not because it's just in fashion, or it's just expensive, or it's just what everyone else has.
Britta Barrett:
And like the character you moved from New York to Florida. How old were you when that happened? And what were some of the big differences you noticed in the culture?
Brittany Ackerman:
So I think I was like eight or nine years old. And yeah, we moved to South Florida, my parents were kind of done with New York, they couldn't stand the weather anymore and the change of season was just really harsh. And school was also getting really, really expensive. There was so much money in New York and the school that I... Because I was in a private school in New York also. And kids would get beat up if they didn't have certain things, whereas in Florida, someone will just tease you until you cry. But in New York, it was getting really bad. And so I think my parents wanted to just pull us both out of that. Kind of felt like I needed a change too.
Brittany Ackerman:
And even though things were clique-y in Florida, it felt more accepting, still clique-y and still expensive and still an emphasis on objects and belongings and status. It somehow felt more open and more accessible, having - being named Brittany and having me be in that friend group definitely helped. I don't know how I would have survived if I was just a Lauren or something.
Brittany Ackerman:
But the major difference was just the weather. I mean, I never dreamed that I would have a house that had a pool in the backyard where I could go swimming in December. I mean, it was crazy. And so I loved it. I loved like oh, we're going to be... We can go to the beach if we want, there's so much more to do it felt like. Or now as an adult, I'm like, "Oh, there's nothing to do in Florida. There's absolutely nothing to do besides go to the beach."
Brittany Ackerman:
In South Florida where I grew up, I went on a couple dates with guys where they would take me to the beach at night but you're not even really allowed to be at the beach at night there. It's supposed to be closed, you'd have to sneak there and risk getting arrested or getting in trouble, getting a citation or something. And yeah, I mean that's why we frequented malls so much or just anything to get out of our houses but that's what we had, that's what we had access to. We would hang out in a Taco Bell parking lot. These rich kids in their BMWs just posted up eating a Crunchwrap at two in the morning.
Britta Barrett:
I'm wondering how you approached a sense of time from a teenager's perspective. One of my favorite lines is when the protagonist is talking about a boy who I think is just a few weeks or months younger, she's just turned 15. And she's like, "I can't even imagine dating someone who's 14, what a baby." And her friend is sort of pushing back on that idea. She's like, "But I've done so much growing in the past couple weeks. So I'm older now."
Brittany Ackerman:
Yeah, I mean, that moment felt a little cringey to write too, because it's like, "What? Now you're too good for someone that's two months younger than you?" But I think that it really feels true to that desire of these characters to be older and to just be adults, even though you're not an adult when you're 15, or 16, or 17. Or I mean, I barely feel like an adult in my 30s. But there was this huge desire to just be older. And then once you get to a certain... When you get to that next level, when you get to turn that next age, it's like, everyone younger than you just doesn't know and they're not cool, they don't get it and you're just above and beyond.
Brittany Ackerman:
So I think that I tried to make the writing reflect how different even just one year in someone's life can change, how many things can really happen. Even if a lot of them are just going to Subway and piercing your ears, there's so many emotions within all of that that happen. And that's what I was really trying to encompass. And that time can feel so heavy and thicker and just bigger when you're that age. It feels like every single thing that happens is so important and it's just over the top and just dramatic. And then, as an adult now, why was that such a big deal to me? Why did I freak out about that? I don't even talk to these people anymore. I don't know them. So different perspective as you get older.
Britta Barrett:
And one of the style choices you make is to include these sort of glimpses into the future in italics. What made you want to include those moments? And how did you decide the fate of the characters?
Brittany Ackerman:
I had the one in there at the end with the narrator and Jensen and kind of a flash forward of Jensen's character. My editor, Anna, she was like, "Oh, try this with some of the other people in the book, where did they end up? Where does the narrator imagine them? Does she know where they end up? Let's try to give some closure on some of these characters." And so I just tried to start placing them throughout teenage friendships, a lot of them are very temporary, and they're not forever. But I think it's still interesting to get a little glimpse or a little window into the future.
Britta Barrett:
And Jensen, in particular, I kept waiting for a culmination of their friendship to maybe escalate to the kiss that they don't ever really have.
Brittany Ackerman:
I think there's something about female friendships that are just so, so special. And I think what I was trying to do was just show that the lines of female friendship can just be so blurry and so messy. How complicated they can be even as adults, but I mean, in my experience as a teenager, you want to be inseparable from that person. It's like your sister, but not. It's like you'd call each other you're, "Oh, this is my best friend. This is my best girlfriend." But it's more than that. It's like a friendship that's more than a friendship.
Brittany Ackerman:
Sarah Gerard reference, she has a really great story called BFF that's in her book, Sunshine State. And there's a really great line about, "I knew like when your period was coming, that's how close we were." And what you were talking about before, how this adolescence is a lot of body horror stuff. To teach someone how to use a tampon and to practice kissing, that is the most intimate stuff that you can do, and you feel so close to them.
Brittany Ackerman:
And so I kind of wanted it to feel a little obscure in that moment. Does the narrator want to kiss her? Are they going to kiss? Does the friend want to kiss her? I think that to resolve those questions, I never really got answers to those questions so I can't really resolve them. But I like the tension of it and I like that it still feels hopeful and it still feels like they're... Because the other part of the book is them kind of drifting apart. And now they've even kind of drifted closer back together than maybe they were before. Their relationship feels more real and more genuine than it did before.
Britta Barrett:
So give us a flash forward for you, what's the next book that you're working on?
Brittany Ackerman:
So I am kind of working on a little bit of a sequel with The Brittanys. So it's pretty much going to be the same narrator but different time in her life, different characters, and I'm writing about the college years. So I went to college in the Midwest, I went to Indiana University, and I was in a Jewish sorority. And it was my first time away from home, really. I mean, I had done like a summer program at UCLA when I was actually 15. But this was like my first time moving and my whole life was uprooted and changed. And I'm still in the beginning stages of it, but it's kind of another year in the life. But this time they are in their junior year of college so everyone is about to turn 21 and they're still going to frat parties, but then they're, "Are we too old for the frat? Should we just wait to go to bars?"
Brittany Ackerman:
And I'm also amping up a lot of the anxiety stuff and my personal experience in college when I went to a therapist for the first time and started on medication. And I know that's like briefly touched on in one of the flashes in The Brittanys, but I want to make that even more of a character and in and of itself in the next book. So that's what I'm doing right now. And it's been really fun and quite hilarious to write. And it's been really wild.
Britta Barrett:
We always like to ask, what are you reading now or what are some recent favorites?
Brittany Ackerman:
I just finished Gina Nutt's Night Rooms, which was one of my favorite nonfiction books I've ever read. It was really beautiful. And in like a very fragmented prose style. And then I'm actually right now I'm reading McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh. And it's the only book of hers that I haven't read and I have been saving it. And it's about this sailor at sea that is a drunk. And it's kind of crazy but it's also what I just needed to read right now. And I also started Sarah Rose Etter's The Book of X, which is another kind of fragmented novel. And it's really, really well done so far. It has that quiet anxiety that I just love in my narrators. And yeah, I'm loving that one too.
Britta Barrett:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for chatting with me today.
Brittany Ackerman:
Thank you so much for having me. It was such a great time getting to know you and getting to talk about the book.
Emily Calkins:
Do you have some favorite Florida set books that sort of capture your experience of growing up there?
Britta Barrett:
I would say that the person who best captures the suburban teenage aches that I had growing up in Orlando, is probably John Green. Paper Towns, the main character lives in the Orlando suburbs. And then in Looking for Alaska, the main character leaves that location to go to a boarding school. And I can completely relate to the desire to leave [crosstalk 00:44:19]. Like John Green, I'm very lucky that my childhood was pretty normal and comfortable. But I shared his experiences of not feeling super connected to my peers or the culture there. And sort of looking beyond the edges to see what else might be on offer in the world. But I do think that a lot of what informs the perception of Florida is fairly cartoonish. It's like the state is being drawn by those like boardwalk caricature artists. And there are some authors who I think do a better job of describing a Florida that's more familiar to me. Are you familiar with Kristen Arnett?
Emily Calkins:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Britta Barrett:
Her work is definitely worth checking out.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, I read the first one Mostly Dead Things. That's the one about the family that owns the taxidermy shop. And it was hard to read because the main character is so depressed, and I don't think she really realizes it. But the characters are really well developed and they're really interesting. And it is like a really interesting look at sort of, if you're a person who's not from Florida who thinks of Florida as beaches and palm trees, it's definitely not that Florida. But it feels like a very specific place. Yeah, she's a really interesting writer.
Britta Barrett:
She wrote this incredible essay for Lit Hub, called "The Problem with Writing About Florida. I just want to read a little bit from that. "There are certain types of essays I don't like and they all have to do with Florida. They're written by people traveling through the state or Floridians who now consider themselves former. Both of them are trying to get to the root of whatever mystical strange forces at work in the state. I'm ready to hate whatever the author is going to say before I get to the end of the first paragraph.
Britta Barrett:
Florida isn't like other states, but you've heard that before. Some of what we are is just terrible. Got a lot of crime and racist, shitty cops. People here voted overwhelmingly for Trump. I'm trying to build something new in this essay but the honest truth is that some of the bad stereotypes are accurate. Do you need Florida Man so that you're able to listen to a Florida woman talk about home? Every time you say something bad about this place, you're talking about me. My heart, my body. If Florida is a joke than aren't I the punchline? Orlando is wet, sticky, violent. It's the place where you learn the contours of your body through sweaty shorts and tank tops. It's a damp, cold bathing suit pulled down around her ankles while you pee in a friend's bathroom at a pool party."
Britta Barrett:
And it goes on and on and on, but I feel like she just nails it. I'm curious too, if readers are more or less interested in hearing from people who also were born where they were born and are writing about it as an own voices perspective. Or want to read people who have moved to or traveled to a new location, which kind of gives a fresh set of eyes, I'm thinking about both Lauren Groff and the author I spoke with Brittany Ackerman moved from New York to Florida.
Britta Barrett:
And that's a pretty common path, we have a lot of people who move from New York to live in Florida at retirement or earlier. And I think they both do a good job of having these sharp observations about a place because of the fact that they're sort of fish out of water when they just arrived and there's this big cultural contrast to what they're used to. We have different experiences of the same place. And in a lot of ways South Florida is very different from Central Florida.
Britta Barrett:
But I think what the book captured maybe even more than the location was locating the character in a place in time. So being a 14 year old girl in the early aughts, that's what resonated most for me about the book because the location, the way she describes there aren't any seasons here kind of adds to the stagnancy, I guess I'd say. And the fact that these kids are being raised in what are sprawling suburbs, but still manages to feel kind of suffocating, because you can only really go as far as your bike will take you. And the radius of teenage life is often fairly limited. That the environment didn't play a huge role in the story itself, although it was certainly culturally familiar. Did you read Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation?
Emily Calkins:
I did. Yeah.
Britta Barrett:
Love the Southern Reach Trilogy. So if anyone has seen the film, or read the book, you can probably imagine your mind, there's this territory that characters in the book are entering into that doesn't behave normally. It's beautiful and scary and unusual. And how would you describe that region?
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, it's sort of almost like an alien planet but it's on Earth. It's sort of behind this force field and when scientists arrive there, the natural world doesn't behave as we expect the natural world to behave on Earth.
Britta Barrett:
And the author Jeff VanderMeer, I believe he still lives in Florida. He certainly went to school in Gainesville. And that location was directly inspired by a hike he used to take in a wildlife refuge in North Florida. It totally makes sense to me how that would get translated into fiction as this dangerous, beautiful, unsettling place.
Emily Calkins:
When I was thinking about what books I wanted to talk about when I think about where I was born, I was thinking about the way that different books kind of capture different elements of the place that I was born. And some are more focused on the natural world and others are more interested in sort of the human experience of living somewhere, whether that's the history of that place, or sort of the contemporary situation in that place.
Emily Calkins:
So I grew up in Spokane, which is on the other side of Washington State and I've talked about that on the show before, I think. But it's interesting hearing you talk about Florida and the different parts of Florida because Washington is really divided. There's Eastern Washington, which is on the eastern side of the Cascades and then there's Western Washington, and they're quite different. In a lot of ways, the natural world is very different. It's much drier, it's higher elevation over in Eastern Washington, and then the sort of built and human world is very different too. And in fact, when I was thinking about books that really sort of captured Spokane and Eastern Washington, I actually think that there are even books set in North Idaho, or even into Montana, that are more evocative to me of growing up in Spokane, or sort of what we call the Inland Northwest.
Emily Calkins:
So a couple of books to me that aren't technically set where I was born in Spokane, but are set nearby that I think really capture the feeling of the place. The first is The Miseducation of Cameron Post, it's set in Montana. And it's sort of a coming of age story about a woman, she's caught kissing her best girlfriend when she's like 11 and it's the same night that her parents die in a car crash. And those two sort of things become intertwined for the rest of the book. And she's sent to a conversion therapy camp, that's really pretty terrible. But there are some really gorgeous scenes about summer in the Inland Northwest and sort of the hot, dry, these languid days where you're a kid and you don't have a lot to do or places to be and just kind of what it is like to amble around in the hot dry summer that really felt like the summers that I knew in the Inland Northwest.
Emily Calkins:
For people who are still looking for a book for this category, place is sort of a generalized term. It can be the city where you were born, or if you were born in a city or in a rural place that is really hard to find something set in that specific place you can go broader, you can go to the state, or you can go sort of regionally.
Emily Calkins:
Really what I was hoping that people would get from this category is an opportunity to kind of experience what I think is so special about reading about a place that you've lived, a place that you remember, it's sort of a dual pronged experience. On one hand, you get the joy of recognizing a place that you've been. And I think particularly if you're like me, and you come from some place that doesn't appear that often in popular culture, it's really exciting to read about Spokane because it means that that sort of zing of familiarity, you don't get very often. So much of the media that we consume is set in New York, or it's set in LA, but to read about the place that you grew up, feels really special.
Emily Calkins:
And then I think there's also sort of this wonderful way that reading someone else's work set in the place that you were born, lets you learn about it or have a different view on it as well. So that's kind of what I was hoping that people would get. And whether that means that you're reading a historical novel set where you were born, or if you're reading nonfiction about something that happened there. There's lots of different ways to approach it.
Britta Barrett:
Do you have any books by authors who were born and raised in Washington about Spokane?
Emily Calkins:
Yeah, so a couple of my favorite Spokane authors Jess Walter and Sharma Shields. I don't know if they were actually born there but they were certainly raised there and then both left, and then came back as adults and writers. And I definitely feel again, like I think Spokane has a little bit of a chip on its shoulder, and I say that with immense fondness with that same chip on my shoulder. So I feel like a lot of hometown pride, getting to see them write about the town.
Emily Calkins:
And I think it's interesting because they do it in very different ways. Jess is a very realistic writer. His work is mostly sort of historical fiction. I've talked about The Cold Millions before, but he also has almost like a crime novel. I mean, I guess it is a crime novel called Citizen Vince that's about a low level criminal who is getting ready to vote in his first election. And it's set in 1980 in Spokane, and the little glimpses of recognition. So this character Vince works at this donut shop that I used to go to, the legendary donut place Donut Parade, that's now sadly closed. RIP Donut Parade. That's the kind of place that you know about and you get the cultural importance of it if you're a person who lived in the town. But then in The Cold Millions, Jess has clearly done a lot of historical research. And that was really fun, because it meant that I got to learn about Spokane in a way that I hadn't really.
Emily Calkins:
And Sharma's books are much more out there. She incorporates elements of the fantastical, though I wouldn't really call them fantasy. And her first book, The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac has big sections of it that are set in Spokane. And what I really like about those books is the way that she writes about the natural world. So Spokane is basically like high desert. There's these Ponderosa pines, there's all of these desert flowers that bloom. It doesn't get a lot of rain, it's at a pretty high elevation. And I think The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac in particular really captures that natural world as well as all of these sort of funny cultural things that you can only appreciate. I mean, I think they work in the book either way, but I think there's a different kind of appreciation that you bring to them when she's writing about the parade that happens every year or that kind of thing. But it's very different approaches to writing about the same place, which I think is an interesting experience.
Britta Barrett:
Are there any other books set here in greater King County area that you'd like to suggest?
Emily Calkins:
One that I think is really an interesting read is called Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. And it is set during the WTO protests in 1999. So I don't know how much that was in the national news. But the World Trade Organization held a conference here in Seattle in 1999. And I think people were really becoming aware of sort of the environmental and economic impacts of globalization. So there were a ton of protests downtown in Seattle.
Emily Calkins:
And this is all fictionalized. But the protests started out peacefully and then became non peaceful. And it's a fictionalized account of those, but it follows different characters who come. So there's someone who's a delegate from a small country in Southeast Asia and he's like it's really important that he get to this meeting. And then there are several different protesters, there are multiple police officers. So the police ended up clashing with protesters in a way that was pretty unfortunate. And it covers all of that. But I think if you lived in Seattle, at the time, or even if you lived in the Northwest, where it was really, really big news, you'll remember enough to be really interested in it. And if you didn't live here, it's sort of an interesting look at Seattle, this long history of sort of social justice, protest, environmentalism, anarchism in the northwest, and sort of how those things met at this particular moment. So that's an interesting one.
Emily Calkins:
I'm really curious to see what readers choose for this. I heard from a staff member who found a book written by her childhood doctor that we had in our catalog. So there's lots of good stuff and I hope that people will share what they read about the place that they were born with us.
Britta Barrett:
And how can they find books about where they were born?
Emily Calkins:
So probably the easiest way, because this is such a specific question is to submit a BookMatch match request. So go to kcls.org/bookmatch. And let us know that you're looking for a book set where you were born, tell us where you were born, and we will create a list of titles just for you. Another way you can get help with this request or with any kind of book suggestion is to go to your local library. So all of our libraries are now open for in person service, and the staff would love to help you find a book about the place that you were born or any other questions that you might have.
Emily Calkins:
We have a full slate of author events planned for the fall. So we've got coming up in September, we'll be talking with Chef Edward Lee, who's the author of a book called Buttermilk Graffiti that's all about cuisine all over the country. He took a road trip and talked home chefs, restaurateurs, people who own grocery stores and it looks at the way that different immigrant cuisine has come together to form a uniquely American food scape. And he'll be talking to Matt Lewis of Where Ya At Matt. So I'm really excited for that one. So keep your eyes open for that on our social media channels and on our website.
Britta Barrett:
Yeah. And whenever possible, we will add conversations with authors to our podcast feeds. So stay subscribed, look for those and happy reading.
Emily Calkins:
Happy reading.
