All Interviews

Kwame Alexander on passing down history between generations

The first book in this planned trilogy, The Door of No Return, was set in 1860, ending with the main character, Kofi, facing an unknown fate. Black Star jumps forward in time to the 1920’s segregation era, to when Kofi is a Nana himself, with the gaps in his story slowly being revealed as he shares them with his granddaughter, Charley. What inspired you to structure the trilogy with a multi-generational jump in between books?

I thought about a couple things. For one, I did not want to write about slavery. Writing The Door of No Return was tough enough, and I found myself often being sad or feeling in a dark mood. I knew if I delved deeper into what happened at the end of book one, I would be back in those blues. And I’m generally, you know, a happy person. I try to stay in that space.

So, I thought: well, why don’t I do this? I’ve been watching a lot of sci-fi, and I love books that play with time. While Black Star isn’t sci-fi, I did play with time in the sense of doing a time jump and giving myself a story set 60 years in the future. I asked myself, what would that look like for Kofi? Of course, for us, it’s historical fiction, but for Kofi, it’s 60 years later. This was a cool thing for me to do as a writer: to be able to do that and then also still reveal what happened at the end of The Door of No Return, to bring some closure to that narrative while not delving deeper into it.

The last thing is that I really wanted was to write some new characters and tell the same story. All these things came together and contributed to my decision.

A theme throughout both books is the power of storytelling, as Kofi used to revere his nana for his storytelling abilities and has now stepped into the role of the storyteller for his family. Why was it so important for you to show readers this way Black history is passed down?

I thought, he’s going to become his grandfather now, and I felt like that was a really cool thing to do in the story. I felt like it came kept it fresh, definitely for me and hopefully for the reader.

Read our starred review of Black Star.

Stories have always been a way that lessons are passed down generation to generation. In West Africa, there are these men and women who are called griots, and they are responsible for keeping the history of the community, the village, the family, intact, generation by generation. So, they passed down these stories, and they share them. My mother was also a storyteller. She told African folk tales. And so, storytelling as a way to teach, a way to learn, as a way to ensure that your history is remembered – I knew that this was going to play a huge role in continuing what I had started in The Door of No Return.

I read that you chose to make Kofi’s granddaughter the protagonist of Black Star because a fan wrote in saying she enjoyed your books but wished one would feature a girl main character. How did you approach writing your first female protagonist to create Charley’s authentic voice?

I have two sisters, a mother, a bunch of aunts. I have two daughters, and I’ve been married. So, when I decided to tackle this book with the girl as the main character, I was like, oh, I got this. It’s gonna be easy. I know women. I’ve grown up around them. I love them. They love me. I mean, this is easy. And so, I wrote the first draft, and I let four of my writer friends read it, who are all women. They all came back to me very politely, and they were like, Kwame, this is a beautiful story. But you haven’t given any agency to the main character. You’ve given it all to her best friend, Willie Green. In the earlier drafts, Willie Green was basically telling the story. Charley was almost a side character. I was straddling the fence, not really delving into Charley’s personality or giving her agency. Instead, I was basically having her follow along with Willie Green.

I’ll give you an example from the first draft of the book. Willie Green loves baseball. It was his thing, and he was convincing Charley to play with him. My friends were like, “well, Kwame, wouldn’t it make sense if she’s the main character, and this is her story, that she loves baseball? He can love it too, but perhaps it emanates from her, her desire, her obsession with the sport.” I was like, oh yeah, duh, and I began to give her more agency and delve deeper into who she is, what she wants by the end of the novel and by the end of her life. I explored the things that are important to her, the things she doesn’t care about. I asked myself, how are her relationships with her friends, with her rivals, with her family? How do we see these people through her eyes? Once I figured all of this out, which took some work, I arrived at a fully fleshed out, whole, three-dimensional human being.

All your middle grade fiction books feature a main character that is completely devoted to a sport. As you say in your author’s note, “I love writing about America through the lens of sports.” What is it about sports that draws you to incorporate them into your verse novels?

I love sports. I’ve played a lot of sports. Sports are a great metaphor, and they’re almost like a hook. We can all connect or relate to a sport. We can relate to the different concepts in sports: teamwork, winning, losing, perseverance, grit, being motivated, dreaming. Sports are a great way for us to talk about the things that are happening in our lives vis-à-vis what’s happening on the field or the court or in the pool or on the track.

What’s interesting to me is, I heard this commentator talk about how Usain Bolt, who was the fastest man in the world, ran the 100-meter dash in 9.58 seconds, which is insane and incredible, but that was just 10 seconds of his life. That’s it. And like he’d been practicing and training for 10 years. He trained 10 years of his life for 10 seconds. Like that’s incredible. And so, I think sports are a way for us to acknowledge the 9.58 seconds, but to really try to get behind those 10 years. What made that person? How did they become this dedicated, this committed? So, I like talking about someone’s backstory and using the sport as both the hook and the framework.

You also say in your author’s note that Black history, while about historical timestamps, is “also about the regular families that lived, laughed, loved, danced, worked, failed, hoped, cried, and died just like everybody else.” Your dedication to portraying this is most evident in the Sunday dinner poems. Are there any moments in your own family’s story that inspired those scenes?

Yes, every moment, literally. I mean, people often think, Black people sit around and talk about racism over at the dinner table. No, we talk about the Olympics, and we crack jokes just like everybody else. That’s always my goal with writing. It’s just to remind Black people that we are human beings and to not allow ourselves to be othered, and to remind non-Black people that y’all need to remember that we are all human beings. And it sounds cliché, but we don’t hear it enough, and we need to know it.

Charley uses a lot of creative hyperboles throughout this book, my favorite being “It’s so quiet / I can hear the moon.” How do you come up with such impactful figures of speech?

Other than being brilliant? I mean, I’m a poet. This is what I do. I traffic in words, in images and similes and metaphors and showing rather than telling. That’s my goal. I think that’s probably one of the big differences between writing a novel and prose versus a novel in verse. You don’t have a whole lot of words with a novel in verse. You’ve got to make sure that every word counts, and every word has to be the right word in the right order. We want to show you something. We want you to feel something. You know, my chapters are maybe 30 lines, if you viewed each poem as a chapter. A prose writer would have three to 30 pages to write one chapter. So, it’s an economy of words, and that makes me focus on the rhythm, the figurative language, the conciseness, the feeling.

In both this and The Door of No Return, there is sparing use of typographical manipulation, which adds impact to the moments you do things like change the font or spacing on a page. How do you go about choosing which moments need the emphasis?

I read each poem out loud, and when I’m writing it, I’m reading it out loud, I’m saying it out loud, and how it sounds to me is how I want it to look on the page, so that when you read it, it will sound as close to how I intended as possible.

Both of these books, as well as several of your others, feature a major climatic moment toward the very end of the book. Why do you like throwing readers those curve balls (pardon the pun)? What do you think it adds to their reading experience, especially with this series?

So that’s really that’s a really cool pun. I’m so gonna steal that when I go on book tour. It’s so good. Love it.

It’s a trilogy, and I need you to finish reading one book and say, oh snap, I can’t wait for the next one. That’s one reason. The second reason is, I’m a big fan of imagination and allowing readers to wonder and sort of figure out what’s going to happen next on their own, figure out what’s possible. I don’t like to tell everything. I like to keep some things for myself and for the character, and I think at the end of Black Star, that’s the situation that Charley finds herself in. It could go a number of different ways, and I like that. But ultimately, everyone knows that if you’ve read any of my books, I am quite hopeful about life, and I sort of envision a world where eventually things are going to work out. So, if Kofi is in book two, then you know, it’s some in some capacity, his story worked out. But there are still things to deal with. There’s still drama, and in some instances, there’s still trauma. I like playing around with that when I end.

Can you tell us anything about where the next book in this trilogy will take us?

Oh my gosh, I so want to tell you. And I’m trying to think, can I give you a hint? Well, I will say this. The Door of No Return was set in 1860. Black Star was set in 1921. So, stay tuned, people.

The author dives into the role of storytelling and history in Black Star, his hotly anticipated follow-up to The Door of No Return.

Fiction Poetry

Tiana Clark’s blazing verse

The title of this collection is arresting—Scorched Earth, a phrase used to describe the destructive wake left by General Sherman’s march through Georgia at the end of the Civil War. That association is strengthened by the extraordinary cover featuring Kara Walker’s Buzzard’s Roost Pass, which is printed over an 1864 illustration of one of Sherman and Johnston’s battles. Would you tell us how you chose this title and cover? How are you hoping they will set up readers for the book?

I was commissioned by Matt Donovan, the director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center, to write an ekphrastic poem [a poem that describes a work of art] for a book he was editing titled The Map of Every Lilac Leaf: Poets Respond to SCMA (Smith College Museum of Art). When Matt mentioned they had a Kara Walker piece in storage, I was instantly intrigued. I’ve admired Walker’s work for years but had never experienced it in person. When I finally saw Buzzard’s Roost Pass, I was transfixed. I couldn’t look away from the black silhouette cutouts of a Black woman’s face and broken body, disassembled and spread across a haunting Civil War landscape.

For me, ekphrasis is all about “breaching the boundary,” an idea articulated by Edward Hirsch, who describes it as when “the writer enters into the spatial realm, traducing an abyss, violating the silent integrity of the pictorial.” This act of transgression felt particularly potent as I explored Walker’s work, which, as David Wall observes, wrestles with the “dark gothic underbelly of the American fabric,” forcing viewers into disturbing confrontations with violence and depravity. Through this process of ekphrastic interrogation, I wrote my poem “Scorched Earth.” I even printed Walker’s lithograph and wrote “dream cover” across the top, hanging it in hope in my office for years as the book coalesced.

When I secured my book deal with Jenny Xu at Washington Square Press, I immediately shared my vision and big wish for the cover. She made it happen, and I was ecstatic and beyond grateful when Kara Walker granted us permission to use her iconic image!

I hope the title and cover work in tandem to set up and subvert the political and personal stakes of the collection—interrogating how race, sex, violence and history collide within the cavalcade of poems. As Wall notes, Kara Walker’s work challenges viewers to confront their own complicity in “producing, consuming, and populating the vicious landscapes of racial and sexual representation.” In this way, I aimed not to exploit but to echo her transgressive charge in my poetry, inviting readers to grapple with these bruised truths while still reaching for joy—Black joy.

You’ve spoken before about how much you love epigraphs, and there’s even a “Broken Ode for the Epigraph” in this book, which hails the device as a “little cup holder” and an “amuse-bouche.” I wondered if you would tell us about your favorite epigraph in the collection. How did you come across it, and why did you choose it?

I constantly collect and archive lines, quotes and passages from multiple texts across genres. Perhaps this stems from my tendency to hoard—both on and off the page (ha!)—believing I will stash away these words for when I need them, like a squirrel furiously burying nuts in preparation for scarcity.

In this way, creating a cache of beloved quotes feels like I’m taking care of myself by crafting my own scrapbook for survival—chock-full of small truths I want to remember and return to. I grew up in church, memorizing and rereading proverbs and psalms, so perhaps, in some way, this passionate epigraphical practice is my form of secular scripture—my way of living with dictums I hold dear and deem as divine.

It’s hard to choose my favorite epigraph from the book because I truly love them all. Today, I’ll focus on Jericho Brown’s epigraph from my poem “When I Kissed Her Right Breast, I Became Myself Entirely,” which reads, “Gratitude is black—” from his stunning poem “Hero” in The Tradition. I see this epigraph in conversation (and holding hands) with a line from Robin Coste Lewis’ poem “Landscape,” which is also referenced in my book and begins, “Pleasure is black.” I love the idea of situating Blackness within the tender worlds of gratitude and pleasure as a form of soft reclamation—a necessary step toward freedom. This reminds me of radical self-love and bell hooks, who wrote, “Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed.”

I think it’s worth mentioning that when Lewis wrote about her poem “Landscape,” she said, “I’m trying to find a new language, or I should say a new English—one that both acknowledges the historical ruin inherent in English, but—because of that ruin—is also a vast open space. I like the ashes.” This idea of recognizing ruin as indictment and exploration feels akin to my dual—and at times dueling—desires as I wrote my way through the historical and psychological landscapes of Scorched Earth. This friction with language contends with my complicated relationship to the archive, which exploits as much as it erases the broken Black body throughout history.

I’m not interested in romanticizing the spectacle of suffering, but I am determined to interrogate and imagine innovative ways to disrupt cliched narratives of Blackness through subversion, speculation and transgression—while also reaching for, and never forgetting, what joy can make possible in my work. For me, this artistic intention must be grounded in, and continually return to, gratitude and pleasure—the revised definitions from Brown and Lewis—which remind me that I am more than what I have endured.

“To me, self-implication functions like adding acid to a dish: its brightness cuts through and balances the bitterness.”

Something I love in your work is how you amalgamate history and popular culture—The Bachelorette, the Great Train Wreck of 1918, FOMO, Phillis Wheatley, Cardi B, the Middle Passage—reminding us of how history lives on in the present, and how what’s present is always in the process of becoming history. I read an interview in Booth where you said that you entertained the idea of becoming a historian in college. Has that aspiration transmuted into your work as a poet?

I initially thought I wanted to be a historian because of my deep love for African American history, which led me to major in Africana Studies in college. During my junior year, I applied for and received an incredible summer internship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York—a decision that pinballed my life into poetry by provocation.

During the summer of 2008, I walked daily over the ashes of Langston Hughes, interred underneath the glittering terrazzo of the Schomburg lobby, where his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” is inscribed. Hughes wouldn’t leave me alone. I felt his ghost pinging me, insisting I was supposed to be a poet, not a historian. Instead of writing paragraphs for my research paper on the Harlem Renaissance, my time with the archive and microfiche at the library poured out as poems. Bewildered, I took the F train to Coney Island, and while staring out over the pier at the shore, I finally shouted back at the waves, “OK, Langston! Fine—I’ll be a poet!”

This catalytic moment crystallized my relationship with the historical archive, shaped by my compulsion to translate research through the alchemy of creative writing—colliding the personal and the political through the raw, transformative power of metaphor and prosody. It didn’t have to be a binary choice. I could be a poet utilizing the methods of a historian invested in translating the lacunae by excavating the often buried or palimpsestic African American stories of survival and beauty beyond the brutality and erasure foregrounded in the archive.

Through poetry, I was able to “speak” to Phillis Wheatley, Nina Simone, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker and Rihanna, along with other Black artists in my work, to better understand myself and build a legacy of models and mirrors—both past and present—that I can look up to, engage with, and see myself reflected back from a Black perspective.

This conjuring practice became my own lyrical way of navigating what Saidiya Hartman calls “a history written with & against the archive,” while also subverting the traditional Western literary canon to create my own compendium of Black persistence. This personal repertoire taught me how to “hold on,” work that, as Alice Walker states, “Black women have done for a very long time.” I also learned this type of perseverance from the single Black mother who raised and instilled in me a sense of radical self-confidence against all odds.

Since writing, for me, is a form of survival—but beyond the need to simply endure—I hope to thrive as I seek more portals of possibility in poetry and prose.

These poems are remarkable in their willingness to contradict or correct—which you acknowledge in these lines from “Proof”: “I think it’s important to implicate / the self. The knife shouldn’t exit the cake clean.” Could you tell us why this double-edged sense of implication is important to you?

I think self-implication is vital for a poet. The weight of the poetic gaze can be heavy and all-consuming. In the past, I’ve made mistakes when writing about complex situations inspired by real-life events and people who have hurt me. Through those experiences, I realized that while it wasn’t wrong to write about my pain, I wished I had done a better job of balancing that harm with an acknowledgment of my own complicity—turning the intensity of the gaze back onto myself with the same level of scrutiny and examination.

Not all the time, but sometimes, that level of self-awareness is crucial from the speaker, especially in rendering the knotted emotional truth of an experience. Which is why the metaphor of the knife arrived while writing “Proof,” a poem about a tense moment between two people on the brink of divorce and the residue that remains after you hurt someone you love. I wanted to be truthful to the messiness in the aftermath of mistakes.

Natasha Trethewey has one of the most self-implicating lines I’ve ever read. In her poem “Elegy,” about fishing with the speaker’s father, she writes: “I can tell you now / that I tried to take it all in, record it / for an elegy I’d write — one day — / when the time came. Your daughter, / I was that ruthless.” Chills! I think about those last four words all the time. It’s astonishing how the speaker confesses to this compulsion. As writers, we often can’t resist the uncontrollable urge to alchemize moments into metaphors, even as they’re happening before us. I certainly have!

What draws me to this line is how deeply relatable it is, how flawed and human—especially when trying to render our parents in our poems (calling on Philip Larkin [“This Be the Verse”] here, ha!). I connect with it because I, too, have been merciless. I, too, have a complicated relationship with my father. To me, self-implication functions like adding acid to a dish: its brightness cuts through and balances the bitterness.

“As I get older, I find myself wanting to be freer in my poems just as much as I want to safeguard myself within them.”

You’ve taught poetry at Smith College (I was one of your students!), the Sewanee School of Letters and elsewhere. A wonderful moment in “50 Lines after Figure (2001) by Glenn Ligon” comes when you describe helping students see what rules they can break in their poems: “50 invisible permission slips sparkling in their eyeballs—THAT GLEAM THOUGH.” What’s something new you granted yourself permission to do in this book?

So many poets I adore have written poems that feel like potent permission slips, encouraging me to take risks, play with form, employ new techniques and explore themes I once considered taboo or forbidden—poets like Sharon Olds, Terrance Hayes and Hanif Abdurraqib, to name just a few from my ever-expanding list of luminaries.

For Scorched Earth, I wanted to remind myself and relearn what I strive to impart to my students by graciously granting myself the utmost permission to be fully myself—flaws and all—in whatever wonky, silly, verbose, irreverent or sentimental ways my beloved quirks and idiosyncrasies manifested in my work. I wasn’t trying to make mistakes, but if they came, then I wanted to let my blunders become material for radical embodiment and lyrical aliveness—which, of course, reminds me of Federico Garcia Lorca’s duende: the raw, mysterious force that “burns the blood like powdered glass” and wrestles with artists, where wounds and imperfections create unrepeatable, “storm-filled” moments charged with ferocious depth, passionate fury and magnetic authenticity—death-haunted with ache and wonder.

I love these magnificent lines from Rainer Maria Rilke: “I want to unfold. / I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, / because where I am folded, there I am a lie.” I love this idea of unfolding—unfurling flaws, unspooling the self—which, for me, means releasing myself from the stress of perfection, from the urge to conceal how awkwardly human, feverishly feral and gloriously weird I am.

As I get older, I find myself wanting to be freer in my poems just as much as I want to safeguard myself within them—and by self, I mean the amalgamation of me(s) vis-a-vis the speaker—speaking through the multitudinous masks of the lyric “I,” a collage of real and imagined versions of myself, all trying to unfold by remaining honest to the emotional truth, all trying to recall Fernando Pessoa’s salient words: “There are more I’s than I myself.”

Don’t get me wrong—deception, at times, serves a vital function for survival, like Scheherazade staving off death with a captivating story and a well-timed cliffhanger, or Penelope weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law by day and unraveling her work by night to fend off suitors, prolonging time as she waits for Odysseus to return.

Or the right to opacity as a tool of rebellion and resistance—a theory from the late Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant, who celebrated the refusal of transparency in praise of the inaccessible and untranslatable, both culturally and personally. As a post-colonial framework, opacity resists hegemonic power, exemplified by Creole in the Caribbean plantation system, where encoded language allowed privacy between slaves to communicate without the master having access to their speech.

These deft and cunning literary examples reveal a crucial truth about the role of art and the discursive power of storytelling, especially for those of us who live, resist and make art from the margins: Whether we reveal, conceal, deceive or even mess up, we are ultimately trying to outlive what might destroy us.

When teaching students to put together chapbooks, you’ve said that each poetry collection should have at least one poem that gestures at, or perhaps belongs to, the next book you’ll write. Is there one of these poems in Scorched Earth, and if so, what is it pointing toward?

Yes, there is a poem that serves as a bridge to my next book. When shaping the narrative and emotional arc of Scorched Earth, I initially wanted to end with “The Terror of New Love!” However, I wasn’t satisfied with concluding on a note that felt potentially saccharine or overly salvific—finding new love after divorce. Although the entrance of this new lover is spectacular and signifies a brave transformation—timidly wanting, trying, hoping and opening up to love again—I didn’t want the speaker to seem redeemed by another person.

Ironically, while the speaker isn’t saved by a partner, it was my partner who suggested adding “Maybe in Another Life” as an epilogue poem. The more I thought about it, the placement started to make sense, snapping into place like the final, satisfying click of a puzzle piece, which accomplished my twin goals of creating a celebratory yet still unresolved coda—one that resists a definitive resolution but instead acts as a hinge, closing and opening, embodying the complex conundrum of whether or not to have children, followed by the radical self-acceptance of not knowing the answers or the outcome.

I hoped for a more realistic rather than romanticized portrayal of the speaker’s journey—one that begins in ruins and ends on the shore in Margate, in love again, yes, but also content in solitude, still striving to embrace the Keatsian “negative capabilities” that life tends to toggle, tangle and untangle ad infinitum.

The epilogue poem subverts the idea of ending with a bang, instead dwelling in flux—the liminal nuance within terminal closure—making peace with all that is known and unknown by mirroring the poem’s soft waves as they ebb and flow, foreshadowing a thematic sneak peek into prose.

Fans of your essays (on Black millennial burnout and writing after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, among other topics) will be excited to hear about your upcoming memoir-in-essays, Begging to Be Saved—your nonfiction debut. Do you have anything to share about the experience of working in prose?

I will never forget when Ann Patchett visited Vanderbilt during my MFA program for a talk. She emphasized that in our work, we should always reach for something higher—beyond what we believe we can accomplish. Venturing into prose has been that ambitious leap and feat for me.

I was already writing long poems, so expanding into essays felt somewhat natural at first. Yet, writing prose has humbled and surprised me, challenging me to rethink my relationship to form in creative nonfiction. I love cross-pollinating my poetic instincts into my memoir-in-progress, channeling Baudelaire’s famous imperative to always be a poet, even in prose.

I’ve also been leaning heavily on poets who write across genres—Saeed Jones, Maggie Nelson, Maggie Smith, Ross Gay and Ocean Vuong—rereading their work for insight and inspiration as I chart my own lyric-driven path in prose.

Writing this memoir has been a wild joy—a broader river to wade into my obsessions and themes as I reckon with Black burnout—both what it is and what I hope lies beyond the racialized stress and terror—alongside millennial divorce, faith, art-making and the evolving, radical methods of Black survival. I’m excited to share it soon!

Read our starred review of Scorched Earth.

Photo of Tiana Clark © Adrianne Mathiowetz Photography.

Award-winning poet and essayist Tiana Clark lets us peer into the process behind her second collection, Scorched Earth—an exquisite book that reckons with history and rings with joy.

Nonfiction Memoir

Sarah Chihaya on ‘Bibliophobia’

What do you love most about your memoir?

I love the idea that it might prompt other people to think deeply about their own reading habits, and perhaps go back to some of the books that shaped them. Maybe it’s the teacher in me, but if any readers of Bibliophobia go back and reread at least one of the books that’s changed the way they think or feel, I’ll be happy.

What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?

I hope that it will reach anyone who has ever regarded how they read with some curiosity and suspicion—that is to say, anyone who ever wonders why they are driven to read and/or write, and questions what might drive us to look for comfort or sometimes discomfort outside our own lives. Not everyone will have read all the books I’ve written about here, but I think anyone who’s been truly changed by a book will have their own version of this experience.

At what point did you know this story was a book?

I wrote three sections of what would become Bibliophobia in a mad rush, two of which remain in the book, and just didn’t feel like I could stop. It had been a long time since I’d been able to write anything, then all of a sudden it was like a dam had burst. It felt almost compulsive at first, and when I tried to go back and work on the soon-to-be-abandoned academic book I was writing, the flow of writing just dried up again. It was clear then that this was the only book I could write in that moment, even if there were other things I was supposed to be doing, and it was futile to try and do anything else.

Read our starred review of ‘Bibliophobia’ by Sarah Chihaya.

What was the hardest memory to get on the page?

To write the chapter on Ruth Ozeki, “A Tale for the Non-Being,” I really had to go back to the moment of my mental health crisis and relive it. This involved tracing every step of a very significant long walk that literally put me back in a place I’d been trying to avoid thinking about for a while. I knew when I set out to do it that it would be painful, but it really brought back specific memories I didn’t know I had. I think it was more necessary than I realized it would be for my own healing process, and I wouldn’t have done it if the book hadn’t made me.

Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?

I hadn’t realized how much I rely on humor as a way of getting through hard things; I always thought I made jokes to make it easier on others, but they are really to make sense of things to myself. Writing and revising this book really made me see how much I have made light of some aspects of my past that I actually needed to confront head-on. That being said, sometimes life is ridiculous, even or especially at its most extreme moments, and some degree of levity is the only thing that can carry you on, whether the reader or the writer.

How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?

Writing this book—the story of my reading life to this point, which is to say, my whole life—has made me feel able to think about writing other things in the future. I feel more at liberty to experiment in different genres and subjects, almost as though I needed to do this in order to grant myself permission to write about topics beyond books themselves. I think I still had a lot of academic hang-ups when I started Bibliophobia about what one was “allowed” to write, which had to do with expertise and earning your way into a topic or form. I don’t think these anxieties are totally resolved—maybe they will never be—but I feel more able to let myself entertain ideas I didn’t think I was ready to tackle before, like fiction.

How have you changed since you started writing it?

Since finishing the book, I’ve been really amazed by how much it’s helped me gain perspective on my own life—which seems so obvious writing a memoir, but I really didn’t go into this project expecting it to be a memoir, or feeling like clarity was possible at all. It’s been really useful and revelatory to talk to both friends and strangers who have read it, and who have their own answers to questions I’ve been wrestling with alone for so long. Elements that felt so close and so raw in the moment of writing now feel farther away, as if writing were a way to look at myself from the outside, not coldly, but hopefully more clearly.

It’s been really useful and revelatory to talk to both friends and strangers who have read it, and who have their own answers to questions I’ve been wrestling with alone for so long.

What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?

For sure it was the history of Anne of Green Gables in Japan, which was a cultural phenomenon I simply never thought to ask about before. I am obsessed with Canadian World, the now-defunct Anne theme park in Hokkaido, and I desperately want to visit it (it’s become a municipal park). I was also really moved by the research I did into the life of Anne’s creator, Lucy Maud Montgomery, which is both incredibly tragic and inspiring. I sought comfort in her books for so many years, never wondering what her life was really like, and even the smallest glimpse into it really shook up my understanding of her work in both the Anne books and the Emily of New Moon trilogy.

Can you describe your book as an item on a menu?

I think Bibliophobia is actually like an after-dinner drink: something to help you digest everything you’ve read before. Ideally, you’d sit and linger with it, as you think about what came before it. And there are more cigarettes in it than I’d realized, so like a good Scotch, it’s very smoky.

Photo of Sarah Chihaya by Beowulf Sheehan.

Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Sarah Chihaya pushed through writer’s block by penning a memoir about the books that have changed her life.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Science Fiction

“If that’s our future, it’s already here.”

You’ve finished your first book! How do you feel?
Very relieved, like I’ve finally reached the surface for a sip of air. This isn’t the first novel I’ve started but the first I feel is finished. It went through many revisions, and I’m grateful to have people who’ve been so patient and supportive.

What did you learn from writing Luminous that you would like to take with you while drafting future novels?
I learned I can’t write in isolation. I like to be in dialogue with a couple books while I’m drafting. It’s like teaching a toddler to talk—can’t let them babble on their own. The books I kept returning to were Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

What drew you to Luminous’ cyberpunk setting?
I confess, this wasn’t a conscious choice so much as a failure of my imagination. I wrote the world I grew up in, and that was Seoul. It’s a crowded city, much denser in population than New York. It’s dizzyingly neon at night; it’s usually smoggy and outrageous and overstimulating. But it’s home.

For me, the real appeal of cyberpunk is the noir element. There’s usually a detective story, which is the spine for Luminous. A mystery or conspiracy that reflects our eroding faith in society. The world is seen as dark, isolating, ravaged by capitalism and war, and people are so plugged in, they’re unable to separate reality from virtuality. That sounds rather familiar. If that’s our future, it’s already here.

” . . . we’ve replaced religion with technology in this pursuit of a solution to death.”

Korean reunification is a central aspect of Luminous‘ world. What interested you about that scenario? What resonance did it lend to the story for you?
The setting of Luminous came to me much later. In earlier drafts, I started with sad, mopey people and dropped them into a thinly sketched Pan-Asia. Then it felt too fraught to envision a future like that. Korea was nearly obliterated a couple times throughout history; in the past century or so, there was the Japanese colonization, and then Korea was liberated—brief hooray—before it plunged into civil war and the country has been divided ever since. It seemed cruel to write a future cannibalizing a country that had fought so hard to exist. I wanted to respect its resilience. And it was very difficult to imagine a Korea of the future without the North, without the possibility of reunification in mind.

Growing up in Seoul, you live with a cognitive dissonance, aware of the North’s suffering, just beyond that border. I think, like many in my generation, I’ve had to numb myself to let that reality sit in my chest. With it lives a kind of yearning, not for someone you’ve known, but for someone you should have known.

What was interesting to you about a sentient robot? Was there a specific influence you drew from?
For Luminous, I wanted to explore the paradox of our relationship with robots. By far the uncanniest for me is the child robot. I grew up watching Astro Boy (Space Boy Atom in Korea). Even then, I thought it was creepy-cute to design a robot to look like a child. Now it seems so counterintuitive. A child has to learn everything from scratch. They’re still fumbling shoelaces and dribbling food on themselves. How is a robot supposed to mimic a child when everything about a child is so antithetical to a functioning robot?

But nowadays, we have grieving parents who can take the pictures of their deceased child and use AI to age them, giving themselves a chance to see their child grow up. This was one of the starting points for Luminous, the way we’ve replaced religion with technology in this pursuit of a solution to death.

Read our review of ‘Luminous’ by Silvia Park.

Do you think you’ll see semi- to fully-sentient robots in your lifetime?
I used to think the intelligence of the robots depicted in Luminous was still, perhaps forever, out of reach. But I also cannot underestimate our obsession with AI, especially for profit. In the race between achieving GAI (general artificial intelligence) and hastening climate catastrophe, I’ve no idea which will win. Just look at how crypto mining is casually devastating to the environment, but rarely is this discussed.

Couple this with our capacity for immense loneliness, and I fear for the moment we successfully merge AI programming with a convincing, soft-boiled body. Not too long ago, we had a Google engineer, since fired, insist that a chatbot was sentient. If a software engineer can be convinced by a faceless chatbot, I don’t think us laypersons will stand a chance.

If you had to replace a body part with a robotic replacement, which would you pick? (I would pick my left arm, it’s mostly useless anyway.)
Great pick! I’d choose eyes. I have a genetic quirk that means my sight will degrade early in life. But I’d be scared to lose the skewed, hazy way I see the world, so I might halve it and just replace one eye, like Jun.

“The future is so fluid, I think it’s best to reimagine it constantly.”

Were there any key influences that molded Ruijie, Jun and Morgan?
I decided to split Luminous into four perspectives: two adults (Jun and Morgan) and two children (Ruijie and Taewon). That choice was inspired by a line from Louise Gluck’s poem, “Nostos”: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”

I’m fascinated by memory. The older we get, the more we seem tempted to hold on to one version of a story and lovingly polish it until it gleams. This lends itself to a kind of myopia in adults that feels different from the solipsism of children who, for all their lack of experience, remain malleable, clear-eyed and hopeful.

With Jun and Morgan, I wanted to explore these siblings who have clashing accounts of their childhood, casting different people in the roles of villain and victim, and how this has shaped them as adults.

Ruijie, as I think I wrote in the first chapter, is a “child beloved.” What struck me about Ruijie, going beyond her very human moments of pettiness, jealousy and anger, was this capacity for immense tenderness. Many very ill children end up reversing roles with their parents, and have to be strong for them. I think that’s why hers is a love story. She falls in love with a robot in the way only she can.

Would you consider writing more novels in this same setting?
Oh, I hope not. I’d rather not stick around in a world for too long or it grows stale like a day-old scone. The future is so fluid, I think it’s best to reimagine it constantly.

What’s next for you?
My fingers are crossed for a much slimmer book than the last. I’m working on a novel about mermaids. Beautiful, bloodthirsty and matriarchal.

Photo of Silvia Park © Han Jeongseon.

Silvia Park’s debut novel, Luminous, takes place in a near-future, reunified Korea where robots bear the weight of human emotions.

Romance Science Fiction

What’s more fun than one alien boyfriend? How about two! (Plus, a pink T. Rex.)

After wildlife biologist Dory is abducted by aliens, she finds herself on a mysterious planet populated by prehistoric creatures—and two very hot aliens named Lok and Sol. We talked to Lemming about surprising inspirations (Furbies!) and what she’d want to make sure she had on an alien planet.

I’m calling it now: 2025 is the year of the alien romance and who better to kick it off than you! (I’m a big alien romance reader, and you have my unwavering adoration.) What compelled you to write an alien romance?
I was watching Meerkat Manor in between binging alien romance novels and I couldn’t help but think of how funny it would be if an animal researcher got abducted by aliens and became the animal being studied. Then I thought, “Well, what if the alien research team was hugely underfunded and had to cut corners?” That got me thinking about all the mishaps that could come from trying to create a habit for a species you didn’t know the first thing about. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those old photos of T. Rex fossils posed upright in those prized fighter positions, but for generations we thought those eight-ton behemoths were running around with excellent posture. Who’s to say aliens four star systems away wouldn’t make similar mistakes? When I had the idea that they’d just have their AI populate the world with DNA they stole from a dinosaur exhibit, I knew I couldn’t rest until I wrote this book.

“I’d have been killed immediately trying to pet all the dinosaurs.”

When you were creating your alien species, the Sankado and the Biwbans, how did you decide what physical attributes you wanted them to have?
There’s a running joke in my family that Furbies are evil aliens sent to destroy us. The one I had as a kid would insult you any chance it got (no clue where it got that from) and had a habit of turning on in the toy box at night to scare the ever-loving shit out of my mom. So I made the Biwbans kinda look like that. As for the Sankado, I kind of just had the idea of these alien satyrs that breathed fire. Then a friend of mine demanded to know how these satyrs breathed fire, which sent me on a research spiral and ended up with me changing their appearance a bit to add patches on their skin that allowed excess steam to roll off and a long tail with a breath tube at the end to help take in more air for fire-breathing.

Lok and Sol are both able to produce flames as a result of the way their body digests yeast. What other fun, niche areas did you find yourself researching for your world building?
I already knew animals like goats and cattle produce methane, and the thought of an alien species powered by garlic bread cracked me up, so I went with that method. I also spent far too long researching how much weight a parasaurolophus could safely carry for one scene, but that’s neither here nor there. I mostly spent my time researching how to see the world through Dory’s eyes as a wildlife biologist. She’s endlessly curious about the world around her, and it was a lot of fun to figure out how nature could still survive and thrive on a planet where wildly different species of plants and animals were just tossed together into one big melting pot.

Read our review of ‘I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I’m Trapped in a Rom-Com’ by Kimberly Lemming.

Dory finds herself with not one but two possessive, alpha aliens madly in lust/love with her, going against the “fated mate” trope we see in a lot of monster and alien romances. Tell us about why you decided to give Dory two partners.
Lok was originally meant to be a rival that got killed off. But I liked him too much and just added him to the trio. Sol needs all the help he can get with keeping Dory alive. So it all worked out.

Dory is a fighter! While she occasionally gets overwhelmed, we never find her defeated even though her life has been completely upended. (I hope I could muster a fraction of her chutzpah in her situation.) How do you think you would fare in her boots?
I’d have been killed immediately trying to pet all the dinosaurs. If the Biwbans wanted me to survive, they’d have to assign a team of Sankado to watch me round-the-clock so I didn’t run off to explore. All bets are off on an alien planet. Survival is secondary, I need to see if the pterodactyl will let me ride on its back. It won’t, but that’s what the team of Sankado is for.

If you were abducted by an alien species, what would you hope would be in your cargo pants pocket to help you once you landed?
Old Bay seasoning, a phone with the same solar-powered case [Dory] had so I could still listen to music, and a book on what plants are safe to eat so I don’t choke to death on a bad berry.

One of my favorite things about your books is that even when the characters are scared out of their mind or trying their best to survive, you have a way of defusing the moment with humor. (Hello, giant pink T. Rex who is allergic to soap bubbles.) Why are humor and camp such important elements in your books?
Life sucks and then you die. May as well laugh about it.

Okay, I have to ask: Our trio finds themselves in a very sexy situation while riding on the backs of two large dinosaurs—and yet, they don’t fall off! How did you go about diagramming this scene while writing?
I imagine parasaurolophus run with a very smooth gait. No, I do not have any research to back that up.

I love hearing who my favorite authors are reading: Who is someone you want to make sure is on our radar in 2025?
Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell was my favorite read [last] year. I’m hoping he’s got more on the way for 2025. I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea is a close second!

What’s next for you?
I’m in the middle of writing the second book in this series now. After that, I’ll probably go back to fantasy for a while. My readers have been very patient waiting for the next Mead Mishaps book, and it’s about time I gave it to them.

Alien Romance This or That:

Horns or Tail?
Horns no question.

Your Planet or Theirs?
Earth? In THIS economy? Theirs.

Wings or Hoofs?
Wings. I imagine hooves would be hell on my hardwood floors

Fire or Poisonous Saliva?
Fire. Poisonous Saliva would probably stain my pillows or something.

Pink T. Rex or Giant Frog?
Pink T. Rex. I WILL befriend her and she WILL let me ride around on her back.

Photo of Kimberly Lemming © Kimberly Lemming.

Kimberly Lemming’s sci-fi romance starts with an alien abduction and only gets wilder from there.

Nonfiction Memoir

Laurie Woolever on ‘Care and Feeding’

What do you love most about your memoir?

Well, I am probably biased, but I think that the narrative really moves; I’ve been told by some early readers that it has that “can’t put it down” quality. I spent a lot of time thinking about what details did and did not need to stay in the story, in order to give the reader the most compelling experience. As I refined the first draft, I could see where certain digressions or explanations were only compelling to me, and I think I made good choices that will keep the reader’s eyes on the page.

What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?

I think this book has a number of targeted reader-types. Fans of memoir as a genre will enjoy this one, which I think is funny, surprising and honest. Fans of Anthony Bourdain will be interested in my experiences as his assistant and co-author. People who like to cook and travel are in for a treat. Anyone who has attended cooking school and/or worked in the food service or hospitality industry will see their experiences reflected here. People who have wrestled with changing standards of workplace behavior, especially around sexual harassment, will find a lot to chew on. People who have struggled with addiction, or know someone who has, will ideally feel seen and heard when reading this book. People who have struggled in their relationships, or with the early days of parenting, or with the long-term illness of a parent, will all find a lot to relate to.

Read our review of ‘Care and Feeding’ by Laurie Woolever.

At what point did you know this story was a book?

After the death of Tony Bourdain, while I was simultaneously working on World Travel and Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, I had occasion to reflect on my career. I was newly divorced and sober and grieving the loss of my boss and mentor, and taking stock of how I’d gotten to that point. A decade ago, I wrote an essay about all the jobs I’d had since college, and that got such a strong response that I knew there was a lot of pleasure and insight to be gleaned by building a narrative around my work life, which so often bled into my personal life.

What was the hardest memory to get on the page?

I sometimes behaved badly in my relationship with my ex-husband, and that’s a tough thing to document honestly on the page. It’s a private and painful situation, and I worked hard to strike a balance between telling a compelling story and protecting his privacy. There was a moment when we were breaking up when he said, “You’d better not be writing about this.” Bearing that in mind, I endeavored to treat him gently and with kindness in the narrative, because the fault was all mine.

Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?

I was lucky to have the experience that I’ve heard other writers talk about, wherein writing in a loose, stream-of-consciousness style for the first draft sometimes unearthed new insights and new ways of understanding an old experience. This was especially true as I wrote about my dealings with men. In the moment, I was only focused on immediate gratification, but in writing about my various boyfriends and flings, I could see patterns to which I had previously been oblivious.

“I was newly divorced and sober and grieving the loss of my boss and mentor, and taking stock of how I’d gotten to that point.”

How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?

I feel great, honestly. I’ve co-authored a number of books, but writing a book as a solo author has been a lifelong ambition. I’ve been buoyed by early reactions and I am eager to launch the book into the wider world, where I sincerely believe it will resonate with all kinds of readers.

How have you changed since you started writing it?

I am fundamentally the same person I was when I started writing it, but I think that I have a perspective on the events described in the narrative that’s both deeper and broader than when I started. I’ve also realized over the course of writing and editing it, and now starting to promote it, that the writing itself held so much pleasure. I used to drive toward the finish line and only feel satisfied on publication day. I know now that every part of the process is a reward.

What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?

It wasn’t so much research as recall, but I found it fascinating and surprising to get back into the course materials from culinary school. That education was much more rigorous and traditional than I’d remembered. I also went deep into the processes involved in Guinness World Record attempts, Judy Garland’s hometown and the fates of various actors who played munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.

Can you describe your book as an item on a menu?

Care and Feeding is itself a tasting menu, delivering a full meal that’s been carefully calibrated with just enough comedy, pathos, thrill, horror, gossip and actual food.

Photo of Laurie Woolever by David Scott Holloway.

Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Laurie Woolever shares about the humbling process, and the joys, of writing a memoir of her life as a food writer, a chef and an assistant to Anthony Bourdain.

Nonfiction Memoir

Martha S. Jones on ‘The Trouble of Color’

What do you love most about your memoir?

With The Trouble of Color complete, my husband will no longer question my habit of saving family mementos. He’d been the one to pack and repack them each time we moved! I’m joking, of course, because he has always been supportive, coming along on my research adventures. It is more accurate to say that I love how this book created a home for the photos, reminiscences, letters and souvenirs I’d collected. It is a practice begun as a small child, when my grandmother began mailing me keepsakes. I love how the book has given these things a purpose by letting them tell a new story about an American family, about who we call kin and how that can change across generations.

What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?

The Trouble of Color is for readers eager for a journey of discovery: of the self, of what it means to be family and how the color line has shaped us. If you have been misapprehended, mistaken or misunderstood for someone you are not, this book is for you. If the look of your very person confounds, confuses or provokes others, this book is for you. If you have been rebuffed, wounded or dismissed along the color line, this book is for you. If you’ve ever felt discomfort when checking a box, filling a blank or choosing a side, this book is for you. If you’ve heard that your family is too complicated, too out of bounds, confused or contradictory, this book is for you. For everyone, The Trouble of Color is an invitation to reflect deeply on their own family stories.

At what point did you know this story was a book?

I’ve collected family memories for a long time. But I only knew I might have enough for a book when I uncovered the story of my great-great-great grandmother, Nancy. She was born a slave in 1808 Danville, Kentucky, and no one in our family had spoken much about her. I stumbled onto the details of her life in the pages of some old, dusty account ledgers, and I could see how she was at the start of a book that stretched out across generations, all the way to me. I wrote The Trouble of Color with her portrait at my shoulder, hanging next to my desk, and always felt sure that Nancy would be pleased to know that I had put her and her descendants’ lives on the page.

If you have been rebuffed, wounded or dismissed along the color line, this book is for you.

What was the hardest memory to get on the page?

I knew I would have to confront my father’s life, including his troubled times. As a girl, I had heard his stories. But as a memoirist, I had to confront raw details: As a young man, more than once he’d barely escaped a tragic end. I wrote and rewrote those passages many times, wanting to be both honest and compassionate. I rooted for him, held my breath when he faltered and discovered that I could understand and even love him, despite his shortcomings. But to get there, I first had to face things that our family rarely talked about.

Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?

I grew up thinking that my parents, who wed in 1957, were the first couple in our family to marry across the color line. They were not, I discovered. Long before couples like them tested their right to marry as part of the Civil Rights generation, men and women together defied so-called anti-miscegenation laws and legally wed. This was true 130 years earlier for my great-great grandparents, Elijah and Mary Jones. In 1827 they fooled a North Carolina county clerk long enough to get a license and say “I do,” even if the law barred him, a free man of color, from marrying her, a white woman. My parents were not outlaws—they were part of a family tradition.

How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?

I feel like I’ve stepped into a new world. For two decades, my reading and writing life had been dominated by history and related scholarship. I love that work and the discoveries it has led me to. But historical writing does not very often invite us to put our imaginations, our dreams, our fears and ourselves on the page. Reading memoir has taught me a new way of thinking about the past and of explaining it in very personal terms. Writing memoir has given me the freedom to share not only what happened in the past. It has allowed me to discover how it feels to know that past and also live its inheritance. I feel excited for readers to know me in this new way.

How have you changed since you started writing it?

I found a new sense of humor while writing The Trouble of Color. I haven’t always found moments in which people misread me and my skin color to be funny. Mostly those were painful scenes. But I learned about my great-grandmother Fannie and her “passing” in downtown St. Louis. She was oftentimes amused when her skin fooled the eyes of department store clerks or train conductors. She shopped and traveled like a white woman when she chose to and, like many a trickster, enjoyed every moment of the farce. Only today, knowing Fannie better, am I also bemused by the misunderstanding that my color invites: People assume I am who I am not. Like Fannie did, I can now see the absurdity in that and laugh, at least to myself.

Read our starred review of ‘The Trouble of Color’ by Martha S. Jones.

What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?

To write about my parents’ lives as suburban activists, I had to go back there, literally. When my memories failed, I returned to my hometown public library where they keep the only run of our weekly newspaper, the Port Washington News. Talk about going back in time: There I was, doing research in the place where, as a girl, I checked out books and studied after school. I was greeted by my junior high social studies teacher, now retired and a library volunteer, and spent days reading issue after issue, gingerly turning the brittle pages. I unearthed tidbits about my parents’ lives and more. I sometimes think there are stories for a next book about my own growing up waiting for me there.

Can you describe your book as an item on a menu?

The Trouble of Color is like a side of greens. Mine are made from improvisation and with love. There’s the sweetness of onions. Heat of pepper flakes. Savor of a smoked ham hock. Bitterness of greens: collards, mustard, chard and beet. Next, laborious prep. Rinse and soak the leaves. Repeat. Tear the tender parts from the stems. Keep the stringy bits for flavor. Magic happens when the greens hit the brew of stock, vinegar and hot sauce: wilting down to a thick, rich stew. Greens are great that first day, but let them sit. The jelly collects. The pot liquor thickens. They taste better than the day before. My greens are like family: contrasting ingredients, labor in the making, transformation in the cooking and always changing with goodness that lasts.

Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

By excavating her ancestral history, historian and memoirist Martha S. Jones invites readers to reflect deeply on their own family stories.

Children's & YA Middle Grade Children's

Guojing on finding hope in the desert

What inspired the desert setting of Oasis?
The desert represents vastness, harshness and emptiness. It also symbolizes the destruction of old ideas, ways of living and civilizations. The story follows two children who show strength as they struggle to survive in a lifeless desert and create their own natural oasis. This extreme desert setting becomes the backdrop for exploring the metaphorical oasis, highlighting the stark contrast between the sacrifices demanded by shiny, artificial progress and the core of human nature and the true essence of humanity.

Your previous two graphic novels, Stormy and The Flamingo, both utilized vibrant colors. Oasis is more muted. What is your process when developing a color palette?

The children live in a forgotten and polluted city in the desert, which is also a landfill from Oasis City. It’s dry, chaotic and hopeless. Bright colors are obviously not suitable for this story, so I used low-key colors to express their mood and situation, and also the unique beauty of the desert.

JieJie and DiDi live alone while waiting for their mother to secure a way for them to join her in Oasis City. This resembles many real-life immigration experiences, and Oasis is specifically dedicated to the left-behind children within China. Can you speak about this theme of migration?

In reality, many children are left behind for various reasons, and one of the most notable examples can be found in China. Many migrant workers move to the cities in search of better opportunities or a brighter future. However, due to the hukou system—a household registration system similar to a local residence permit—children face significant challenges in accessing education and social benefits in urban areas. As a result, a large number of children are left behind in rural areas, often living with their grandparents. This has led to a growing crisis, with countless children raised without their parents, resulting in emotional distance and a breakdown of fundamental human connections. This situation deeply saddens me, and in my story, the two children represent those who are left behind.

“Despite advancements in technology, why have our most basic and simple needs become luxurious and out of reach? Why are people feeling lonelier and more indifferent?”

The children find moments of happiness even while living in a brutal environment. For example, they enjoy the “beautiful pink color” of the sunset—despite it being a result of pollution. How did you maintain the gentleness in this story, despite its harsh circumstances?

I lived in Beijing for a while during the worst of the smog. I still remember the sight of the beautiful pink sun, partly hidden by the fog. Its color was soft and magical. I also experienced dramatic sandstorms that, for just a few minutes at noon, turned the world dark, as if it were the end of the world. I’ve kept these images in my mind and used them in my story. In one scene, the pink sun represents the children’s longing for their mother—an unreachable wish, like a dream lost in the mist.

The story takes place close to the Mid-Autumn Festival (“moon festival” in the book). What does that festival mean to you?

The Mid-Autumn Festival, with a history spanning over a thousand years, is a day dedicated to family reunions, with the moon serving as a symbol of this togetherness. On this day, families gather to admire the moon together. In Chinese legends, the moon often represents family members who are absent. One such legend tells of a lonely beauty residing on the moon in a cold palace, longing to be reunited with her family. For me, the Mid-Autumn Festival is just as special as it is for any other Chinese person: It’s a time spent with my parents, grandparents and loved ones, filled with food, laughter and joyful talks.

Do you see Oasis reflecting the labor realities of our world?

In Oasis, which is an upside-down world, the children’s mother has no name. Instead, [she is referred to by] a number in a factory, while artificial intelligence provides the human emotions [in the story]. We see that humans have to work like machines, and having the most basic human emotions has become a luxury. This is not a plot in science fiction. We see it from [factory workers in real life] who fight for their family and a better future for their children.

The mother “works like a robot,” while the AI mom performs the actions of a human mother. How would you describe the dynamic between human and robot in this story?

The human mother is simple and ordinary, not endowed with superpowers or magic like AI. Yet, for her children, she remains an irreplaceable figure. Her senses, smile, embrace, voice and even her scent cannot be replicated by AI in this story. The true essence of motherhood is unique and incomparable. Since becoming a mother myself, I’ve felt this strength more deeply than ever. The AI robot may serve as a caregiver, a guardian and perhaps even a friend, but it can never replace the warmth and depth of a mother’s love.

Read our starred review of Oasis here.

In Oasis, AI robots can build cities, or fight on the battlefield, or act as mothers. What was the significance of including these different modes?

AI can become whatever we choose it to be, depending on how we use it. It holds the potential to either help or harm us. In my story, while an insecure human society creates technology driven by its own fears, two children demonstrate how they repurpose the same technology to play a different role, ultimately benefiting the core of humanity.

In the end, the AI robot provides a way for the mother to escape her struggles. Do you envision a hopeful future with AI?

Despite advancements in technology, why have our most basic and simple needs become luxurious and out of reach? Why are people feeling lonelier and more indifferent? Like the ending of the book, I hope AI evolves beyond a tool for the wealthy; I wish for it to help humanity reconnect with its true nature, embrace each other and support those in need.

In the author’s latest graphic novel, Oasis, two children seek comfort in a discarded AI robot, while their mother labors in a factory in order to give them a better life.

Nonfiction Memoir

Chloe Dalton on ‘Raising Hare’

What do you love most about your memoir?

I wrote the book with the hare stretched out on her side in my office, or licking her paws beside me. As I settled at my desk in the morning to write, she would arrive back from her nocturnal wanderings, shake the dew from her fur and settle down to rest. I never knew what the next day would bring, and it filled me with a sense of wonder. If I’d been writing about an experience that was already in the past, there might have been a temptation to burnish it with my own interpretation and the benefit of hindsight. Instead, my task was to observe closely, to listen and to try faithfully to describe what I witnessed.

What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?

I’m not a scientist or conservationist; I’m a city dweller who happened to have an extraordinary experience with a wild animal. I hope that the book might appeal to people who wouldn’t normally read nature writing. Perhaps readers who, like me, had a strong connection to animals in their childhood but lost sight of that because of work stress and responsibility. Or anyone who is going through a difficult period in their life and feels uncertain about the future. The message of the book is that sometimes the most beautiful experiences in life are just around the corner, or—in this case—just at the end of the garden. The things that we least expect can end up bringing us the greatest joy.

Read our starred review of ‘Raising Hare’ by Chloe Dalton.

At what point did you know this story was a book?

When the hare was 4 months old, she learned to leap the wall around the garden. She melted invisibly into the landscape of fields and woods, and I thought she was gone forever. But instead she returned, of her own accord, and chose to live a dual life between the wild and my home. The fact that she felt so safe in my house that she wished to return was deeply moving. At that point, I knew I was witnessing something very unusual, and that I wanted to document the story for myself and for others.

What was the hardest memory to get on the page?

There is a painful moment in the story when a beautiful young leveret—one of the hare’s own young—dies unexpectedly. I was deep in the book at this point, writing the story as it unfolded around me. I was devastated by its death, and it was a struggle to avoid letting my emotions swamp the page. I could hardly see for tears.

The hare is an animal that has never been domesticated. It clings on, despite the destruction of the natural landscape.

Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?

I was surprised by how much action and interest there is in the life of a hare. And I could never have imagined that I could experience such curiosity, interest, joy and satisfaction from living alongside a family of wild animals. Trying to find the words to describe the color and pattern of her fur, watching her conceal herself from predators in the garden, waiting for her young to emerge at night so she could feed them, all these moments captivated me. I was utterly absorbed, and felt more at peace than at any other point in my life.

How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?

I feel closer to nature, more attuned to animals and particularly conscious of the vulnerable lives lived by our remaining wild creatures. The hare is an animal that has never been domesticated. It clings on, despite the destruction of the natural landscape. It is a symbol of beauty, resilience and survival against the odds. This experience has made me more hopeful about the possibility of finding a better balance between humans and nature, and the rewards for all of us if we can manage that.

How have you changed since you started writing the book?

I’d developed a bit of a carapace in order to cope with my work in politics. This experience has allowed me to shed that, and to live in a way that is truer to my own nature. It’s freed me up to be gentler, more patient and more attentive to my surroundings. I’m kinder to myself, and able to give more time to others.

What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?

Hares have the very rare ability to carry two separate pregnancies at the same time—a phenomenon known as superfetation. I had the privilege of watching this happen in real life. I then read every study I could find, to understand this extraordinary, and rather controversial, aspect of a hare’s biology. It was also very enjoyable simply trying to pin down the exact differences between rabbits and hares. Before I met the hare, I couldn’t have told you what those differences were, but there are a great many, since they are in fact different species.

Can you describe your book as an item on a menu?

I’d like to think that it would be something unpretentious, nourishing, warm and comforting. Something homemade, and simple. Freshly made bread, perhaps, with a touch of salt.

Photo of Chloe Dalton by Andrew Parsons.

Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Chloe Dalton shares how writing a memoir about raising a wild hare taught her to be true to her own nature.

Nonfiction Memoir

Joshua A. Miele on ‘Connecting Dots’

What do you love most about your memoir?

By nature, I tend to think more about the future than the past. While I’m conscious of my own history and narrative, I usually spend most of my energy thinking about the cool things I’d like to do and what comes next. Writing this book with [co-author] Wendell Jamieson has been an incredible opportunity to carefully consider the amazing people who have shaped my life—family, friends, collaborators and mentors—and to appreciate the cumulative impact of their invaluable support and encouragement.

What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?

Connecting Dots offers a fun, interesting and exciting ride for two specific sets of readers. I try to normalize and offer insights about blindness for the total newcomer, someone who knows nothing about blind people and who wants to learn more, from basics like Braille and cane use to how we use computers and raise children. At the same time, it’s crafted for folks who do have a connection to blindness and are curious about my life and work: my time at NASA, developing accessible mapping software, crowdsourcing audio description for YouTube and so on. Either sighted or blind, student or teacher, child or parent, consumer or designer, I think my story includes enough nuance and depth to be appreciated from almost any perspective.

At what point did you know this story was a book?

For the past 25 years, my friends have been encouraging me to write this book. While flattering, I had a hard time believing that it would be sufficiently meaningful to devote the kind of time and effort I knew a project like this would take. I also questioned whether I had made enough progress in my career to be memoir-worthy. With the recognition of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2021, and Wendell’s generous offer of partnership in the project, these objections seemed to have been largely addressed, and I was forced to admit to myself that the time for a book had finally come.

“I have always worried that my violent and traumatic origin story is a distraction from the important work I want the world to know about.”

What was the hardest memory to get on the page?

For most of my professional life, I’ve been trying to direct attention to my work in disability and disability inclusion, and away from my personal origin story: how I became blind. I have always worried that my violent and traumatic origin story is a distraction from the important work I want the world to know about. While the story of Connecting Dots focuses emphatically on “the important stuff”—blind identity, cool accessible technologies, inclusive design and even the arc of my blind life—completeness required us to include the story of how I got burned as a little kid. It was a challenge to cover these events while being neither dismissive nor sensational or maudlin. Ultimately, I think we got it just right.

Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?

One of the most delightful things that arose as we wrote was the strength and power of our collaboration. We kept our draft live in a Google doc, with Wendell drafting most sections from weekly interviews. I’d go in and edit, revise, trim and expand. Wendell would revise my revisions and I’d improve his updates. We were usually thrilled with the results. We would occasionally debate strenuously on one point or another, but always with respect and always ultimately finding a satisfactory resolution. Through this amazing partnership, I learned a lot about storytelling and I think Wendell learned a lot about disability, and he definitely learned a lot about me.

How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?

In addition to feeling optimistic that we’ve told an interesting, funny and engaging story, I hope this book has a positive influence on lives and the world. My ultimate mission is to normalize blindness and disability, to help move us a little further along the road of everyday, reasonable expectations and opportunities for people with disabilities. I hope to offer an example (or counterexample) for young blind people, parents of blind kids and blind parents, educators, designers, engineers and other shapers of our more-accessible future.

How have you changed since you started writing it?

I honestly think I’ve learned many things since starting the Connecting Dots project, but have changed very little. If I’ve changed, it’s to become more patient, more understanding of difference, better able to communicate with people holding opinions different from my own. These are not changes brought by the writing process, but the slow progression of age and maturity. It’s been a long road.

Read our review of ‘Connecting Dots’ by Joshua A. Miele.

What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?

Since Connecting Dots is a memoir, I had to do very little research; I consider myself a world expert on my own blind life. However, early in the writing, I constructed a simple timeline of my life that included dates and timespans for major life events, girlfriends, trips and places I lived. Most of it was easy, but reconstructing the early ’90s with a reasonable degree of accuracy was surprisingly difficult. Interestingly, there are also no photographs of me from this time period. Maybe it has a connection to the aliens that got the Mars Observer, or maybe it’s just a result of the college lifestyle I was living.

Can you describe your book as an item on a menu?

A robust and resilient blind life dressed in a lively, acidic and sweet disability-pride reduction, served with good and bad choices, mixed mature and immature romance, a sprig of accessible design and plenty of fresh Pacific oysters.

Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Joshua A. Miele wants his memoir to normalize blindness and disability, and inspire readers to shape a more accessible future.

Romance Contemporary Romance

How to have a work-life balance—when your work is also your life

Linda Holmes, author and host of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour,” wants to be clear that her third novel, Back After This, is not inspired by anyone she knows in real life. Well, except for the dog. “The Great Dane [Buddy] in the book is based on a real Great Dane that went to my dog’s day care who looks exactly like how the dog is described: giant black-and-white Great Dane and has a bandanna that says ‘Not a horse,’ ” she says, giving a shoutout to Buddy’s real-life inspiration, Jude.

As Back After This opens, podcast producer Cecily Foster has been dreaming of hosting her own show for ages. Her boss, Toby, has an idea that could be the key to bringing in revenue and staving off impending layoffs. The catch: It’s a dating show, and Cecily will be a host, but she’ll be paired with influencer-turned-dating coach Eliza Cassidy, who will set her up on a series of 20 blind dates, all of which will be recounted on-air. If Cecily plays ball, Toby will give her the chance to pitch a project she actually wants to host. But Eliza’s dating experiment might be doomed, as Cecily keeps running into the very cute Will and his dog, Buddy.

“My idea was to write the absolute most rom-com rom-com . . .”

“My idea was to write the absolute most rom-com rom-com, which is why it has these kinds of chance meetings,” Holmes explains. She cites the movie Serendipity, starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale, with its unbelievable chance encounters, and, naturally, the Nora Ephron classics. “The odds that these people would be in this position and bump into each other in the ways that they do are all very unlikely. But it’s amazing how much you will forgive when you like the characters and want good things for them.” (This writer was tempted to derail the conversation completely in favor of talking about favorite romantic comedies. Holmes also plugs the show Starstruck, about a regular woman who meets a movie star, in case any further recommendations are needed.)

There’s a cozy, anecdotal quality to Back After This, in which no one even comes close to being a truly Machiavellian villain. Instead, Holmes says she chooses to write about the way things are difficult even for people who are genuinely trying. Cecily’s boss and her jerk of an ex-boyfriend may do things that are at odds with Cecily’s goals, but their actions stem from trying to protect their own livelihoods and foster their careers. “And honestly, it’s less about those people than it is about people who try [but still] make errors, because that’s how an overwhelming majority of people are,” Holmes notes. Her characters feel very much like people you know: some acquaintance of your sister’s with a fascinating job, a best friend trying to determine the next step in their career or the cute neighbor down the street with the friendliest dog. How those people figure stuff out, how they move through their day-to-day moments, is what Holmes is most interested in.

Read our review of ‘Back After This’ by Linda Holmes.

While Eliza’s selections for the 20 first dates make sense on paper, very few grab Cecily’s attention enough to warrant a second one. “I think those dates are dealt with fairly quickly because they don’t make a huge impression on her,” Holmes explains. “If you’ve ever been on a so-so date . . . you struggle after the fact to remember the details because it’s all just small talk unless it sparks in some way.” Holmes admits she isn’t a huge believer in this kind of matchmaking, and that’s reflected in Cecily, who finds the setting of parameters, the guidance of a complete stranger and the revolving door of mediocre first dates to be lacking in the passion and spontaneity that she prefers.

Back After This by Linda Holmes book jacket

But Cecily’s biggest relationship, the one that looms even larger than her 20 dates and connection with Will, is the one she has with her job. She loves her work in audio production, but she’s consistently held back by the fact, as Holmes puts it, that she’s just too good at the position she’s in, and her boss couldn’t possibly lose her by promoting her. “On the one hand, she’s really revered at her job, but she also has no ability to choose what she’s going to do,” Holmes says. “It’s something that many people have seen and experienced, and it causes people to have a fracture at a job that they love because there’s nowhere for them to go here.”

Holmes explains that Back After This and its evolution was partly inspired by news of a round of layoffs at her own company and how she thought about work and its role in people’s lives and identity. Both Cecily and Will (who is a photographer but also works as a waiter) struggle with how integral their jobs have become to their identities. Separating from a workplace or career path that is really enjoyable, but cannot offer you the growth or opportunities you need, can feel just as bad as a breakup. “I have a particular hope that people who are in this extraordinarily difficult environment for media jobs feel like I understood some of that insecurity,” Holmes says, “and some of that feeling of your work is not your worth and your job is not the same thing as your work anyway.”

“I feel like I have writing down to something that terrifies me slightly less than it did when I started doing it.”

Despite having a third novel hitting shelves, Holmes laughs at the thought of having mastered the art of crafting, writing and editing. “I feel like I have writing down to something that terrifies me slightly less than it did when I started doing it. I do think I have reached a point where I’m a little better than I used to be at believing that I will eventually get it to come together,” she says, adding that she’s the kind of writer that will do several—and this is stressed—big plot changes while editing. Holmes reveals that in the first iteration of Back After This, the podcast with Eliza never even got made and the book focused more on the pre-launch preparation. “Do I have it down to a science? Absolutely not. I am a little better at not freaking out in the middle when I don’t know how we’re going to fix it,” she says, though quickly follows up with a laugh, “I don’t know. I’m probably lying and I’ll still freak out.”

While Holmes’ novels so far have skewed toward romance, a genre label that she welcomes with open arms, she describes her current writing project as more of a family story. “I think it will be fun . . . if I can figure it out,” she adds. Her readers trust and know she will, however many freak-outs aside. They are eager to take comfort in the little pockets and slices of life of her characters as, despite whatever difficulties they may face, they still find the courage to try.

Photo of Linda Holmes by Cassidy DuHon.

Linda Holmes’ slice-of-life romance Back After This explores the pitfalls of letting your job define you, even if you truly love it.

Nonfiction Memoir

Amanda Nguyen on ‘Saving Five’

What do you love most about your memoir?

The greatest thing I have ever written was my rights into existence. This is the second. It was healing to write it and I hope that readers will be able to heal a part of their soul while reading it too.

What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?

Anyone who has had to heal, is on their healing journey and wants to know how to change the world will enjoy the book. This book is a literal map of my healing journey; I hope it’s a useful blueprint for others to take their own journeys too.

At what point did you know this story was a book?

To be honest, I’ve always turned to writing to heal. But the moment I decided I could write was when I passed my United Nations General Assembly Resolution for survivors of sexual violence. It felt like a curse was breaking; I was on this runaway train for nearly a decade weaving justice out of my trauma. After having reached the highest levels of legislation by changing the world, it was time to write it down. As for the magical surrealism in the book, sometimes a story grips you and you have no choice but to tell it. I knew that when I arrived at the realms of grief. I’m grateful to FSG for honoring my artistic voice and granting me the ability to tell my story with both literal and emotional truth.

Read our review of ‘Saving Five’ by Amanda Nguyen.

What was the hardest memory to get on the page?

The hardest memories I had were when I revisited the state my mind was in, its desperate attempts to make sense of why those who hurt me did so. Spoiler: There is never enough reason to explain violence away. We create our own closure by creating our own justice and resilience.

Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?

Our younger selves have a distinct voice and a lot of wisdom to share. We all have lessons we can learn from our younger selves and from each stage of grief.

How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?

Writing is healing. I feel like I was able to thoroughly process my trauma, make sense of it, grieve it and now graduate from it.

How have you changed since you started writing it?

I feel braver. There were painful documents I hid in the back of shelves that I had to unearth in order to write the memoir. I’m proud that I’ve healed enough to work up the courage to dust them off, confront them, make sense of them and process them.

What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?

I looked up the statistics of how difficult it is to pass a federal law. If readers want to learn how to pass a bill, this is a step-by-step guide.

Can you describe your book as an item on a menu?

One serving of hope please!

Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Amanda Nguyen co-authored the Sexual Assault Survivor’s Rights Act after being raped at Harvard. Writing her memoir helped her heal.

Nonfiction Memoir

Bridgett M. Davis on ‘Love, Rita’

What do you love most about your memoir?

I love most that Love, Rita captures who my sister was as a woman who battled a chronic illness, while also revealing her complexity and fullness; I love that this memoir is a microcosm of shared life experiences for so many Black women and men. I love that Love, Rita includes 22 letters that Rita wrote to me throughout the years, which stitch together the story of us as sisters. I especially love that the book includes family photos. Most of all, I love that writing this memoir allowed me to be in an active relationship again with my sister, as a way to better understand who she was to me, and who I am without her.

What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?

I hope that all types of readers will find their way to this book and enjoy it. That said, I do feel that readers who may most enjoy Love, Rita are those who like reading stories about individual people defined and shaped by familial dynamics, but also by living in a particular time and place, i.e., personal narratives anchored by social history and cultural context. In addition, anyone who has battled a chronic illness or loved someone who has, anyone who has some experience with inherited and lived trauma will, I hope, find value in this book. Finally, because the book explores multiple losses, anyone who has lost a loved one and suffered through grief and mourning will hopefully appreciate my book’s exploration of that experience.

Read our review of ‘Love, Rita’ by Bridgett M. Davis.

At what point did you know this story was a book?

On what would’ve been my sister’s 65th birthday, I wrote a letter to her, and in it I explored some of the milestones in her life. That’s when I realized she’d lived through so many cultural touchstones; her life’s events were resonant beyond their individual impact on her, but also more broadly as markers of Black life from the mid-to-late 20th century. That’s when I committed to writing this memoir, with two goals in mind: To honor my sister, and to highlight what America’s structural racism looks like through the lens of a personal, lived experience.

What was the hardest memory to get on the page?

The hardest memory to capture on the page was the one that follows my sister’s final months of life, after she loses her battle with lupus: the day she dies.

Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?

As I wrote, I was surprised by how vivid and alive my sister felt to me again. I was surprised—even though it had been my goal—by how writing this story conjured her presence, made me feel close to her again, despite how long ago she died.

How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?

I’m greatly relieved to have gotten this story—which for so long felt too hard to write, yet consumed my consciousness—out of me; I feel liberated from this family narrative and the parts that saddened me, yet surprisingly comforted by the parts that lifted my heart. Now that it lives on the page, I feel proud of myself for facing my fears and writing the hard parts. Having done so is a major personal and creative triumph.

As I wrote, I was surprised by how vivid and alive my sister felt to me again.

How have you changed since you started writing it?

When I began writing, I still held some guilt over not being able to save my sister. That guilt has subsided now that I’ve written the book, because I’ve gained invaluable understanding and perspective. I’ve now honored her life. Not only has research and combing through personal archives made that possible, so has mining my memory and speaking to many people who knew and loved her. Because I understand more fully what Rita meant to me, and how she influenced who I’ve become, I can honor those parts of her that live in me. That’s new.

What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?

Because my sister attended Fisk University, I researched that particular historically Black college, which allowed me to learn about the institution’s fascinating history. I learned that not only did Nikki Giovanni and W.E.B. Du Bois graduate from Fisk, but the university has played a crucial role in Black and American history in myriad ways. Learning about Fisk’s story opened up a new, rich portal of Black culture for me.

Can you describe your book as an item on a menu?

Love, Rita is a delicious chicken shawarma with creamy garlic sauce. Not only was this one of my sister’s favorite meals at her favorite Middle Eastern restaurant in the Detroit area, La Shish, but it captures that combination of familiarity and comfort mixed with spiciness that embodied Rita’s personality. People love it. People loved her.

Photo of Bridgett M. Davis by Nina Subin.

Discover more great memoirs this Memoir March.

Writing a memoir about her late sister allowed Bridgett M. Davis to honor their relationship and find closure.

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Bridgett M. Davis on ‘Love, Rita’

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