S04.36: Jude Deveraux: Trailblazer
Our Trailblazer episodes continue this week with Jude Deveraux, an early historical romance author who broke several publishing barriers over her more than forty year career.
In this episode, we talk about her journey through the Wild West of romance in the late 1970s, her publishing career at Avon Books, Pocket Books and Ballantine. We talk about the judgement and misogyny that circles romance, the buying power of readers, and the way the genre and bookselling has changed. We also talk about her writing process, and what it’s like to be Jude Deveraux. This one is a real joy for us, as we wouldn’t be the readers or writers we are without Jude Deveraux.
This episode is sponsored by Avon Books, publisher of Joanna Shupe’s The Bride Goes Rogue, and Amazon’s Kindle Vella, publisher of Eloisa James’s The Seduction Series.
Show Notes
Like many of our trailblazers, Jude Deveraux’s first brush with romance was Kathleen E Woodiwiss’s The Flame & the Flower. The publisher with “the prettiest covers” in the 1970s she references was Woodiwiss’s publisher, Avon Books.
Books of Jude Deveraux’s that we talk about in depth include: The Enchanted Land (her debut novel), A Knight in Shining Armor (early time-travel romance), Sweet Liar, The Providence Falls series with Tara Sheets, The Girl from Summer Hill, Twin of Ice (the twins!!), and “The Matchmakers” a short story in The Invitation collection (featuring Cale & the angel sex scene).
The Four Js were Jude Deveraux, Julie Garwood, Johanna Lindsey and Judith McNaught.
People mentioned in the episode: Kate Duffy, editor at Silhouette Books and Pocket Books; Joan Schulhafer, publicist at Pocket Books; Richard Gallen, publisher & packager; Ronald Busch, publisher of Pocket Books; Robert Gottlieb, agent; Linda Marrow, editor at Ballantine/Doubleday/Dell; Kathryn Falk, publisher of Romantic Times Magazine; Kathe Robin, reviewer at Romantic Times Magazine.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Avon Books, publisher of Joanna Shupe’s The Bride Goes Rogue, available at
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo or your local independent bookseller.
Visit avonbooks.com
and
Amazon’s Kindle Vella, publisher of Eloisa James’s The Seduction series,
available at amazon.com/kindlevella.
S04.27: Nine Questions about Nine Rules
It’s a Very Special Episode™️ of Fated Mates today, celebrating the rerelease of Sarah’s first book, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake! We talk about the book that started Sarah’s romance career, about why it still resonates, about new covers during a pandemic, and yes…we get to the bottom of the age old question: Will Benedick Ever Get a Book?
You can buy the new Nine Rules at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and get signed copies at WORD.
This episode is sponsored by Adriana Herrera, author of The Duke Makes Me Feel and The Romancelandia Shop.
Our read along next week is Diana Quincy’s Her Night With the Duke, which was on our Best of 2020 year-end list! Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, or at your local bookstore. You can also get it in audio from Chirp Books!
Show Notes
This tweet about Car Talk made Jen laugh. It really was the greatest NPR show of all time, and since they are no dummies, they have in fact made it into a podcast.
Buy the books with stepbacks now, because we aren’t sure how long they are going to last. Lots of folks participate in #StepbackSaturday on Twitter and Instagram to share their favorites.
Sarah's agent at the time was Alyssa Eisner-Henkin, who is still a great YA and children's agent!
Sarah's editor is still Carrie Feron, who has edited romance for her entire career. Authors she has edited include Lisa Kleypas, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Sally Thorne, Jude Deveraux, Elizabeth Lowell and Eloisa James.
The name of the documentary about romance is called Love Beneath the Covers (2016), which is a fascinating look at the romance genre.
Where's My Hero is a romance anthology that featured some of the good guys, and it's available in eBook and print.
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Adriana Herrera, author of The Duke Makes Me Feel, available at
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo
Visit Adriana at adrianaherreraromance.com
and
The Romancelandia Shop, where romance lovers can find stickers, pins, notecards and more.
Use the code FATEDMATES at checkout for a free Fated Mates sticker!
S04.11: Vincent Virga: Trailblazer
This week, we’re continuing our Trailblazer episodes with Vincent Virga—author of the Gaywyck trilogy, the first m/m gothic romance, and one of the first m/m romances ending with a happily ever after.
He talks about writing gay romance and about the way reading about love and happiness changes readers lives. He also shares rich, wonderful stories about his vibrant life as a picture editor in publishing, about the literary set in New York City in the 70s and 80s, about writing during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, about the times in a writer’s life when the words don’t come easily, and about the times when they can’t be stopped.
We are honored and so grateful that Vincent took the time to speak with us, and we hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.
There’s still time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2021 Book Pack from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, and get eight of the books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and other swag! Order the book box as soon as you can to avoid supply chain snafus.
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Our next read-alongs will be the Tiffany Reisz Men at Work series, which is three holiday themed category romances. Read one or all of them: Her Halloween Treat, Her Naughty Holiday and One Hot December.
Show Notes
Welcome Vincent Virga, author of Gaywyck, the first gay gothic romance, and one of the earliest gay romances with a happily ever after. It was published by Avon in 1980. He has written several other novels, including Vadriel Vail and A Comfortable Corner. He was also the premier picture editor in the book industry. He has been with his partner, author James McCourt, author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz, for 56 years. Their collected papers are housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Today is the 41st anniversary of The Ramrod Massacre in New York City, where Vernon Kroening and Jorg Wenz were killed. Six other men were shot and injured inside the bar or on the streets near the Ramrod.
Author Malinda Lo and Librarian Angie Manfredi sound the warning bell about the fights that we are facing around access to books and libraries and calls for book banning happening all around the country. Here is what you can do to help support your local library. Check out Runforsomething.net for ideas about local races where you live.
Want more Vincent in your life? Here is a great interview from 2019 on a blog called The Last Bohemians, and this 2011 interview on Live Journal.
Daisy Buchanan cries that she's never seen such beautiful shirts in The Great Gatsby, and We Get Letters is a song from the Perry Como show.
People Vincent mentioned: Susan Sontag, Maria Callas, opera singer Victoria de los Ángeles, editor Elaine Markson, Jane Fonda, Armistead Maupin, poets John Ashbery and James Merrill, Hillary and Bill Clinton, editor Alice Mayhew, Gwen Edelman at Avon Books, Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse, publisher Bob Wyatt, John Ehrlichman from Watergate, author Colm Tóibín, poet Mark Doty, Truman Capote, poet and translator Richard Howard, Shelley Winters, John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, and Kim Novak.
The museum Vincent was a part of in County Mayo, Ireland, is The Jackie Clarke Collection.
The twisty turny secret book that made him a lover of Gothics was Wilkie Collins's Woman in White. Vincent is also a lover of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and Henry Bellamann's King's Row.
A few short pieces abaout the AIDS epidemic: the impact of the epidemic on survivors in the queer community, and how the American government ignored the crisis.
A transcript (genrerated by a human!) can be found at the bottom of this page.
Vincent Virga 0:00 / #
Genres have no gender, really. I mean, if you look at them closely the mysteries revolve around behavior and in Jane Eyre, the wonder of Jane Eyre, is the book is about finding out that I am my own person. When Jane says, "I can take care of myself", the book was banned. The book was condemned in pulpits. The book is considered revolutionary art because "I can take care of myself."
Sarah MacLean 0:43 / #
That was the voice of Vincent Virga, the author of Gaywyck, which is the first modern male/male gothic romance published by Avon in 1980.
Jennifer Prokop 0:53 / #
This is an amazing conversation.
Sarah MacLean 0:56 / #
Oh, it's so good. It's so good.
Jennifer Prokop 0:59 / #
Every conversation we have had has been so different and so varied, but talking to Vincent, who was really writing a romance kind of outside of the romance community and also outside of the literary community, but deeply rooted in the gay community, makes for a really interesting conversation. He is going to talk about his lifelong relationship with his partner, Jimmy.
Sarah MacLean 1:28 / #
Jimmy. Hey Jimmy! We love you.
Jennifer Prokop 1:30 / #
We love Jimmy. We've never met Jimmy but we love Jimmy a lot.
Sarah MacLean 1:34 / #
Look, I have plans. (laughs)
Jennifer Prokop 1:35 / #
Yes. He's going to talk about the experience of writing Gaywyck, of living through the AIDS epidemic in the '80s, about life in New York, and learning what it meant to be part of a literary culture that most of America had turned its back on.
Sarah MacLean 1:52 / #
Also about what's underneath Hilary Clinton's bed.
Jennifer Prokop 1:55 / #
Vincent's stories are unbelievable. The people he has known, the people he has met, the stories that he's going to tell, but most of all, his commitment to really making a space for queer, young people to see themselves in a happily ever after.
Sarah MacLean 2:14 / #
This one's fabulous. You're going to love it. Welcome everyone to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels, and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 2:24 / #
And I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor. Without further ado, here is our conversation with Vincent Virga.
Sarah MacLean 2:33 / #
Thank you so much for joining us on Fated Mates.
Vincent Virga 2:37 / #
It's been quite an adventure for me.
Sarah MacLean 2:40 / #
Tell us why.
Vincent Virga 2:41 / #
Because I haven't revisited Gaywyck, actually revisited it, since 2000. When it was reprinted in this edition with a hideous cover by Alyson books.
Jennifer Prokop 2:57 / #
Oh, sure.
Vincent Virga 2:57 / #
And with that edition, I wrote an afterword, explaining how the book happened. And essentially, as I say in that piece, my memory works visually. All of my information is stored in my memory visually. I'm totally visually literate. So basically when I think about the beginning of Gaywyck, where was I when I started it. I see myself, literally I see myself sitting in a house. Big house. On a hill. In Shinnecock. Which is the first town and the beginning of the Hamptons.
Vincent Virga 3:47 / #
Long Island splits at Hampton Bays and the east end begins at Shinnecock. And so I'm sitting in this house on a hill, and the question is, how did I get there? And that's where my partner, Jimmy McCourt comes in. We've been together 56 years. And he basically has flawless recall. So our pal Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography, she invented this phrase called "time's relentless melt." That is the history of me.
Jennifer Prokop 4:26 / #
Me too.
Sarah MacLean 4:28 / #
Same thing. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 4:28 / #
It's interesting, isn't it?
Jennifer Prokop 4:29 / #
My best friend is my own memory. I'll call her and be like, "Okay, so how did that happen again?" And she remembers, which is very nice.
Vincent Virga 4:36 / #
Yes. Well, I also would be great for you, because I remember how it happened. But you can't ask me, "When did that happen?" So essentially I walk in and I say, "Jimmy, when did this happen?" I said, "I remember I'm sitting in this house, and you went down to get the mail." And it was high on a hill. So he went down on a bike, and then he was coming up on a bike shouting, shouting at the top of his lungs, "I have a letter from Maria Callas."
Sarah MacLean 5:11 / #
Maria Callas the opera singer?
Sarah MacLean 5:15 / #
Okay. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 5:15 / #
Maria Callas. And then out he shouted (singing in the style of Maria from West Side Story), "Maria! Maria!" (laughter) Now Jimmy had published, this is 1975, so Jimmy had published his first book, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, which got stupendous, stupendous reviews. And basically, it was the first book to be published by New York Review Books of a living author.
Vincent Virga 5:16 / #
And I was sitting on the hill in Shinnecock because I had just been fired by the New York Review of Books. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 5:44 / #
I was the only person they have ever fired. And they fired me because I had been causing trouble. It's a long story, but I had been causing trouble. So they fired me. A client making some really absurd, absurd claim. However, they paid me unemployment. And so there I was, it was summer. I hate the summer. My whole life after being fired was based on getting out of the city and the heat. In fact, my whole career is freelance. And so I went out, Lenny, a friend of mine, gave us this house. And so there I am, 1975, Jimmy's got his letter from Maria, which was actually a fan letter.
Jennifer Prokop 6:35 / #
She was his fan?
Sarah MacLean 6:36 / #
Imagine getting a fan letter from Maria Callas!
Vincent Virga 6:39 / #
She was his fan. He adored her. But also, her colleague was Victoria de los Ángeles, one of the great opera singers from that period. And she, she has a great La Bohème and great Madame Butterfly recordings, and basically, Jimmy was 10 at the Metropolitan Opera, his mother took him. They'd been going because a friend had a box, and they would go on Saturday. He was 10. And he was really not very happy with most of the operas, but suddenly, there was the Marriage of Figaro. And there was Victoria de Los Ángeles. And when it was over, Jimmy said to his mother, "I want to meet her." So they went backstage, and this little guy with these big glasses, began to talk to her. And that was the beginning of the most profound friendship. Jimmy and Victoria. And when I joined, and me, we would travel around Europe with her, going to her recitals, going to her performances, being backstage and it was a truly great adventure. And that is basically how we got to Ireland, but that's later. So here I am, on the hill. And at this point you see, I had been, had access to publishing houses because the first chapter of Jimmy's Mawrdew was published in 1971. In the New American Review 13 it was the cover story. And we actually came home from London because Jimmy got a telegram from Ted Solartaroff saying Mawrdew Czgowchwz dazzling. So we came home and I went with him and we met the team at Simon and Schuster.
Sarah MacLean 6:47 / #
This is like the good old days of publishing.
Jennifer Prokop 7:40 / #
I know.
Sarah MacLean 7:48 / #
Get a telegram.
Vincent Virga 7:53 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 7:54 / #
Fly home to New York to meet Simon and Schuster.
Vincent Virga 8:16 / #
That's exactly right. And we met Ted Solartaroff.
Sarah MacLean 8:26 / #
Vincent, in my life, I have never seen a telegram from my publisher, and I object. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 8:46 / #
Actually, Jimmy received that one and Jane Fonda, when I was working with her on her books, I was a picture editor, she would send me telegrams.
Sarah MacLean 8:55 / #
It was so civilized.
Vincent Virga 8:56 / #
It was absolutely tops civilized and so thrilling! I mean there we were zooming home for New American Review. And then the book was sold by Jimmy's agent, Elaine Markson, to Simon and Schuster. And while I was there I met the team, as I said, Rhoma Mostel and Gypsy Da Silva. Now, this is important, because Simon and Schuster at that point was publishing all of these gothic romances and I said to them -
Sarah MacLean 9:30 / #
Wait, I'm gonna stop.
Sarah MacLean 9:31 / #
At this point were you reading these gothic romances? Or were they just sort of -
Vincent Virga 9:35 / #
I loved the form, but I was not reading the the new ones. My gothic romance is what Jane Eyre -
Jennifer Prokop 9:43 / #
Frankenstein.
Vincent Virga 9:44 / #
Wuthering Heights. Frankenstein. Absolutely! And also Wilkie Collins The Woman in White.
Vincent Virga 9:51 / #
The secret in Wilkie Collins, I used to say, it's worth killing for. I would kill if that were my secret. So that when I was completing Gaywyck, I kept writing new endings until I had an ending, a secret that I would kill for.
Sarah MacLean 10:10 / #
Ohhh! That's great!
Vincent Virga 10:10 / #
There are basically three endings to Gaywyck.
Sarah MacLean 10:14 / #
Okay. Because that really is the cornerstone of the good Gothic, that there is a twist at the end. There's a -
Vincent Virga 10:21 / #
A real -
Sarah MacLean 10:22 / #
And you don't see it coming.
Vincent Virga 10:24 / #
Absolutely. So I began reading them. I would send them to my mother. And once I was out there, and I picked up, I think it was Cashelmara, or it was one of them, a mega bestseller! And I'm reading this puppy, and all of a sudden I discovered that the secret wasn't a crazy wife in the attic. (laughter) The secret was actually, the secret was the husband was a closet faggot. That was the secret. So the wife would swoon, faint, and then she would fall into the arms of her best friend who would say, "I never liked that guy." And so that's how they ended. And that, that became a form.
Sarah MacLean 11:20 / #
So that became a secret that you saw many times, over and over again.
Vincent Virga 11:24 / #
Over and over again.
Vincent Virga 11:25 / #
And I couldn't believe it! I thought this is totally unacceptable! And meanwhile my mother's reading this and meanwhile I'm living with Jimmy. And I'm thinking to myself, this is absolutely hideous. And at that point, I had not come out.
Sarah MacLean 11:40 / #
Vincent, I want to come back to that, but also, can you give us a sense of time at this point? What year are we in?
Vincent Virga 11:45 / #
We're in 1972 when New American Review 1973 -
Jennifer Prokop 11:51 / #
That's when I was born, Vincent. I just want to - (laughter) You know what, because I'm usually the oldest person on these calls. So I just want to enjoy being like, I'm the young one now. I'm the young one.
Vincent Virga 12:01 / #
Yes, yes. I just joined 79 and Jimmy just joined 80.
Sarah MacLean 12:05 / #
So this is the mid '70s, and Jen has just been born, which is the most important part of that! (laughter) You were saying you had not come out yet.
Vincent Virga 12:15 / #
I had not come out! I would visit my mother and my father and they would say to me, "Who's watching the cat?"
Vincent Virga 12:21 / #
I would say, "I live with Jimmy." And I kept saying that we met in 1964 at Yale Graduate School and basically, "I'm living with Jimmy!" And they would look at me and nod, and they never computed. So basically I thought, "I have to deal with this at some point." And I'm reading these books and my hair is on fire. I'm thinking this is disgusting! So there I am, in the house on the hill, and I'm reading Lolita. I'm reading Lolita and I thought to myself, "This could be a boy." And then the next thought was, "If Shakespeare had a sister, why can't Jane Eyre have a brother, John? And that was the point when I thought genres have no gender, really.
Jennifer Prokop 13:19 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 13:20 / #
I mean if you look at them closely, the mysteries revolve around behavior. And in Jane Eyre, the wonder of Jane Eyre, is the book is about finding out that I am my own person. When Jane says, "I can take care of myself" the book was banned. The book was condemned in pulpits. The book is considered revolutionary art because "I can take care of myself." So basically that became the basis of this, and also the other basis was Rochester has to go blind in order to see the truth. I began to think about my boy, my narrator, and it all sort of came together pretty fast. Too fast. Because I settled in and I began to write very quickly. Now I don't how to write a novel. I never knew how to write a novel, but I knew what novels were. I had been reading them since I was very, very young. I started reading when I was five and basically, I started reading stories. And then in grammar school I was reading novels. I was reading Dickens. And I remember in the 10th grade, Miss Marsh, was a genius of a teacher, she assigned Jane Eyre. And then she assigned Vanity Fair, which I adored. But while other kids in my class were bored, I went on to read all of Brontë. And I went on to read all of Thackeray. And so when I later discovered Wilkie Collins, I read all of Wilkie Collins. And essentially that's a lot of books. And the same with Dickens. And so when I realized that I wanted to write a book, I said to Jimmy, "I think I want to write a book." And Jimmy said to me, "What took you so long?"
Jennifer Prokop 15:44 / #
Awww. (laughs)
Sarah MacLean 15:45 / #
What a good dude! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 15:47 / #
What took you so long? And also, we had a joke. VIrginia Woolf said, "You shouldn't start writing until you're 33." I was 33.
Vincent Virga 15:56 / #
It was perfect. I mean, the gods were all ordaining this.
Jennifer Prokop 15:59 / #
Did you read pulp? Was there fiction that featured gay characters at all? Or were you really steeped in these classics?
Vincent Virga 16:07 / #
I was steeped in the classics. And when, and remember now, we're talking 1970, and so I was pretty much reading the classics. And also, I'd never been to a gay bar. I mean I met Jimmy in New Haven, and I never went to a gay bar. And so basically I was reading the classics. And in fact, I wanted to become an academic. And Jimmy wanted to become an academic. Actually, he was in a PhD program at NYU, which he thought was, "This, this is the end of my life! This is so boring!" And so he announced that he was leaving NYU, that he was going to Yale Graduate School of Drama to find a husband. (laughter) That's what he told all of his friends. That was the reason he went to Yale. And so -
Sarah MacLean 17:00 / #
And it worked! And look at this!
Vincent Virga 17:02 / #
It did work! He also brought, in the beginning of the term, all of his gay friends from Manhattan. So basically, it was a total revelation to me. These queens were swanning around and they were laughing. They were all opera mavens,, and they would sit down at the piano and make up operas and it was a whole other realm for me. And so no, I didn't read pulps, I mean, I read Dragonwyck. I also must tell you my mother's, when she was young, she worked in publishing at Macmillan. So the house in Manhattan, and then the house, the apartment in Manhattan, and the house on Long Island was floor-to-ceiling books. And they were all bestsellers. So there were things like, you know, Kings Row, which in fact, I've just re-read. I love those mega best sellers!
Sarah MacLean 18:02 / #
That's the thing, right? Those mega best sellers feel - there's a reason why they are best sellers.
Vincent Virga 18:08 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 18:08 / #
They appeal to a really intense of storytelling that we all have.
Vincent Virga 18:14 / #
Absolutely. So there I am, you know, reading Thackeray, and when I was in college, my professor assigned Clarissa.
Vincent Virga 18:26 / #
Clarissa. And so I went to the bookstore, and there was this tiny paperback called Clarissa, and also, it had in big letters on the back, "Abridged." And I remember thinking, "I don't think so." (laughter) So I went to the library, and I said to the librarian, who knew me at that point, and I said to the librarian, "I have to read Clarissa. I want to read the whole thing. Do you have the whole thing?" And he went into the back, and he came back carrying these three tomes.
Sarah MacLean 18:58 / #
Giant books! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 18:59 / #
The three volumes of Clarissa. And he said to me, "No one has checked this book out -
Sarah MacLean 19:07 / #
(laughing) No one has ever read -
Vincent Virga 19:08 / #
"For 100 years. This book has been here for 100 years, and no one has ever read the whole thing." So that basically tells you, you know, what I was like with my reading. And I think that's why I said in the beginning, "I don't know how to write novels, but I know what they are" So that when I read them -
Sarah MacLean 19:31 / #
The instinct is hardwired.
Vincent Virga 19:32 / #
Hardwired, not only with Clarissa, but also with Kings Row.
Sarah MacLean 19:36 / #
Mmmhmm.
Vincent Virga 19:37 / #
You know, and the whole idea of telling a story, and also I grew up in the movies, essentially. I mean, I was, I think I was four when I was taken to the Wizard of Oz. And so the movies, I became obsessed with the movies and I grew up literally in the movies.
Vincent Virga 19:57 / #
The narrative, visual narrative, and of course now when I look back, I realized that it was helping me develop my visual sensibility.
Vincent Virga 20:07 / #
And as Gaywyck, the first draft, I put it aside and I'm thinking, "Oy. I have to let this sit." And so I started a novel called The Comfortable Corner. And I started writing The Comfortable Corner, and I actually, over the next, I think, two years, completed the first draft of that and then I went back to Gaywyck, and I did the second and third draft of Gaywyck, but I must tell you, from the beginning, I knew that it was a game. I knew. I knew that I was going to take lines from the great novels and the great movies.
Sarah MacLean 20:48 / #
Am I wrong in thinking that it begins with this echo of Rebecca? Like, "Last night I dreamed I was at Manderley again."
Vincent Virga 20:54 / #
That's right, exactly. Exactly. So the game begins. I, throughout the book, at one point, when he has all of these, he gets all of these clothes from Donna, when he picks up all these shirts, and he says, "I've never seen so many beautiful shirts." That's probably the most famous one. That's also a key, it gives things away. And at one point, he says, "No one's ever called me "Darling" before." And that's Bette Davis and Now, Voyagers. So there are dozens of them.
Sarah MacLean 21:21 / #
I love that. I mean and that's why it's so appealing because when you think about the great romance novels, there is something that echoes media and pop culture and -
Vincent Virga 21:31 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 21:32 / #
And culture writ large.
Vincent Virga 21:33 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 21:33 / #
And that's why we love, we did a whole episode on retellings of Fated Mates and -
Sarah MacLean 21:39 / #
There's such an appeal to retellings because we know the story, and also we like the game, as you call it.
Vincent Virga 21:45 / #
Yes, it's the game, and I think when the book came out and was reviewed by Armistead Maupin, he said, he goes on and on with such delight, the tone is perfect, and the last line is, "I wonder if Robert and Donough saw Judy at Carnegie Hall?" (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 22:06 / #
Perfect! Ohhh! Did you frame it on your wall?
Vincent Virga 22:08 / #
And then he says, "Read the son of a bitch."
Jennifer Prokop 22:12 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 22:13 / #
"You'll love it!"
Vincent Virga 22:14 / #
And that became the key word. And when I was re-reading it now, I though of Armistead and I thought to myself, "Yeah, I get it." I really like this book.
Sarah MacLean 22:27 / #
Yeah, it's really fun!
Vincent Virga 22:28 / #
I really like this book!
Jennifer Prokop 22:29 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 22:29 / #
And I read the son of a bitch! (laughter) And I loved it!
Vincent Virga 22:34 / #
So essentially, I'm here today with this sense of celebration. And it's delightful to me that I'm now getting all of these, I'm getting all these fan emails from people of all ages again. And there's a question you ask, and I want to tell you, first of all, I had no community. None.
Sarah MacLean 23:02 / #
And that is the thing that we talk about, is the question that we ask all the time, who was your community? So -
Vincent Virga 23:07 / #
I had no community as a writer. None. Also, Jimmy's success, you know, he was published by Knopf, his books got fabulous reviews. And it brought me into a very high voltage literary community in Manhattan. And I, when Gaywyck was published, I didn't really care. I did my job, and it got wonderful reviews, and people were reading it, but that community, that community, it became their dirty secret.
Sarah MacLean 23:43 / #
Very familiar.
Vincent Virga 23:44 / #
So I would go to these events and John Ashbery would come up to me and tell me, "I love your book." And I remember Tim Duclos calling me over and saying (in a whisper), "I love your book. It really shocks me how much I love your book."
Sarah MacLean 23:59 / #
Oh, that's my favorite. "It shocks me. I couldn't believe it was good." (laughter)
Vincent Virga 24:02 / #
No, they couldn't believe it, and it was this game. And there I was, and I remember being at a party at James Merrill's house and him saying, "My nephew says Gaywyck saved his life. He was in the most profound despair and he read Gaywyck."
Sarah MacLean 24:23 / #
So before we go much further down this, people reading the book, can we talk a little bit about how the book came to be?
Sarah MacLean 24:31 / #
It's written. You've edited it. Where does it go from there?
Vincent Virga 24:34 / #
No, no.
Vincent Virga 24:35 / #
No, no. I wrote it, and Jimmy's editor, Elaine Markson, read it and loved it. And she said to me, "I will sell this book. This is unique. It's actually beautifully written. And I love this book!" So she sent it around. She sent it to Knopf. She sent it to all her friends and it was rejected. Boing, boing, boing, boing, boing. She gathered 35 rejections. At this point I had this huge career in publishing as a picture person. Eventually, I'm the only person who ever researched, edited, designed and cached picture sections. The last couple of books I did were by the Clintons. I did Hillary's book, Bill's book. I've got an eight page resume, 163 books, right. So this is also going on, and my mentor is Michael Korda, who is the head of publishing at Simon and Schuster, and Elaine sent it to everybody. Everybody.
Sarah MacLean 25:38 / #
Were the rejections because it was happily ever after? Was it because it was Gothic? Was because it was gay?
Vincent Virga 25:43 / #
I think it was gay, and no one could cope with it. They couldn't figure out what was I doing defiling this genre that was making fortunes for them. And meanwhile, I'm taking the villain and making him the hero?
Sarah MacLean 25:59 / #
I love it!
Vincent Virga 26:00 / #
So essentially -
Jennifer Prokop 26:01 / #
What are you? Milton?
Vincent Virga 26:03 / #
Exactly! And they could not cope. So Simon and Schuster, I worked with all of them, and one of the great divas was named Alice Mayhew. She did the Woodward Bernstein books. I mean, she was the great diva of the political book. I did many, many books with her. Her assistant was a woman named Gwen Edelman. okay? When Gwen left Alice, she went to Avon books.
Sarah MacLean 26:33 / #
To this point, Avon books is not a part of HarperCollins. It's a pulp publisher.
Vincent Virga 26:39 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 26:39 / #
And they do mass market reprints and pulp fiction -
Vincent Virga 26:43 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 26:43 / #
And just for the last few years, have been doing paperback originals like -
Sarah MacLean 26:50 / #
Rosemary Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss.
Sarah MacLean 26:53 / #
And those kind of big romance names.
Vincent Virga 26:56 / #
Yes, all the romances. So I sent it to Gwen, and she called me and she said, "I love this, but I can't publish this book." And I remembered Gwen was a friend, when we were in East Hampton, where we went every summer to get away from the heat. And it was also East Hampton BC: East Hampton before computers.
Sarah MacLean 27:24 / #
No helicopters flying back.
Vincent Virga 27:26 / #
No. Absolutely. And Gwen's daddy, owned what we in the romance novel realm would call, "an estate."
Sarah MacLean 27:37 / #
(laughter) I'm for it.
Vincent Virga 27:38 / #
So essentially, and we were on different sides of the highway. He was south of the highway. I was north of the highway, but my neighbor -
Sarah MacLean 27:47 / #
East egg and West Egg,
Jennifer Prokop 27:49 / #
Yeah, right! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 27:49 / #
Right. And my neighbor was Gwen Verdon, whom I worshipped! I mean the first musical I ever saw as a kid was Redhead, she and Bob Fosse. And she was my neighbor. So basically, it was, that was East Hampton, you know. So Gwen came to see me, and she sat down, and she said to me, "I have to tell you, I really love this book. And I'm so sorry, I can't publish it." And I said, "Why can't you publish it?" And Gwen said to me, "Gay people don't want romance."
Sarah MacLean 28:22 / #
Why wouldn't you know that, Vincent? (laughter)
Vincent Virga 28:25 / #
Gay people don't want romance and obviously I wouldn't know that because I wrote this book called Gaywyck. And had I known that I wouldn't have written that book. And it was also one of the reasons it had been rejected by everybody. Gay people don't want romance.
Sarah MacLean 28:37 / #
What nonsense!
Vincent Virga 28:38 / #
I said to Gwen, "Gwennie, you've known me and Jimmy for years. Years! You know, you know our lives. You've been with us at parties. You've been with us at dinner. You know, you know our lives, Gwen. In fact, you even know I came out in Paris. What is more romantic than coming out in Paris?"
Jennifer Prokop 29:03 / #
Nothing.
Vincent Virga 29:04 / #
So she said to me, "I live over a leather bar in the West Village." And she said to me, "I know gay people don't want romance."
Sarah MacLean 29:15 / #
Because of the leather bar in the West Village?
Vincent Virga 29:17 / #
The leather bar. Because she's in the West Village and all she saw -
Sarah MacLean 29:20 / #
That's the source she's citing.
Vincent Virga 29:22 / #
She only saw cruising. She only saw New York City in that period of time. Pre AIDS and she only saw that. That's all that she knew about the gay community. So basically I said, "Gwen, look at Jimmy and me as I said." And she said, "Right." So she went back and she presented the book to Bob Wyatt, who is gay. (laughter) He was the publisher. And so he loved it! And so they said, "Yes, they loved it." They loved it. The only caveat they had was I had to change the title. [AD BREAK]
Sarah MacLean 30:07 / #
So the original title was Gaywyck? Or -
Sarah MacLean 30:51 / #
Gaywyck. They said, "You have to change the title." And I said, "But it's a game, you know. Dragonwyck. It's a game. This is all part of the game." "No, no, no no. We want something more in the romantic line."
Jennifer Prokop 32:00 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 32:01 / #
So I started. I started making these lists of romantic titles and when our papers went to Yale, to the Beinecke Library, I scooped up everything that had to do with Gaywyck, all the different drafts, everything. And that list is there.
Jennifer Prokop 32:16 / #
Oh, wow.
Sarah MacLean 32:17 / #
You've got to get it back!
Vincent Virga 32:19 / #
I wish I could remember what they were.
Sarah MacLean 32:21 / #
Attention Yale University. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 32:24 / #
When I was reading, someone, two summers ago, someone got a scholarship to go work with Jimmy's papers at Yale for his PhD. And he also went through my diaries because they're all there. Everything is there. Jimmy still shocked by everything. It was the perfect way to clean out in New York City apartment. And my sister's -
Jennifer Prokop 32:45 / #
(laughing) You're like, "Yale, would you like my things?"
Sarah MacLean 32:46 / #
(laughing) "Do you want my paper?"
Vincent Virga 32:48 / #
Everything went to Yale. Every single thing. And so I tried and I tried, meanwhile thinking, "Ugh, I can't bear changing the title of this book. I just can't bear it." And so then they created the cover.
Sarah MacLean 33:02 / #
Which is -
Vincent Virga 33:02 / #
And of course the cover -
Sarah MacLean 33:03 / #
It's stunning!
Vincent Virga 33:04 / #
It's flawless! Stunning!
Sarah MacLean 33:06 / #
It's stunning. The first time I ever saw it I gasped out loud.
Vincent Virga 33:09 / #
Yeah, me too.
Sarah MacLean 33:09 / #
And then I called Avon and I was like, "How do I get a copy of this?" The answer was, "You can't have one." (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 33:19 / #
That's fine.
Vincent Virga 33:19 / #
It's intriguing, intriguing, intriguing, because people, when they got out into the bookstores, it was mistaken for a straight romantic novel.
Jennifer Prokop 33:29 / #
Ohhh.
Sarah MacLean 33:29 / #
Because it looks just like all the other gothics, which is how it should look.
Vincent Virga 33:33 / #
Absolutely.
Sarah MacLean 33:33 / #
It's how it should look. House on the hill. Brooding men.
Vincent Virga 33:36 / #
And at first glance - Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jennifer Prokop 33:39 / #
Crashing waves.
Vincent Virga 33:40 / #
Right! It was perfect. I loved it. And so out it went into the world. And then bookstores started to put warnings on it.
Vincent Virga 33:49 / #
Saying you need to know this is a gay gothic, a gay romance. And one of my clients, my picture editing clients, at that point was John Ehrlichman from the Watergate years. And I loved him. And I would come home and say things to Jimmy like, "Oh god, John Ehrlichman is a sweetie!" And Jimmy would say, "Get a grip!" And so basically -
Sarah MacLean 34:15 / #
(laughing) John Ehrlichman, about to go to jail!
Vincent Virga 34:17 / #
Actually, yes! And what happened was when I read his manuscript, he went to jail! And when I read his manuscript and said, "John, you told me everything, but you don't tell me why you went to jail." And so he wrote a chapter Why I Went to Jail. So he and I became really good friends. And he read Gaywyck, and he loved it. And when he went out on the road, he would call me and he would say, "I'm in Oklahoma. I'm in Mississippi. I'm in bookstores selling my book, and I'm asking them why they don't have Gaywyck, and many of them do have Gaywyck." And then he went to Texas, and he called me and he said, "I was just in a bookstore in Texas, and that that bookstore has a bullet hole in the window, which was put into Gaywyck!"
Sarah MacLean 34:59 / #
(gasps)
Jennifer Prokop 35:00 / #
Hmm. Wow.
Vincent Virga 35:02 / #
We mustn't forget this.
Jennifer Prokop 35:04 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 35:05 / #
Mustn't forget this. The night of my party, my Gaywyck party in 1980 November, was the night of the Ramrod Massacre. And I know it happened because we were at my party at Lane's West Village apartment and we heard gunshots.
Vincent Virga 35:24 / #
And then we heard police. So we must not ever forget this. And then I went out on my tour. And I was, I was invited to meet the editor. He was Brent Harris. He loved the book. I went to see him, but before I got in the house, I got a phone call, telling me he was very sick. He was dying. And he was, in fact, I would be the last person he would be seeing before he went into this hospice. And when I got there, he loved the book and he loved Mawrdew. And so we were talking about that, he loved Callas, he loved Victoria. And we got all engaged with all of this stuff. So my short visit became hours. And while we were talking, his friends were packing up his apartment, because he was being moved out. And he was one of the first, he said, "I know of five of us. They're calling it the gay cancer. They don't know what it is yet, but there's this thing happening." We mustn't forget that either, because I - this is difficult. One of my best friends is Colm Tóibín. I've read all of his books. I met him when we were both young in Dublin. And he wrote a book called The Story of the Night, which I never read because it was about AIDS. When Gaywyck came out, and then two years later, it was followed by A Comfortable Corner, which is a book about recovery from alcoholism, written from the point of view of the other, used to be called the codependent. And basically those books were picked up all over the place. They were picked up by the 12 Step groups, they were picked up by the gay men, all over the place. And then, then I started getting invited to the hospital. And Jimmy was invited to the hospital. He could go. I could go, but I would faint. Literally, I would faint. And I was in analysis at that point. I had given myself analysis for my 40th birthday. And Jimmy always said to me, "Oh, you'll just love this. You get to talk all about yourself." And so my analyst said to me when I said I'm, "I'm fainting." He said to me, "You're having the correct response." So I realized this was a problem. And I couldn't go to wakes either, but I was invited because of the books, because the men loved the books. And so I went. I did the best that I could. And basically I couldn't write. The reason there's such a gap between Gaywyck and A Comfortable Corner and Vadriel Vale was because I actually suffered from what we now recognize as PTSD. It was, it was PTSD-ville. That's all I can say. And lost so many friends. And when years later when I met, when I met my friend, Mark Doty. When I met my friend Mark Doty for the first time, he said to me, "When my partner was dying, in Provincetown, we would read your books over and over." And so then also, when I was doing Capote with Gerald Clarke, he said to me, "Truman reads your book aloud every Christmas."
Sarah MacLean 39:46 / #
Oh my god.
Vincent Virga 39:47 / #
So there was that going on.
Sarah MacLean 39:50 / #
And you're also you're getting telephone calls in the middle of the night.
Vincent Virga 39:54 / #
I am getting, yes to telephone calls, and the most stunning, remember now the year, so I was still in the phonebook.
Jennifer Prokop 40:03 / #
Sure.
Vincent Virga 40:03 / #
And I would get, I would get telephone calls.
Sarah MacLean 40:06 / #
Phonebook! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 40:08 / #
Imagine? Phone? I actually had someone come to my apartment, this kid, and I still have a black hanging phone because I love it as a souvenir. And the kid said to me, "What's that?"
Sarah MacLean 40:16 / #
What's that?
Jennifer Prokop 40:17 / #
Oh, yeah. I teach middle schoolers and a kid was like how? And another kid was like you put your finger in and you -
Vincent Virga 40:25 / #
Yes, yes, yes. So the phone rang in the middle of the night. And it's this young boy calling me from the Midwest because he had read Gaywyck and he had been going to kill himself. He was going to shoot himself. He was in love with his gym teacher. And he said to me, "I found Gaywyck. I found it in the A&P." Because of that cover! Because it had been stacked in all of these places. So he found it. And he said to me, "Is it true that men can be together?" And I said, "I'm together. I'm together with Jimmy." We've been together since 1964 and we're very together. And we have a completely together relationship, and it's also exclusive. We never opened it. It's been exclusive for 56 years for me. And so I said, "Of course, yes, it is." And then I said to him, "If ever you need to talk about this, if ever you get frightened, call me." And he said to me, "I won't have to call you. I just have to re-read Gaywyck." I -
Sarah MacLean 41:45 / #
(laughs) I'm a mess.
Jennifer Prokop 41:46 / #
I know. I'm fine.
Vincent Virga 41:48 / #
And so AIDS hits and I am paralyzed. And I mean, paralyzed. And I was paralyzed. So what happened then was my career just became huge. Huge. I was, I became literally America's foremost picture editor.
Jennifer Prokop 42:09 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 42:09 / #
Michael Korda christenened me the Michelangelo of picture editors. So I was all over the place. And Jimmy's editor at Farrar, Straus said, "Oh, dear. Hair by Kenneth. Pictures by Vincent." And meanwhile, I'm going to these posh events, and all of these people are coming up to me and saying, (in a whisper) "I love your book. I love your book." They'll never talk about it. And I said, you know, I would say to Jimmy, "I don't give a shit. I did what I did. I achieved what I did. I'm proud of the book. I don't care if they like it or not." And Jimmy said, "That makes it more difficult for them. Really makes it more difficult for them. So I would go to all the parties and inevitably one of them, some mega star would come up to me and say, (in a whisper) "I love your book." And that became a joke that Jimmy and I had.
Sarah MacLean 43:10 / #
You kept a list on the fridge.
Jennifer Prokop 43:11 / #
Yeah, right.
Vincent Virga 43:12 / #
Love your book! I can't tell you. And then my mother and father, we're sitting having lunch, and they are listening to the radio, and they begin fiddling on the dial and all of a sudden, they discover NPR, with bells ringing, and bats screeching and scary music. And the announcer says, "Our guest today is Vincent Virga, the author of the first gay, Gothic."
Sarah MacLean 43:47 / #
And so at this point, to be clear, you have not come out to your parents.
Sarah MacLean 43:52 / #
And your parents don't know that you've written a book.
Sarah MacLean 43:56 / #
But you did write it under your actual name.
Vincent Virga 44:00 / #
In fact, I wrote it under my actual name.
Sarah MacLean 44:01 / #
This is amazing.
Vincent Virga 44:03 / #
And my youngest brother, who is today a devoted Trumpster said to my oldest sister, "I have to change my name. I have to change my name. How can I go to school with this?" And meanwhile my sister is giving it to all of her friends and my middle brother was a deacon of the church, upstate New York. They spoke out against homosexuality. So when Gaywyck was published, my brother bought the number of copies that he needed and gave one as a Christmas present to each deacon, and resigned from the church. So that's my brother and my other brother saying "I have to change my name."
Sarah MacLean 44:42 / #
Love that story too! So your parents stumbled upon NPR -
Jennifer Prokop 44:46 / #
Outed by NPR seems like a very niche way to come out, (laughter) you know.
Vincent Virga 44:52 / #
My parents also, they never listen to NPR! They were probably looking for some talk show. Some dish show that they could have over lunch. So I went out the next weekend.
Sarah MacLean 45:06 / #
So they said nothing, or did they summon you?
Vincent Virga 45:09 / #
No. They said nothing, nothing, nothing. And I didn't even know they'd heard it. Nothing. So we go to Abraham and Straus, which is a huge supermarket, a department store in a mall, where I had worked as a kid. That's where I worked as a kid, for all of those years, between college and between Yale. In fact, the year between Yale, I was actually reviving trout, because they had built this huge trout field, you paid $5, and you went shipping, but the trout were coming up in the heat. So my job was wearing pit boots and reviving trout. (laughter) So we went to A&S and we're going up the escalator and there is a banner over the bookstore that says, "Gaywyck! Vincent Virga." And I say, "Oh, my God, look at that." And my parents ignored it.
Sarah MacLean 46:04 / #
Like it didn't exist,
Vincent Virga 46:05 / #
Didn't exist. Didn't exist. I finally at one point, soon after that, they said to me, something like, "Who's minding the cat?" And I said, "Jimmy. I live with Jimmy. I've been living with Jimmy, and basically, I wrote a book called Gaywyck." And that's when they admitted hearing it on NPR. That's when they talked about the banner. My mother read it. And she said to me, "I thought there was too much sex."
Sarah MacLean 46:33 / #
My mother said the same thing. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 46:36 / #
I said, "How could you tell? It's written in all of that prose, that Victorian prose. It's buried in the prose." I said, "How could you tell? It means, aha, that you've been reading those books I'm sending you. You've been reading those romances." And then basically, I went to sleep.
Sarah MacLean 46:58 / #
So now is this happening because Avon is just behind this book?
Vincent Virga 47:04 / #
Avon was behind it, but actually, the world was behind it.
Sarah MacLean 47:11 / #
That's great.
Vincent Virga 47:11 / #
Armistead Maupin was behind it. It was time. It was time. And so Richard Howard, who's a great poet and translator, he tells me the story that he was driving across the United States with his partner, and they were listening to NPR. And all of a sudden, this thing appeared. The bells chiming, and there I am! And the two of them started screaming at top of their voice with joy. Years later, I picked up, I'm still constantly reading right, and I picked up Madame de La Fayette The Princesse De Cleves, which is considered the first French psychological novel. It's about a woman, an aristocratic woman, who marries an aristocratic man, and then falls, she falls in love with another man. She falls in love with this man, and in Roman Catholic fashion, she has a nervous breakdown, she's hysterical, and basically, at the end of the book, she goes into a convent and dies. So I thought to myself, "You know, what? Why couldn't a man fall in love with a woman and marry her? And then fall in love with an aristocratic man?" Why can't, since I took the John reform, why can't I take the psychological novel? And so I flipped it around, of course, we meet Vadriel Vale in a monastery, which he leaves for various reasons to go out into the world to actually discover himself. And he discovers himself, he marries this wonderful woman, and he falls in love with Armand de Guise. Now the name Armand de Guise is actually a name that's in The Princesse De Cleves. And I plot that book, along the lines of The Princesse de Cleves, but I hook it into Robert and Donough Gaylord. I make Robert and Donough Armand's best friend.
Sarah MacLean 49:27 / #
Ahh! Perfect! Series, a series is born!
Vincent Virga 49:30 / #
And they also live across from each other in Gramercy Park and when I wrote Gaywyck, the first draft, I was the superintendent of the building on Gramercy Park. A little building. I was the super under a fake name, because it was a rent stabilized apartment, and Jimmy and I needed a place to live and we were walking down the street, we bumped into our pal from Yale, Bob Landorff, and he said to me, "I'm getting married and I have this tiny studio apartment at Irving Place. Do you know anybody who wants it?" And I said, "Yeah, we want it." And he said, "But you have to be Bob Landorff." And I said, "Okay. That's fine."
Vincent Virga 49:30 / #
This is the most New York thing I've ever - I mean, everybody does it.
Vincent Virga 50:08 / #
Then the landlord came because he needed a new super, and I answered the door as Bob Landorff, and Jimmy was in the bathtub. So in comes the super and he sits down, and he says to me, "Will you be the super of the building?" And I said, "I can't do anything!" "No, no, no, no. All you have to do is wash down the halls, sort the trash, and when anything goes wrong, you just call somebody." So we talked and talked and talked, and then he got up and he said, "Okay, it's a deal. Free rent." I said, "No, no, no. No free rent." I'm thinking, "Free rent. He's gonna find out I'm -"
Jennifer Prokop 50:41 / #
You're not Bob Landorff!
Vincent Virga 50:42 / #
I'm not Bob Landorff and I'm out the window! So basically, I said, "No, no, no." So he said, "I have to go to the bathroom." So we went into the bathroom, and there is Jimmy in the bathtub, and the landlord pees and then he leaves and Jimmy is freezing in the bathtub and I said, "Just think here we are with the frozen rent and I'm now the super." So basically, it's on Irving Place, and on the corner of Irving Place and Gramercy Park -
Sarah MacLean 51:12 / #
Which is one of the most beautiful places in the city! For those of you who are not New Yorkers, it's gorgeous, that block.
Vincent Virga 51:19 / #
Gorgeous. Yeah. And that's where Robert, that's where Robert and Donough, on the corner.
Sarah MacLean 51:25 / #
Perfect.
Vincent Virga 51:25 / #
And across the park, I then moved to 22nd Street and Lexington, around the corner from Gramercy Park. And Armand and Vadriel live on the other corner. So for me, they are, that's where they live, and that's where they'll always live.
Jennifer Prokop 51:46 / #
So what year was this? I mean, clearly, you were still doing picture editing and still had that whole outlet for your creativity, but writing novels was a little different, right?
Vincent Virga 51:58 / #
Yes. And I only wrote in the summers.
Jennifer Prokop 52:00 / #
Yeah. Okay.
Vincent Virga 52:00 / #
Because I discovered that I couldn't do, I couldn't do both. I could research in the winter. I could do some re-writing in the winter, but I was doing these mega best selling books. And I mean, I was working with these, you know, I was working with the President of the United States. And I was working with Jane Fonda, whom I love and all of these wonderful people on these mega books. And that took a lot of time. And also, if I'm doing your book, I read your manuscript, I then make a list of everything I want to see, and then I meet with you, and I go through your sock drawer. (laughter) And we wander through what's under your bed. Shelley Winters had these incredible pictures under her bed. And so that's what I do. I enter your life. With Hillary and Bill Clinton, I entered their lives, and I moved into the house. And it's hard to write fiction when you've got this mishegoss going on. (laughter) Impossible. And so I would write in the summer. So always the summer. For decades it was East Hampton until East Hampton became too expensive. Then it was one summer in Woodstock, which I hated. All these rich people pretending to be poor. And they were also too many mosquitoes! And so as the gods would have it, Victoria was giving a performance in Dublin and Jimmy traveled all over the British Isles with her and then they went to Dublin and a woman who was in control of this whole creative project fell in love with Jimmy and said, "You should come and spend summers in Ireland." So that's how we got to Ireland. We spent four years in Dublin, that's where I met Colm Tóibín. And then we went out to the west of Ireland, County Mayo, and I actually created a museum out there. Co-founded a museum in the west coast of Ireland, in Ballina. And then I would have, we would come back to New York, and then I got a call from the Library of Congress asking me, my very first book, my very first book was for John Wayne. And it was 12 songs. Michael gave me 12 songs and said, "You have to make a book out of this. You're a picture editor, right?" And I lied, and I said, "Sure!" Thinking, "How hard could it be?" So one of the tenants in my building was Agnes Maya, who was in charge of all the picture research at Simon and Schuster at Random House. And I said, "Agnes." She says to me, "You can't do that. I couldn't do that." So she gave me a copy of picture sources, and I kept playing the songs over and over again, and thinking to myself, "Oh my god, this is such a hoot! It's such America. It's all about America!" So I called the Army, the Navy, and the Marines, and the Air Force and I said, "Listen, I'm working on a project with John Wayne. Can I come and go through your files? And they said, "John Wayne? Sure."
Vincent Virga 53:10 / #
For him anything. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 54:55 / #
Anything! And also, and this is my first book, so I don't even know you're supposed to pay people. And then I thought to myself, all those pretty pictures of America, all of those advertisements for Oldsmobile and Ford. And so I started calling the mega companies and saying, "Listen, all those beautiful pictures of America." And they said, "We don't - no one can have them." And I said, "Well, I'm doing a book for John Wayne."
Sarah MacLean 55:24 / #
(laughter) Oh, John Wayne!
Vincent Virga 55:26 / #
And I will give you a credit. I'll give you a credit in a book by John Wayne called America, Why I Love Her. And then I thought, "I need more." So I thought to myself, you know, all those Farm Security Administration pictures, Dorothea Lange, all those people I love, they're very America. So I went to the Library of Congress, and the curator I met, became the head curator, 15 years later, of prints and photographs. And so they called me and said, "We need to do a book. We're having a major anniversary, 100 years. All of the curators have been working in their different divisions. We need a book. What do you think we should do?" And I said, "We need to do a book about a history." And I called it Eyes of the Nation, because that's what the Library of Congress is. And also the Library of Congress is America's memory. So I said, "Let's do this." And I did that. I said to Jimmy, "We're only going to go for Eyes of the Nation." He didn't want to come here. He hated it. From the beginning, he said to me, "You walk past people. You don't want to fly over there." And so we came, and then I did a book called Cartographia -
Jennifer Prokop 56:38 / #
Right.
Vincent Virga 56:38 / #
Which took seven years.
Jennifer Prokop 56:41 / #
I have a copy of it. It's beautiful!
Vincent Virga 56:43 / #
Isn't it beautiful?
Jennifer Prokop 56:44 / #
Cartographia is really your book. You are the author of record,
Vincent Virga 56:50 / #
I wrote that book. Meanwhile, remember, I had already done Eyes of the Nation, and I had done all these other books. So everybody knew me, I had full access. And when I would go in, I always had an idea of what I wanted. And I divided the book. This is what we call in the theater "a two o'clock in the morning idea." You're supposed to wake up in the morning and say, "What a stupid idea!" I didn't. I went in, and I said to Ron Grim at the Library of Congress, and he adored me because he was my guy in Eyes of the Nation. And so I said, "I have this idea." And so we began. And since I was going all over the world, the book is about maps as cultural documents. I tell the story, the history of the country, and the civilization through the map. So I say in the very beginning, it took me forever, and I was under contract to Little, Brown, and I went to this big, big event, a publishing event, and Jimmy was hosting a table. And there I was, in my tux, surrounded by all of my friends who were editors-in-chiefs and all these wonderful kids, people who had grown up with me. And the editor-in-chief of Little, Brown came over and said to me, "Vincent! We were talking about you in an editorial board meeting." And I said, "Oh?" And he said, "Yes! If you don't finish this book in six months, we're canceling the book."
Sarah MacLean 58:15 / #
(gasp) Not fun! Not cool at a gala! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 58:20 / #
No, not cool!
Sarah MacLean 58:22 / #
I object!
Vincent Virga 58:25 / #
I had been all over the Library of Congress for six years, and all these people explaining what the map meant. And I then went back to library and I thought, I have six months and I have, I have 1000's of pages. And so I wrote the introduction. What is a map? I wrote the basic introduction. And then as I went through, I thought to myself, you have one day for each map, if you can have one day for each map, will then come to the end of it. And meanwhile, I was surrounded by all these scholars who kept wanting to read my stuff, and they just adored my stuff. And they would say, "Oh, but you have to do this. You have to do that. You have to explain to me why was this huge thing going on in India?" And I would say, "No."
Jennifer Prokop 59:17 / #
(laughter) I've one day.
Vincent Virga 59:19 / #
One day. And so I did it. I did it. And essentially, it's a wonderful book.
Jennifer Prokop 59:26 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 59:26 / #
I think. And also I invented this thing where I said, I create a metaphor. Map as A. Map as B. And when the book came out, now remember, I have no, no, I'm not an academic, and when the book came out, it was accepted because of Ron Grim and but I was the key name on the thing and they behaved abominably. Then it went to be reviewed by THE great journal Imago Mundi, and it was assigned to the head of the maps division in the British Museum.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:02 / #
Oh. No pressure. (laughter)
Vincent Virga 1:00:05 / #
He reviewed the book and he begins with, "You know, when I first started reading this book, I thought to myself, "It's very relaxed.""
Sarah MacLean 1:00:15 / #
Unlike the British Museum,
Vincent Virga 1:00:16 / #
All of sudden these metaphors begin. "It's beautifully written, but he creates these metaphors for each map. And my first reaction, it's awfully simplistic. And it's awfully American." He writes this.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:31 / #
Terrible scathing review! (laughter)
Vincent Virga 1:00:33 / #
Then he turns around and says, "This book is magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. It is a total triumph. It is so inventive, it is so brilliant. And it's magnificent!" Well that, of course, did not help me in the academic world. Imago Mundi, I started reviewing for Imago Mundi and the academics were freaked, because I was going to all these conventions and asking all these questions. And, um, it was a great, great experience. And then it became number one on Amazon and five different -
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:13 / #
Wow.
Vincent Virga 1:01:14 / #
Sections.
Sarah MacLean 1:01:14 / #
Great.
Vincent Virga 1:01:15 / #
So, and then I stayed on, you know, Jimmy said, "Oh, we can go home now." But then the books kept coming, kept coming. So ultimately, I think there are now 29 books from the Library of Congress with my name. And also I did movie calendars, because I had all these friends. And you know, and I would call these people in, the publisher would say to me, "The Library of Congress is 1000 pound gorilla." So I very boldly, you know, I would call people. And I, first of all, I called my pal who was the head of 20th Century Fox legal, and he gave me permission to use the images without pay. But I had to get permission from everyone in the image. That meant I had to -
Sarah MacLean 1:01:59 / #
Wow, that's rough.
Vincent Virga 1:01:59 / #
Had to bring in people. There were all those people. I couldn't do it. I mean, basically, two brilliant brilliant people did that for me. But I had to call the difficult ones. I had to call Lauren Bacall, because her agency screamed at me over the phone. Four letter words. So I called her as the, you know, the 1000 pound gorilla. And I explained that we wanted to do this for Humphrey Bogart, because he wanted to use a picture. It was for Film Preservation Society, which I know she loves. And so she said, "Oh, sure, you can do it." So she called the people back and said, "Yeah, he can have this. He can do this." They call me back and every four letter word, "You know how she treats us? Do you know what she does to us?" And then with Kim Novak, which was the joy of my life, because I worshipped Kim Novak. And basically I put her on the back of Eyes of the Nation. So her people said no. I called Kim Novak. And Faye Dunaway. I called Faye Dunaway. And Jimmy had just reviewed her book in the New York Times which she loved. And I said basically, "When are you going to play a Long Day's Journey into Night?" She said, "Yes." So essentially, that was what I was doing at the Library of Congress.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:02 / #
Amazing.
Vincent Virga 1:02:02 / #
Then comes The Princesse de Cleves and then comes Vadriel Vale. And then I was thinking again, and I was alive again to my book. And I started thinking, what's next? I want the Gaywyck trilogy, so what's next? Next is to take the 19th century melodrama. I've taken the gothic romance. I've taken the psychological drama. Let's do the melodrama. So basically I created Children of Paradise, and I will never forget the moment sitting in the west coast of Ireland, and starting that book, and standing in the front room, with Robbie, in his house in Gramercy Park. And there I was, back with my crowd. And then I took the characters from Morris because at the end of it, Foster says, "They go off into the greensward." And then he says in the final, in his afterward, "They could not have lasted in the greensward." So I bring them, I bring them to Gaywyck. The whole point, when I look back on it, is about queer spaces. Now, when I'm reading all this stuff, and I realize my goal was queer spaces. Gaywyck is in 1900. All those people, he's at the opera, all of these people, Vadriel Vale, queer spaces. And so I go epic in Children of Paradise, queer spaces, and we invent the movies! Robbie becomes a movie director. If I'm going to do it with melodrama, I have to invent the movies! So basically, it cannot be published until, it exists in the Beinecke Library, and it exists in William and Mary, because William and Mary did a celebration of Gaywyck, and I asked them if they wanted the third volume of the trilogy. And basically they said, "Yes!" The reason it can't be published is because it was sent out, and the rejections were basically, "Oh, this book doesn't stand alone, and it's too long ago."
Sarah MacLean 1:02:02 / #
Vincent!
Vincent Virga 1:02:20 / #
"No one remembers Gaywyck."
Sarah MacLean 1:05:36 / #
We have to get it published!
Vincent Virga 1:05:38 / #
My goal is to have the trilogy published in uniform volume.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:44 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 1:05:45 / #
That's my goal. And my other goal is either Netflix or Amazon. I want a, I want a series.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:59 / #
Vincent, we're going to get this done. We're going to get - well, I can't, I mean, I can't get the Netflix deal for you, but we're going to get this publishing done. We can do this! We're going to do this. Fated Mates is going to come together, we're going to work together, we're going to do this. We're going to get this done.
Vincent Virga 1:06:14 / #
I would really love that.
Sarah MacLean 1:06:15 / #
We're going to get it done.
Vincent Virga 1:06:15 / #
It's my dream!
Sarah MacLean 1:06:17 / #
Everyone, listen up! We're getting it done. Stay tuned. So did you even know, it was a romance?
Vincent Virga 1:06:26 / #
I knew it was out there, but I wasn't interested. I mean, it was heterosexual, and I thought to myself, "I don't want to read these." Also, the few I picked up when I was at Avon, I thought, "I prefer The Lord Won't Mind." I'm a snob! I mean, you know, I'm a snob! And also, I long, long for romance novels, and I simply am old, and I can't find the ones that - the genre is problematic for me.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:04 / #
In the years since your books were published, have you heard from other gay romance writers who were inspired by you? Do you feel like you've left a mark in that sense? A trail?
Vincent Virga 1:07:18 / #
That was always very moving, because at one point, there was a book published, a Rainbow novel, won the award, I loved it. And in this sense, my note to this writer, and he, he sent me the most wonderful letters, and I got letters, letters, we get letters. We get stacks and stacks of letters. When the book was published, I was getting letters from Japan. In fact, there was a huge review for the book in Japan, and they sent a film crew over to interview me. Yeah, I got a lot of letters, very moving, very touching letters from people who said it helped them come out. That is who said they hid the book. And they loved the book so much, that they were passing it around. In fact, this week I got a letter from a man who 20 years ago, bought it in a bookstore in Florida. And then he lent it to someone and never got it back. So he wanted it, and he recently tracked it down in the original edition, and he loved it more than ever. And I think last week I got, older men who are moving and downsizing will write me and say their partners died and they're moving, and they're bringing very few books, but they must have mine. They must have mine. So that happens as well. I love this book. And then I just get letters randomly saying, "This is my favorite novel, and I just want you to know that." I have no idea why! I got a letter from a young boy. 24 years old, and he said, "I'm a goth, a gay goth, and I love your books. I'm sure you get letters like this all the time." And I wrote back and I said, "No. I do not get letters from 24-year-old gay goths." I'm always saying to Jimmy, "It's so touching to me." And now to be in that book, you know, The History of the -
Jennifer Prokop 1:09:35 / #
Yes! The Romance History from Rebecca Romney.
Vincent Virga 1:09:35 / #
Oh, my god!
Sarah MacLean 1:09:39 / #
Well, I think the thing about Gaywyck that resonates so much with so many people is that you really did knock down the doors of the Gothic, which is a genre that many of us love so much. Many of us cut our teeth on those early Gothics and you re-wrote the rules of it. I'm sad to hear that you you never had a writer community, but I know for a fact that many writers were inspired by you.
Vincent Virga 1:10:10 / #
Several years ago there was a convention, and there was a panel about the gay books. I wasn't invited, and just assumed, you know, I've never gone after this. I did it, as I've said, and I just sort of cruised along with it amused, and knowing what I did,, but at the same time, I remember a book that came out about gay fiction. And there was a little footnote that said, "Oh, and then there's Gaywyck, which is really a footnote, and it will never be anything but a footnote." That's what this thing said, and I thought to myself, "Okay, so maybe there were others before me." And of course, now I've read - I have a whole library of the gay novels before me.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:52 / #
Well I do think that it's worth saying that you are, as far as any of us can tell, you are the first gay Gothic romance, the first gay, possibly the first gay historical Modern romance with sex in it and everything!
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:07 / #
And a happy ending!
Vincent Virga 1:11:08 / #
The happy ending. That was the thing that I think even shook Gwen a bit. And I had been told, Michael Korda said to me, "I want you to write a book. I want you to write a story based on the best of everything." Because he had published that mega bestseller. He said, "I want you to write a best of everything with/for men. I want the gay men to die." And I said, "No." Now when I look back on it, I thought to myself, "You know, I could have killed him in Vietnam. He could have died as a great American hero." But at that point in my heart, I wanted to write this gay Gothic, and I'd already started it. I'm getting statements from Amazon, that people are buying it again. What, what caused this resurgence?
Sarah MacLean 1:12:05 / #
It's a book that people are aware of now. There are many, many more of us now who believe that those paperbacks from the '70s should not have disappeared. They should have been honored in a way that, you know, in the same way that other books from the '70s remain honored. So people are starting to think about the Modern romance, the happily ever after, with sex on the page, what does it look like? What are the roots of the genre? Who are the people who built the house? And we believe that you are a person who has built the house.
Vincent Virga 1:12:43 / #
And now you know, I've been writing, and I wrote a book called He Cooks, I Clean, which is a joke Jimmy and I had. It's a novel, He Cooks, I Clean. And my novels are now very, very erotic because D.H. Lawrence said, "You can't possibly create a fully rounded character, if you don't have their love life." That was his argument for Lady Chatterley's Lover. And basically, I always agreed. I mean, I pussyfooted through Vadriel and through the other ones. I'm a little, little bolder in Children of Paradise, but it was inappropriate for that period, and for my tone. So it's sort of a hidden, though my mother sniffed it out.
Sarah MacLean 1:13:32 / #
(laughter) Moms will do that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:34 / #
Mothers. They know.
Vincent Virga 1:13:33 / #
Mom. And now of course, in these new novels of mine, they're very, very passionate and graphic. But, you know, I've sent them to editors, and they say, "No, but we're supposed to be, we're supposed to be married now. You know what I mean? It's supposed to be all over, but it's not all over. For me, it will always be the Ramrod shootings on the publication that, I don't know that I can ever move beyond that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:09 / #
Yeah.
Vincent Virga 1:14:10 / #
So that's where I am, and I'm sad. Deeply saddened. I'm waiting to see what's waiting for me, because I'm now reading The Prophets. I've just started it. And I don't know what's going to happen in that, but I think it's going to be very unhappy. But of course, they're slaves and I've already started to cry, like, in the first chapter, by what he describes, but I'm, I'm in this, you know. I'm in this. And I live in hope.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:44 / #
Wow! That was so amazing!
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:53 / #
Sarah, before we talk about our feelings, I want you to tell our listeners about the story of how Vincent came to be on the podcast.
Sarah MacLean 1:15:04 / #
Ohhh.
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:05 / #
Because it's a good one. Everybody listen, we had a list, and we didn't hear back. A lot of people we just didn't hear back from.
Sarah MacLean 1:15:13 / #
Yeah! You will hear - we will do this: whenever there is an interesting story related to how we found a person, we will tell the story at the end. Vincent Virga. We discovered him - I think Steve Ammidown rang my bell about him when we were doing the Trailblazer thing for the RITA's in 2019, which keeps coming up because it was a really important piece of my learning about the history of the genre, which I thought I kind of knew, and then suddenly there were all these names that Steve really, Steve helped with that. And he kind of rang my bell about it, and so when we made our list of Trailblazers, he was an obvious choice.
Jennifer Prokop 1:15:59 / #
He also, Gaywyck appears in Rebecca Romney's romance catalog.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:05 / #
That happened after we started looking for him. What's interesting about the Rebecca Romney catalog and Fated Mates' Trailblazers episodes is they really have, I think we and Rebecca are often like, "Oh, that's great. That person is on our list. Or our person is on her list." So it's a really cool marriage of the two projects. But I went looking for him, and I found he has a website that hasn't been updated very recently, and I sent him an email that just introduced us, because at this point, you know, I don't expect people know who we are.
Jennifer Prokop 1:16:45 / #
Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:16:46 / #
So I introduced us and I sort of said, "Well, I'm in New York, and I think you're in New York, and I'm happy to come. I'm vaccinated." A lot of these emails are very, "If you can't do this, we're happy to come and be with you. We're vaccinated." And my phone rang, and it was a weird number from New York. so I let it go to voicemail, because, obviously, I let it go to voicemail. Who answers the phone?
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:12 / #
Nobody.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:12 / #
And I had a voicemail from him. And I will say this, you guys, I have had a couple of really great voicemails over the course of this project, because what I've discovered is many people who are of a certain age, are very happy to make a telephone call. So Vincent and I chatted a couple of times before we recorded.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:34 / #
The first time Sarah talked to him, she called me. You actually called me, I don't know if it was catching. And you were like, "We're a Vincent Virga stan podcast."
Sarah MacLean 1:17:44 / #
Basically, we're just going to have Vincent Virga on as our third forever. Like, you can just join us all the time. And here's the thing, I had heard some of those stories already, because we've had a couple of really great conversations, but this episode. Jen.
Jennifer Prokop 1:17:58 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:59 / #
I cried twice!
Jennifer Prokop 1:18:01 / #
So for those of you listening in real time, usually we release on a Wednesday. And here it is, it's an unusual day. We released Beverly Jenkins a couple of days ago, and here we are releasing another Trailblazer. And that's because this date is very special. This is actually the 41st anniversary of the release of Gaywyck. And the reason we know that is because, if we remember, Vincent mentioned that the night of the party, that essentially was celebrating it, there was a massacre at the Ramrod bar, and that happened on Wednesday, November 19, 1980. I will put some of these articles in show notes. This is for many people, maybe little remembered, part of gay history. A former police officer entered a gay bar called the Ramrod and opened fire. And so, you know, this was a point in the interview where all of us, I think, but Vincent especially, got really teary because here it was, this kind of height, of kind of a career and a moment for him, and it was this really brutal reminder of how unaccepting some people would always be of love stories and happily ever afters for gay and lesbian, and at that point, probably those were the only categories of Americans. So that's the reason we really wanted to release today's episode on the anniversary because -
Sarah MacLean 1:19:33 / #
We wanted to say it same. The Trailblazer episodes are about speaking the names of the people who built the house, and in this particular case, it felt important to say the name of the Ramrod massacre and to talk about this today. In shownotes we'll also put the names of the victims -
Jennifer Prokop 1:19:34 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:19:34 / #
Of the shootings, and you know, we're our thinking Vincent today, but we are so, so happy to have had him on the podcast. I was - what a remarkable life!
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:10 / #
Oh, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:20:11 / #
He is living! I think it's amazing how much he had to say about the work and about writing love stories, for somebody who we have not heard from. As a genre, we don't talk about Vincent as much as I think maybe we should.
Jennifer Prokop 1:20:32 / #
Yeah. I think one of the other things that is especially poignant, is how people would whisper to him. This really stuck with me. "I loved your book, but I can't really talk about it publicly." I think Rebecca's catalog has a lot of really interesting information about the evolution of gay romance from Gaywyck. And I'm going to include a thread from a librarian I follow, Angie Manfredi, who talked about how the assault on putting LGBTQ+ literature in libraries is more intense than ever. And how vital it is for kids, for teenagers, I mean for all kinds of people, but kids especially, to be able to see themselves in literature portrayed in a positive way and having the potential for happiness and joy, and all kinds of stories. And she gives in this thread, some really specific things that you can do as a regular person, as simple as calling up your local library and saying, "I hope that you are keeping these materials on the shelves for kids and teenagers in our community." So I just want to say how urgent it is that, you know, we not take this for granted. I was very, it's sometimes really overwhelming to feel like we've made no progress, but the way we make sure we keep the progress we have made is by fighting for it, and not just assuming. Right? Not just assuming that they'll always be gay and trans and lesbian romance, or bisexuals in romance, and that especially if we want those materials to persist and be around for everyone, that we make it clear to our local libraries that, and our school libraries especially, that we support having those materials on the shelves.
Sarah MacLean 1:22:30 / #
And on top of it, purchasing those materials if you are able to, making sure that those materials pass through bookstores. And requesting those materials from your local bookstore, making sure that when you're in Barnes & Noble, you're asking for books that represent all marginalized communities, but especially those in LGBTQIA+ community. This is a second piece of the library struggle, but we all saw what happened on Election Day in Virginia, and we know that the critical race theory piece was a HUGE piece that swung Virginia red, particularly with white women. And I want to just say that there's another great thread that went around last week that basically underscored that libraries are going to be the frontline for so much of this. Anybody who was following that story in Virginia knows that it started with a mom, a white mom, who was horrified that her son was forced to read Beloved in class, and traumatized by the content in Beloved. So when we're talking about books being banned, we're talking about it happening right now, all over. So we'll throw that into show notes too.
Jennifer Prokop 1:23:58 / #
Yes. And that's it. These are, I think it's really also important to say it seems so easy to think it's happening somewhere else. It's happening everywhere.
Sarah MacLean 1:24:09 / #
Everywhere.
Jennifer Prokop 1:24:10 / #
It is happening at a school board in your town. Someone is going after books that they think are you know, and I just think as romance readers, if we care about happily everyone after, we have to care about, we have to be literally willing to stand up and say, because they're going to come at, you know, romance will be first, right? But when I think about children, when I think about the kids in my room who need to see books about themselves on the shelves, this, this is urgent work, that we as listeners and we as readers have to be a part of, because it starts with censorship, right? It starts with banning books. It starts with saying, "We shouldn't be teaching these things because they make me uncomfortable."
Sarah MacLean 1:25:08 / #
Yeah. And books are world changing in the sense that when you read a book, when any kid reads these books, it changes the way they look at the world. And that's what we need.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:20 / #
And that's why they want to get rid of them.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:22 / #
I also just want to say and this is, you know, we're down a little bit of a Fated States rabbit hole now, but I just want to say listen, school boards too, I mean, we saw that on Tuesday, on the Election Day this year. The battle for this country is happening in school board races.
Jennifer Prokop 1:25:43 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:25:44 / #
So if you are out there, and you are like, "What could I do? I don't want to, I can't run for Senator. How could I help?" Check out runforsomething.net where you can learn more about running in your town to be on the school board. You know, right now school boards are really front lining this.
Jennifer Prokop 1:26:05 / #
Yes. And I would just say, like I said, if you can't do that you can call your principal. I mean that's the thing, there are things, you can call the principal of your school and say, "I support having books that talk about race and racism and have gay and lesbian characters in them. There are lots of things that you can do. And I think it's just really important. We're big believers in, you know, civic action. So it doesn't have to be running for Senate, but it can be calling your kid's principal and saying, "Don't you dare take these books out of these classrooms. I want my kid to be learning the truth about who we are as a country. I want my kid to be reading stories about people that are not like them. I want my kid to see the whole world out there in their classroom."
Sarah MacLean 1:26:55 / #
In the meantime, we hope you enjoyed our interview with Vincent. We hope you head out and pick up Gaywyck on what you can get in print or in ebook, and we hope that you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. We thought, I mean, I don't know if I've said this on the recordings yet, but it really does feel like every single conversation is so different from all the others.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:17 / #
Oh, absolutely!
Sarah MacLean 1:27:18 / #
And this was really a delight! And I told Eric when we finished, I was like, "We have to have him for dinner because he's amazing!" (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:28 / #
Honestly, I mean and that's the thing, let alone from Gaywyck, the story of his life doing images and the other work that he did, this is someone who had a long and distinguished career in publishing.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:40 / #
Yeah, and I want to hear all about Watergate! (laughter) Tell me everything!
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:44 / #
I want to hear about Bill and Hillary. Everything!
Sarah MacLean 1:27:47 / #
Going through pictures that were like under the bed in Hillary Clinton's house.
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:51 / #
Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:51 / #
Sounds like, first of all, if I had known that job existed, I would not be sitting here with you, dummy. (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:27:58 / #
Fine. My goodness.
Sarah MacLean 1:27:59 / #
Anyway, that was remarkable! I'm so glad that we did that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:28:04 / #
Me too.
Sarah MacLean 1:28:05 / #
And I hope you all loved it. Tell us how you felt about it on Twitter @FatedMates or on Instagram @FatedMatespod. You can also send Vincent an email the same way we did at his website vincentvirga.com. I think Vincent would probably be really thrilled to hear from all of you, if you felt moved by his stories. And otherwise you can find us at fatedmates.net. We will be back on Wednesday on proper schedule, but today we hope you're being kind to yourself and others.
S04.10: Beverly Jenkins: Trailblazer
This week, we’re continuing our Trailblazer episodes with Beverly Jenkins—the first Black author of historical romance featuring Black main characters. We talk about her path to romance writing, about how librarians make the best writers, and about her role as the first Black historical romance novelist. We’re also talking about writing in multiple sub genres, about lifting up other authors, and about the importance of the clinch cover.
Thank you to Beverly Jenkins for taking the time to talk to us, and share her story.
There’s still time to buy the Fated Mates Best of 2021 Book Pack (which includes Beverly’s Wild Rain!) from our friends at Old Town Books in Alexandria, VA, and get eight of the books on the list, a Fated Mates sticker and other swag! Order the book box as soon as you can to avoid supply chain snafus.
Thank you, as always, for listening! If you are up for leaving a rating or review for the podcast on your podcasting app, we would be very grateful!
Our next read-alongs will be the Tiffany Reisz Men at Work series, which is three holiday themed category romances. Read one or all of them: Her Halloween Treat, Her Naughty Holiday and One Hot December.
Show Notes
Welcome Beverly Jenkins, the author of more than 50 romance novels, and the recipient of the 2017 Romance Writers of America Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the 2016 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for historical romance.
You can hear Beverly’s interview on the Black Romance History podcast, and last February, Jen interviewed her for Love’s Sweet Arrow when Wild Rain was released. Wild Rain was also one of our best of 2021 romance novels.
Beverly Jenkins's first agent was Vivian Stephens. You can listen to Julie Moody-Freeman's interview with Vivian in two parts on the Black Romance Podcast.
Some of the people Beverly mentioned: sweet romance author Laverne St. George, author Patricia Vaughn, author Anita Richmond Bunkley, publisher Walter Zacharius, editor Ellen Edwards, editor Christine Zika, cover designer Tom Egner, author Shirley Hailstock, author Donna Hill, author Brenda Jackson, editor Monica Harris, author Gay Gunn, marketing expert Adrienne di Pietro, editor Erika Tsang, agent Nancy Yost, Romantic Times owner Kathryn Falk, and Gwen Osborne from The Romance Reader.
Here’s more information about 1994, the summer of Black love, and here’s a PDF of Beverly Jenkins’s 1995 profile in People Magazine.
Transcript
Beverly Jenkins 0:00 / #
The idea that I was out in the marketplace, the African American readers were just over the moon. Some of the stories they told me of going in the bookstore and seeing Night Song, and you know, the first thing they did was flip to the back to make sure it was written by a Black woman, and one woman said she sat in the bookstore right there on the floor, and started reading.
Sarah MacLean 0:30 / #
That was the voice of Beverly Jenkins. We are thrilled to have Beverly with us. We've been working on getting her to join us on Fated Mates since Season One, and pandemics and busy-ness got in the way, but we're finally here and it feels right that the first time we talked to Beverly, we're talking to her as part of the Trailblazers series. You will hear her talk about her life, her time beginning writing her work, her research, publication, her editors and her readers, and we think you'll love it. Welcome to Fated Mates.
We are so thrilled to have Beverly Jenkins with us today. Welcome, Beverly!
Beverly Jenkins 1:18 / #
Thank you! Thank you! I'm thrilled to be here. This is - you know we've been trying to hook up for a while, so thanks so much for the invite!
Sarah MacLean 1:26 / #
We really have! And obviously, for many, many reasons, Jen and I have been wanting you to come on Fated Mates to talk about all sorts of things. I don't know if you remember this, but you and I were together outside of the National Book Festival, what feels like 1000 years ago when we could be with each other, and you started telling me stories about the beginning of your career and the early days and it was one of the most magnificent afternoons of my life, and so I am basically just here to make you tell those stories on tape.
Beverly Jenkins 2:09 / #
I've got a million of them, so you'll have to let me know which one -
Sarah MacLean 2:12 / #
I love it! No, I want to hear them all.
Sarah MacLean 2:14 / #
So we are - the conceit of this whole - the work that we're doing right now with our Trailblazer guests is to really get the voices of the genre and the voices of the people who built the house on tape, and to also say the names of the people who maybe we have not heard of. The not Beverly Jenkins'. So that's why we're doing this. That's why we think it's important and that's why we are so grateful to have you with us.
Beverly Jenkins 2:48 / #
I'm proud to, proud to represent. So hit me up with your first question.
Jennifer Prokop 2:55 / #
Well, I think one of the things and this is true for all romance writers, readers, everybody, which is how did you come to romance? How did you become a reader and a writer of romance?
Beverly Jenkins 3:08 / #
I tell the story about I grew up reading everything. You know I was one of those kids that read everything in the neighborhood library, from the kiddie books to the teen books to the adult books. This would be late '50s, early '60s. I think I got my first library card when I was like eight. So that would have been like 1959, right, but there was nothing in the books that represented me in the classics, of course that my mom would make us read or insist we read Langston Hughes and Bontemps and you know those folks. But for popular literature, there was nothing, but it didn't stop me from reading. You know I love a good story. So in my journey through Mark Twain Library, that was the name of the library, eastside of Detroit, Gratiot and Burns, it's no longer there, and I'll tell you a terrible story about that eventually, but they had when I got to the teen books, I read Beany Malone. I don't know if you're familiar with the Beany Malone books. YA, family, small town. Beany was the the youngest kid, so you had her adventures. They had Seventeenth Summer which I think everybody my age read and then I moved to Mary Stewart, you know, This Rough Magic, all those great books. So then that brought in Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney and Jane Aiken Hodge.
Sarah MacLean 4:37 / #
Victoria Holt is one of those names that comes up every time you talk to a group of romance novelists who started, you know, young.
Beverly Jenkins 4:44 / #
Yeah, she was there. So read her. Charlotte Armstrong. I don't know if you're familiar with her. She's got a great book. What is the name of that book? The Gift Shop, I think! Awesome! It's you know, a sweet romance but it's a young woman who is on a quest with this guy. Somebody left some kind of, if I can remember correctly, some kind of a secret something inside of a gift shop. They were, it was inside of a little glass pig, [laughter] so she and this guy are traveling all over. I don't know if it's the world, I think was a country, trying to run down these pigs to get whatever it was that was inside and it's just a great story and probably holds up pretty well. I haven't read it in a 1000 years, even if it's still in print?
[Laughing] I'm gonna report in. I'm gonna find this.
Jennifer Prokop 5:35 / #
I know me too. I'm down, so yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 5:38 / #
Yeah, Charlotte Armstrong, The Gift Shop, great! Then you had stuff like Cash McCall, that they made the movie with Natalie Wood and James Garner, I think. So I had always loved a good love story. You know you had Doris Day and James Garner and all of that. You know, my sisters and I, I have five sisters, four sisters, three of us are stairsteps. So you know, we loved you know that kind of stuff. So reading and pop culture, but like I said, there was nothing that reflected us. Then you've got the Toni Morrison quote, you know, if it's not out there, and you want to read it, then you need to write it, but I was just writing for me. I wasn't writing for publication because the market was closed. So that's sort of how I got started, I guess, a long winded answer to your question.
Sarah MacLean 6:36 / #
So when you say you weren't writing it for the market, walk us through kind of putting pen to paper and then -
Sarah MacLean 6:45 / #
I mean, now you're in the market, so how did that happen?
Beverly Jenkins 6:47 / #
Now I'm in the market, now I'm in the marketplace. There were you know, other than, and I did not read those because I didn't even know they existed. Elsie Washington and Vivian, who really started this industry for us, the American side of it. Have you heard her interview with?
Jennifer Prokop 7:07 / #
The Black Romance Podcast.
Beverly Jenkins 7:08 / #
Oh my gosh!
Sarah MacLean 7:09 / #
It's fantastic! We'll put links to it in show notes, everybody.
Beverly Jenkins 7:12 / #
Just amazing. So Elsie and Sandra and I had no idea they were out there. But I was writing for me, and this was like, God, BC, Before Children. [laughter] You know me and Hubby, we were like "No, we're not having no kids. We are having too much fucking fun!" [laughter]
Sarah MacLean 7:35 / #
Were you writing historical or were you writing contemporary? What?
Beverly Jenkins 7:39 / #
I was writing Night Song.
Beverly Jenkins 7:42 / #
I was writing Night Song, didn't know I was writing Night Song at the time though you know, I had no title for it, but it was just a story for me and I would come home from working at the Michigan State University Graduate Library. And I'd come home, he had played tennis in high school, so he would come home, 'cause he was a printer back then, so he'd come home, clean up from all that ink. You know, he had ink in his fro and all of that. Ink in his nose, man had ink coming out of the backs of his hands for years because there's no OSHA back then you know.
Beverly Jenkins 8:13 / #
So he'd come home, clean up, grab his tennis racket and go play tennis, and I would read because you work at a Graduate Library and the little old ladies in cataloguing loved me. So I can go through the back halls of the library and grab stuff off people's carts, mainly science fiction which is what I mainly read back then, take 'em home. So if I wasn't reading, I was working on this little story just for me. Buffalo soldier and a school teacher. I had no idea it was going to be published or would get published because I already had my dream job. I was working in the library. That's all I ever wanted out of life, you know. And then I met LaVerne, I was working in Parke-Davis.
Sarah MacLean 8:56 / #
Who's LaVerne?
Beverly Jenkins 8:57 / #
LaVerne? LaVerne is the reason we're here today. Her and my mama. She writes under LaVerne St. George. She's a sweet romance writer. This is probably, oh, let's see if I was working at Parke-Davis, this is probably somewhere between '85 and '90, and LaVerne had just gotten her first book published. We were working at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical library, which was a whole different story, that's a whole different conversation. Parke-Davis was probably one of the, maybe one of the first big pharma companies. It started in Detroit and they moved from Detroit to Ann Arbor, which is where I was working. So she had just gotten a sweet romance published by a small publisher here in Michigan. So we're celebrating her and I was talking about this little manuscript I was working on and she wanted to see it and I knew she was a member of RWA back then and I didn't know anything about any of that. I'm just writing a story, right? So I bring it in and she says, "You really need to get this published!"
Jennifer Prokop 10:03 / #
Did you hand write this manuscript? Is it typed?
Beverly Jenkins 10:06 / #
Yeah!
Jennifer Prokop 10:06 / #
What does this look like?
Beverly Jenkins 10:08 / #
Oh, okay, it was...I had [she chuckles] this little what we used to call close and play typewriter.
Jennifer Prokop 10:16 / #
Okay.
Sarah MacLean 10:17 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 10:17 / #
You know, you could carry it.
Jennifer Prokop 10:18 / #
Oh yeah.
Sarah MacLean 10:19 / #
They were very lightweight, right?
Beverly Jenkins 10:21 / #
Very lightweight, [laughter] you opened it, you open it like you open a laptop
Sarah MacLean 10:24 / #
Giant. [giggles]
Jennifer Prokop 10:25 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 10:26 / #
Yeah. I mean, it's little and I had one of those. So it was very bad because I couldn't type back then at all, very badly typed. In fact, my husband's secretary wound up typing it once I got it ready for publication, but most of it though, at the beginning, was handwritten.
Sarah MacLean 10:45 / #
I mean nobody, this is one of those minor little things, but nobody realizes how much work it was -
Sarah MacLean 10:51 / #
To write a book at this point.
Beverly Jenkins 10:53 / #
OH...MY -
Sarah MacLean 10:54 / #
If I had to do this, there would be no -
Sarah MacLean 10:56 / #
We would not know each other. [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 10:58 / #
Oh, girl!
Jennifer Prokop 11:00 / #
Right! That's why I was so curious. It had to be -
Beverly Jenkins 11:04 / #
It was so, you know, once we got published, right, there was no - we were using word processors 'cause this is before computers.
Beverly Jenkins 11:13 / #
And it was all cut and paste, for revisions, and I mean actually cut and paste. [laughter] I mean, you would have to, okay, when you did revisions, you had to cut pieces out, tape 'em in, and then tape them to the pages. So you may have some - and then you have to fold it up. So you may have something that unscrolls from me to you in Chicago. [laughter] You know, fold it up.
Beverly Jenkins 11:43 / #
You know when you - then you've got tons of Wite-out.
Jennifer Prokop 11:47 / #
Oh yeah.
Sarah MacLean 11:47 / #
Oh, remember Wite-out?
Beverly Jenkins 11:49 / #
Put it in a mailer. Oh God, Wite-out, yeah, I saved them.
Sarah MacLean 11:51 / #
Our young listeners are like, what's Wite-out?
Beverly Jenkins 11:54 / #
I know. I guess they're using Wite-out now for something else, but yeah, it's a little thing that you could, [laughter] paint over your bad mistakes and you can type over it once it dried. You had to wait for it to dry though.
Sarah MacLean 12:06 / #
Yes! Oh and if you didn't then it gummed up the typewriter!
Beverly Jenkins 12:10 / #
Yeah, it would get, occasionally get all gunky.
Sarah MacLean 12:13 / #
We'll put it in show notes. Learn about Wite-out in show notes.
Beverly Jenkins 12:16 / #
Oh God, yeah. Lord have mercy. You know, and then you'd have to call FedEx to come get it.
Sarah MacLean 12:22 / #
Yeah. There was no - I mean me sliding in -
Jennifer Prokop 12:25 / #
To drop off -
Sarah MacLean 12:26 / #
Two minutes before midnight on the day.
Beverly Jenkins 12:28 / #
No, no. You had to send it. Well you know, you had to have an account 'cause they'd come pick it up from your house.
Beverly Jenkins 12:37 / #
Umm, it was a mess!
Jennifer Prokop 12:39 / #
Sorry. I know, that's a digression, but I was curious.
Sarah MacLean 12:41 / #
No, but Jen it's so important -
Beverly Jenkins 12:42 / #
It's a great question, a great question.
Sarah MacLean 12:44 / #
It sort of, it speaks to this kind of mentality -
Jennifer Prokop 12:47 / #
The time!
Sarah MacLean 12:48 / #
The time, but also the commitment. You have to commit to being a writer at this point.
Beverly Jenkins 12:55 / #
'Cause it was a lot of work. Oh my God! You know, the folks that are using Scrivener and even Microsoft Word, you have no idea what a joy!
Sarah MacLean 13:07 / #
[laughing] Living the high life!
Beverly Jenkins 13:09 / #
We old hens, oh God! So yeah, we had all that to do.
Sarah MacLean 13:14 / #
So anyway, so LaVerne had published her first book.
Beverly Jenkins 13:16 / #
Right. She had published her first book.
Sarah MacLean 13:18 / #
And you had Night Song.
Beverly Jenkins 13:19 / #
And I had Night Song. And she, I just tell folks, you know, she harassed me everyday. She and I laugh, we're still good friends. She laughs about me telling people that she harassed me every day at work, but I think she did. At least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Sarah MacLean 13:33 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 13:34 / #
And I don't know how I found Vivian? I cannot tell you how I found Vivian. I think maybe by then I was reading Romantic Times?
Sarah MacLean 13:43 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 13:44 / #
And maybe, you know, she showed up in there or something? Anyway -
Sarah MacLean 13:49 / #
So wait, this is a good point. There used to be a romance magazine and it was called Romantic Times and you could subscribe to it. If you were romance fan, you subscribed to it and there were reviews in it and interviews with your favorite authors and if you were a romance author, it was like Time Magazine for romance authors. If you ended up on the cover of Romantic Times, stop it, you were on your way.
Beverly Jenkins 14:09 / #
You were on your way. They were some of my biggest supporters at the beginning. I will always -
Sarah MacLean 14:14 / #
Mine too.
Beverly Jenkins 14:15 / #
Be grateful to Katherine Falk. But I don't know how I found Vivian. So I sent her my little raggedy manuscript, just to get LaVerne off my ass.
Sarah MacLean 14:25 / #
At Harlequin at this point?
Beverly Jenkins 14:27 / #
No, she's - no she was -
Sarah MacLean 14:28 / #
That's right, she was gone!
Beverly Jenkins 14:29 / #
She was freelance. She was gone, they'd let her go by then.
Sarah MacLean 14:31 / #
That's right! Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 14:32 / #
Yeah, she was on her own.
Sarah MacLean 14:33 / #
So we're in the late '80s.
Beverly Jenkins 14:35 / #
We're late '80s and we're almost at '90. We might be even at '90 because they bought the book in '93. Sent in my little raggedy manuscript, 'cause it was baaaaaddd. Oh my God.
Sarah MacLean 14:47 / #
I don't believe it.
Beverly Jenkins 14:48 / #
Girl, let me tell you stories. It was baaaddd. Anyway, so she called me at work because I was working at the reference desk.
Sarah MacLean 14:59 / #
On the phone.
Beverly Jenkins 15:00 / #
On the phone! And said, you know, she wanted to represent me. So me not knowing anything, you know, about this whole process, I was like, "Sure! Okay!"
Beverly Jenkins 15:13 / #
Right. I don't think we ever -
Jennifer Prokop 15:15 / #
Seems like a nice lady calling you at work.
Sarah MacLean 15:16 / #
Was she running - she was running an agency at this point.
Beverly Jenkins 15:19 / #
Right, a small agency out of her house. And she had me and she had Pat Vaughn, Patricia Vaughn.
Beverly Jenkins 15:29 / #
Who just sort of disappeared. I don't know whatever happened to her. Murmur of Rain, which came out right after Night Song did. I don't think Vivian and I even signed a contract. This was just a -
Sarah MacLean 15:40 / #
Sure, handshake deal.
Beverly Jenkins 15:41 / #
Just a verbal kind of thing. So, umm, took us a while to sell it. I got enough rejections to paper all of our houses because they didn't know what to do with it!
Jennifer Prokop 15:53 / #
Well and my question is how clear was it to you that, "We don't know what to do with it?" means, "We just aren't going to carry Black romance?"
Beverly Jenkins 16:02 / #
No, there was no box for it.
Jennifer Prokop 16:04 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 16:05 / #
You know and even with romance and I didn't care, I mean, probably, if I had been set on getting published, all of those rejections would have probably broken my heart.
Sarah MacLean 16:17 / #
Of course.
Beverly Jenkins 16:18 / #
But I had a dream job! I was getting up every morning going to the library! I could care less about a rejection letter, but the interesting thing was, they all said the same thing basically: great writing but, great writing but.
Sarah MacLean 16:34 / #
What do we do with it?
Beverly Jenkins 16:36 / #
Yeah and 'cause 19th century...
Sarah MacLean 16:38 / #
America.
Beverly Jenkins 16:39 / #
American history. Even 1990, if it's a 19th century story involving Black people, it should have been about slavery.
Jennifer Prokop 16:50 / #
Right.
Beverly Jenkins 16:51 / #
So here I come with -
Jennifer Prokop 16:52 / #
We know how to sell it if its Roots.
Beverly Jenkins 16:54 / #
Right. Yep, its Roots. Barely. We know how to sell it if its Roots, and you have to remember that there were only, maybe, three Black romances out there. I mean, Vivian had the connections to send it to everybody.
Sarah MacLean 17:08 / #
So let's talk about who that is. Who were the other names who were writing Black romance? And they certainly, they weren't writing historical. You were the -
Beverly Jenkins 17:19 / #
No. Anita Richmond Bunkley had written Black Gold, which was not really a romance more like women's fiction, but it was historical, about a woman in an oil field family in Texas. And she had also written Emily...Emily The Rose. It's about a free Black woman in Texas in the 1820s and 1830s and her journey, and it wasn't a romance either. I mean, there was rape and -
Sarah MacLean 17:46 / #
Emily, The Yellow Rose.
Beverly Jenkins 17:48 / #
There you go. Okay. Yeah, yeah. We don't talk too much, we don't talk very much about Anita very much. In fact, I've neglected to talk about her for years. You know, I was going through some stuff last night, just so I could be prepared for this, and came across a bunch of stuff I was like, "Oh man, I forgot about this! I forgot about that! I forgot this!" Anyway, nobody was writing historical romance. So they're looking for a book, slavery. That's the box. So here I come with a story with a Buffalo Soldier and an overly educated school teacher in a free Black town, on the plains of Kansas, 1879, and they're like, "What the hell is this? What are we supposed to do with this? We don't know what to do." So, I do remember one editor at - I don't know what house she was at, but she sent me a very, very encouraging letter. And she said she really, really wanted and she was just, I think she's like an executive editor now and she was just a baby, baby assistant back then. And she said, she really, really, really wanted to publish this. She said that she could not convince the higher ups to take it. You know? And like I said, I didn't care! You know, I was working at a library in the morning. You know, hey! Hello! Then came, I guess, the news and I didn't know anything about this, that Walter Zacharias was going to be putting out the Arabesque line.
Jennifer Prokop 19:22 / #
Oh, sure.
Beverly Jenkins 19:23 / #
And it was my understanding that Avon didn't want to get left behind because you know they were the number one publisher of romance back then and you couldn't find anybody. So Ellen Edwards, who used to be Vivian's assistant back when Vivian was working in that closet, you know with the candle lights, called her and said, "Do you have anybody? Do you know anybody?" And she said, "Well I just happen to know this little lady in Michigan." And so she called me on June 3, 1993. I told the story about my husband and I having this hell of a fight that day. I don't, like I said I don't know what we were fighting about, something stupid probably, and the phone rang, and it was Ellen, and she said she wanted to buy my book. So of course, I stopped the fight. [laughter]
Sarah MacLean 20:17 / #
Some things are important. [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 20:19 / #
Oh yeah! You know, he was like, "I guess I got to take your little ass to dinner." "Yes, you better take my ass to dinner!" [More laughter] So they kept sending me contracts.
Sarah MacLean 20:29 / #
This was 1993.
Beverly Jenkins 20:31 / #
This is 1993 and the book came out in '94. Summer of Black Love is what we called it, because that was also the summer that Arabesque released their first four or five, and so, on you know, on the road from there.
Jennifer Prokop 20:48 / #
So once you sold Night Song, did you immediately start working? I mean at that point how did you start to balance the idea of I have my dream job, but now I also have a writing job?
Beverly Jenkins 21:02 / #
Yeah, I didn't know what I was doing. It was all - [she laughs]
Sarah MacLean 21:06 / #
Feels very real. [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 21:09 / #
I had no idea what the hell I was doing because I had the writing. I had the job. I had the kids. I had the hats that I was wearing in the community. The hats I was wearing at church. I had a Brownie troop. [laughter] You know and because I was a stay-at-home mom, you know, after we adopted Jonathan, my son, early on too in the career, so as a stay-at-home mom, so then I'm doing field trips and I'm doing snow cones on Friday at school and you know, all of this stuff. The kids are in the band. And luckily, all praises to my late Hubby, because that first deadline, Ellen sent me a 14 page revision letter.
Sarah MacLean 21:58 / #
On Night Song.
Beverly Jenkins 21:59 / #
Yeah. 'Cause it was bad. She was like "Bev, -"
Beverly Jenkins 22:03 / #
"We love the love scenes. We need a story." [laughter] I was like, "Yeah, you need a story. Really?"
Sarah MacLean 22:12 / #
I just want to say something about Ellen Edwards because we have sort of danced around her in the past on Fated Mates, but you are the first of her authors who we've had on. She was editing in the heyday of the '90s authors.
Beverly Jenkins 22:28 / #
She was amazing!
Sarah MacLean 22:29 / #
At Harper. She edited, for our listeners, she edited Lisa Kleypas' Dreaming of You. She edited -
Beverly Jenkins 22:35 / #
She was amazing.
Sarah MacLean 22:37 / #
Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels. She edited you.
Jennifer Prokop 22:41 / #
Wow. I mean that's amazing.
Sarah MacLean 22:42 / #
This woman was, SHE was building romance too.
Beverly Jenkins 22:46 / #
Right, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 22:47 / #
And really setting -
Beverly Jenkins 22:48 / #
Yeah, yeah.
Sarah MacLean 22:49 / #
A lot of things in play. So what, so talk about that a little bit. What was the feeling like right around then?
Beverly Jenkins 22:55 / #
You know it was interesting because she taught me how to write commercial fiction. I will always be grateful for her, because of, and we had some, we had some bumps.
Beverly Jenkins 23:12 / #
We had some bumps and she's the reason I'm here. She taught me the differences in writing a romp as opposed to a period piece to - she was absolutely amazing! And when she left, her assistant, Christine Zika was amazing, 'cause Christine edited Vivid, and she edited Indigo.
Jennifer Prokop 23:39 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 23:41 / #
Will always be grateful to her for those two. So I guess I was doing okay, they kept offering me contracts.
Sarah MacLean 23:48 / #
You were doing great. [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 23:50 / #
You know, wasn't a whole lot of money and wasn't making a lot of money, but the idea that I was out in the marketplace, the African American readers were just over the moon. Some of the stories they told me of going in the bookstore and seeing Night Song, and you know, the first thing they did was run to, flip to the back to make sure it was written by a Black woman, and one woman said she sat in the bookstore right there on the floor, and started reading.
Sarah MacLean 24:22 / #
That's amazing.
Beverly Jenkins 24:23 / #
You know.
Sarah MacLean 24:24 / #
Well these also, the cover, it had that original cover? That burnt orange cover with the clinch on it.
Beverly Jenkins 24:30 / #
Mmmhmm. Right, yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 24:31 / #
Oh, it's so good.
Sarah MacLean 24:31 / #
I mean, it's such a beautiful cover.
Beverly Jenkins 24:34 / #
Tom, Tom Egner gave me just, you know, always grateful to him. He gave me some just fabulous, fabulous covers. And you know, a lot of times I would win Cover of the Year and all of that and I always sent the awards to him.
Jennifer Prokop 24:52 / #
Oh, that's nice.
Sarah MacLean 24:52 / #
What a decent person.
Beverly Jenkins 24:55 / #
And he said, "Nobody's ever done this before." I said, "Well, I didn't do the cover. You did!" [laughter] "So put it on your, on your whatever." You know.
Sarah MacLean 25:03 / #
For those of you listening, Tom Egner was the head of the art department at Avon. He basically designed all those clinch covers.
Beverly Jenkins 25:11 / #
I know. He was amazing. I miss him a lot. But then Avon's always got great art, you know, so, but I do miss him. So yeah, so then we got the People magazine spread, right after Night Song. I think it was in February of - book came out in '94. The spread, five pages!
Beverly Jenkins 25:33 / #
In People Magazine in February '95 and -
Sarah MacLean 25:38 / #
And what was that? About you?
Beverly Jenkins 25:40 / #
It's about the book and me, and you know, pictures of my husband, and pictures of my kitchen, and all of that. And the lady who did the article, her name was Nancy Drew. That was her real name.
Jennifer Prokop 25:51 / #
Amazing.
Beverly Jenkins 25:52 / #
And I got calls from people all over the country, "I opened my People magazine and there you were!" [laughter] And I'm like, "Yes! It is me! It is I!" You know, "I have arrived!" Umm, but very, very heady days, in the beginning.
Sarah MacLean 26:09 / #
Yeah. When did you know that romance was a huge thing and that you were making waves? I guess that's two questions. [Ms. Bev gives a throaty laugh] So -
Beverly Jenkins 26:22 / #
Yeah, it is, you know, and I have girlfriends who told me that I really don't know how influential I have been. You know, I'm just writin'. I'm just trying to tell the stories that I would have loved to have read as a teen or a young woman in my 20s or even my 30s. But I don't...I'm still amazed that people are buying my books! My mom used to tell me, she said, "Well, that's a good thing!" You know, so that you're not jaded or whatever and entitled, and all of that. I'm still amazed.
Sarah MacLean 27:00 / #
Did you feel, at the time, something was happening in the world though? Did it feel like - or was it just sort of, you know, life?
Beverly Jenkins 27:09 / #
It was just sort of life! I mean, yeah, you know, we were changing, in the sense that you had more Black women writing. Brenda and Donna Hill and Shirley Hailstock and -
Jennifer Prokop 27:22 / #
Now did that feel like it was because of Arabesque? Was it just sort of an explosion? Or -
Beverly Jenkins 27:29 / #
I think it was Arabesque.
Jennifer Prokop 27:31 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 27:32 / #
Because they were doing Contemporaries and these Black women were eating those books up.
Sarah MacLean 27:36 / #
Mmmhmm.
Jennifer Prokop 27:36 / #
Sure.
Beverly Jenkins 27:37 / #
And plus they had a great editor in Monica -
Sarah MacLean 27:41 / #
Monica Harris?
Beverly Jenkins 27:42 / #
Monica Harris. Yes, and she was just an amazing editor for those women. Rosie's Curl and Weave. She edited those anthologies, and they all absolutely loved her. Just loved her. So it was, it was sort of like an explosion.
Sarah MacLean 28:00 / #
But on the historical side, it was just you.
Jennifer Prokop 28:04 / #
Still just you.
Sarah MacLean 28:04 / #
There was no one else.
Beverly Jenkins 28:06 / #
It was just me and then the two books by Patricia Vaughn.
Beverly Jenkins 28:11 / #
Murmur Rain and I don't remember what the second title was. Gay Gunn had done Nowhere to Run, or was it nowhere to hide? Nowhere to Run. So, you know, Martha and the Vandellas. [laughter]
Sarah MacLean 28:23 / #
So at this point, who is your - whenever we talk to people who came up through the 90s in romance, there is such a discussion of community. Who you turn to as your group?
Jennifer Prokop 28:36 / #
Your people.
Sarah MacLean 28:39 / #
Who was that for you at this point?
Beverly Jenkins 28:42 / #
The readers.
Sarah MacLean 28:44 / #
Talk a little about your readers.
Beverly Jenkins 28:46 / #
It was the readers. I mean, all this fan mail I was getting and then we had two young women here who wanted to start the Beverly Jenkins Fan Club.
Sarah MacLean 28:54 / #
Amazing.
Beverly Jenkins 28:56 / #
Gloria Walker and Ava Williams and so they were, you know it was all snail mail back then. So they were sending out applications and they were sending out membership cards and newsletters and all of that. I was doing a lot of local touring, a lot of local schools and stuff, and so when I told them that I wanted to have a pajama party, they sort of looked at me like, really? [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 29:24 / #
What was the first year that you did that? Do you remember?
Beverly Jenkins 29:28 / #
Ahhhh, shoot - maybe '99? Maybe '97?
Jennifer Prokop 29:33 / #
So, a long time.
Beverly Jenkins 29:34 / #
It's been awhile, yeah, but Brenda and I would switch off years. I would do the pajama party one year and then she'd do her cruise the next year, but we sent out letters, because like I said, there was no computers back then, at least that I was using.
Jennifer Prokop 29:51 / #
Right.
Beverly Jenkins 29:52 / #
And 75 women showed up, from all over the country.
Sarah MacLean 29:55 / #
Amazing.
Jennifer Prokop 29:56 / #
It is amazing.
Beverly Jenkins 29:57 / #
And we had a hell of a time! And we talked books and my husband came, because you know, these were, "his women" he called them. [laughter] They loved him, he loved them. These women, Saturday night, when it was time to go home, everybody cried. We had formed this sisterhood, "a sistership" as we call it, and nobody wanted to go home. So we started doing it every two years. They were my, they were my bottom women. You know in the pimp world, your bottom woman is your original hoe, right? [laughter] And she's the one that keeps everything together and all of that, when he starts bringing in new women. So they were my foundation and a lot of them, most of them, are still with me today. So in the meantime, you know, online is growing.
Beverly Jenkins 30:52 / #
And people are telling me, "You need to be online" and I'm like, "No, I don't." [laughter] I don't need to be online.
Sarah MacLean 30:59 / #
I have my pajama party ladies.
Beverly Jenkins 31:01 / #
I have my pajama party ladies.
Jennifer Prokop 31:02 / #
I don't need a TikTok.
Beverly Jenkins 31:03 / #
Don't need a TikTok, don't need a 'gram. [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 31:08 / #
This was even before social media. This would have been more like a web page or -
Beverly Jenkins 31:12 / #
Yeah, and it was a, we started with a -
Sarah MacLean 31:15 / #
A blog.
Beverly Jenkins 31:17 / #
No, we started with a Yahoo group.
Sarah MacLean 31:18 / #
Oh, sure!
Jennifer Prokop 31:19 / #
Sure. Okay, that makes sense.
Beverly Jenkins 31:21 / #
So little did I know that there were other Black women reading groups online, and one of them was, and I cannot remember what the real name was, but they called themselves The Hotties because they read hot stuff. And this was a group that was connected to Gwen Osborne and Gwen is sort of like the griot of Black romance. She was one of the early reviewers for The Romance Reader. She knows where all the bodies are buried. [laughter] We sort of combined her group and my group, and that's when we started doing the traveling, going to all these different places and all that for African American history kinds of stuff and books! So it, you know, so I'm trying to build my own little empire, because I'm not getting a whole lot of support from my publisher. I mean, I guess they were just, one of the young editors said, "Well, they just like the cachet of having you." So I'm like okay, well I can handle that. I'm still gonna go out, do my thing and all of that, but (she sighs) then after my husband passed away in '03, I met Adrienne di Pietro, and she was the marketing director for Avon and we were at one of those Avon dinners in Dallas.
Sarah MacLean 32:46 / #
Those famous dinners.
Beverly Jenkins 32:48 / #
Mmmhmm! She and I were outside smoking. I didn't know who she was, she didn't know who I was. So we hit it off really well and we got to talking, and when we got home, about a week later, I got a call from her and she said, "You know what? I have looked at your file - " she said, "and we have not done a damn thing for you." She said this is getting ready to change. And it did. 'Cause I got a lot of support in the beginning, the first couple of years.
Jennifer Prokop 33:19 / #
People Magazine.
Sarah MacLean 33:20 / #
Five pages in People.
Beverly Jenkins 33:21 / #
Yeah, right, you know, and then nothing. I think too, I tell people, I said, "You know what? When my husband passed away, you know, it's like God says "Alright, I've taken something very, very precious from you. So how about try this as a replacement?"" And my career took off. So I don't know if it was the Spirit or I don't know. Whatever. Everything in its own time and place is also how I deal with it. So Adrienne just started pushing to want a lot more for me. I mean, she sent me a box of bookmarks that had to have 20,000 bookmarks in it. What am I going to do with these? [laughter] I still have half of that box somewhere in the house.
Sarah MacLean 34:04 / #
[Laughing] Oh my god! Bookmarks! Remember bookmarks?
Beverly Jenkins 34:07 / #
Oh God, girl, oh no, Lord have mercy. But she was amazing, and I was very, very sad when she was let go.
Sarah MacLean 34:17 / #
I only knew her - she was let go almost immediately after I started at Avon.
Beverly Jenkins 34:21 / #
Yeah, she was amazing as a marketing director.
Jennifer Prokop 34:25 / #
At this point, with the big RWA implosion, there was a lot of talk about how Borders in particular, which is a Michigan -
Beverly Jenkins 34:37 / #
Right.
Jennifer Prokop 34:37 / #
Didn't buy Black romance. So how aware were you of the impediments at the bookstore level?
Beverly Jenkins 34:47 / #
I didn't have that issue.
Jennifer Prokop 34:49 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 34:50 / #
Because I knew the people. Borders did my books for my pajama parties.
Jennifer Prokop 34:55 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 34:55 / #
Okay. In fact, one of the ladies, Kelly, who was supervising that, she and I are still friends. She's out on the coast doing something with books somewhere, but Barnes and Noble I had issues with.
Jennifer Prokop 35:11 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 35:12 / #
Still do. But Waldenbooks, Borders, you know and that whole thing with Borders and the Black section of the bookstore started at one of the stores near me, and the store was run by a Black woman. And this was at the height of the hip hop stuff, the urban stories. And from what I heard, she said the kids didn't know how to use a bookstore. And they would come in and they would ask for, you know, their favorite titles, and she would have to have her people, take them by the hand and show them where the spot was. And she got tired of it. So she put them all in one spot, so all she had to do was say, "Over there." Her sales went through the roof. Corporate, doing nothing but looking at the bottom line instead of the purpose behind it -
Jennifer Prokop 36:01 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 36:01 / #
Said, "Okay, let's put all the Black books in one spot."
Sarah MacLean 36:04 / #
Everywhere.
Jennifer Prokop 36:05 / #
It worked here.
Beverly Jenkins 36:06 / #
So now we've got this, you know, Jim Crow kind of section in bookstores. I had a reader tell me one time she said, "Miss Bev, I found your books in men's health." [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 36:22 / #
Good for them. That's where it should be. Leave those books there. [laughter]
They should really be put together. Romance and men's health. [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 36:31 / #
Yeah, I mean, Brenda and I, and the early Arabesque women were always shelved with romance. We were never not shelved with romance. Only in the last, whatever, 20 years or so, and it's such a disadvantage for the young women of color who are coming up to not be in the romance section, because it cuts down on discoverability.
Jennifer Prokop 36:56 / #
Of course.
Beverly Jenkins 36:57 / #
I would be nuts if that was happening to me right now. But luckily for me, because you know, people didn't know any better back then, I was in romance. I was in historicals. I was in African American fiction. I was in men's health. [laughter] I was all over the store, which was great, and then my readers were fierce about making sure the books were available. I would get emails and Facebook messages from women who said, "Well, I went to, you know, five different stores in LA and your book's not there." or, "I made them go in the back and get the box out and put your books out." [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 37:42 / #
Amazing.
Beverly Jenkins 37:43 / #
So you know, they were amazing. And then my mother! Bless her heart! She'd go into a bookstore and just move books around.
Sarah MacLean 37:51 / #
That's what mothers are for, no?
Beverly Jenkins 37:53 / #
Right! Exactly! Right. You know, she said, "I had to run out!" We lost her two years ago. She would carry around one of those little bitty spiral notebooks, purse size and it'd have all my books, every page had all my books on it. And she'd go to the mall, and she'd just hand it out to people. "This is my daughter's books! This is my daughter's books!" She was marketing when I had no marketing. She was director of marketing back then. [laughter] I remember her saying one time she was in Target, and you know, I had to tell her, "Mom, they were alphabetical." She said, "I don't care. Your books are on the bottom." And she said, "and I looked up in the camera was on me!" She said ,"and I ran out of the store!" [laughter] I don't think they're gonna put you in jail.
Sarah MacLean 38:36 / #
For re-aarranging shelves!
Beverly Jenkins 38:38 / #
For moving books around.
Sarah MacLean 38:40 / #
So there obviously has been a shift from when you started in 1993 'til now in romance. There have been tons of shifts, seismic shifts, I feel like romance moves so quickly.
Beverly Jenkins 38:53 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 38:53 / #
Can you speak to the way that you have seen the genre shift over time? You know, both as a writer and as a person who knows a lot about romance.
Beverly Jenkins 39:05 / #
Yeah. First we had the hardware shift from cut and paste and Wite-out and all that to computers and Scrivener and Google and, you know, I had to use libraries, of course, when I did my first book.
Jennifer Prokop 39:24 / #
Sure. For research.
Beverly Jenkins 39:26 / #
Yeah, 'cause none of the Master Goo, Mr. Google, Aunt Google, whatever people are calling her today, was not available back then. So that's been a seismic shift. The model is no longer blond and blue eyed and a size five. Everybody gets to have a HEA now no matter who you are, how you identify, who you love, because love is love. And that's been an amazing thing. Books are no longer rapey!
Jennifer Prokop 40:01 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 40:03 / #
You know, which was a big issue back in the day. A lot of women didn't want to read romance. "Oh, they're rapey!" "Well, yeah." "But it's not really rape." "Yes, it is." That's changed. We're now all about consent and consent is sexy! And then, you know, but we have fewer houses, too!
Beverly Jenkins 40:26 / #
When I started out, God, it had to be like 25 different houses. Now we got what? Four? Three?
Beverly Jenkins 40:33 / #
One maybe? Coming up?
Sarah MacLean 40:34 / #
Fewer and fewer it feels like every day.
Beverly Jenkins 40:36 / #
I know, it's such an incestuous business you know. They're eating their young all over the place.
Sarah MacLean 40:42 / #
What about book selling? What about stores? And discoverability?
Beverly Jenkins 40:47 / #
There are fewer stores. You don't have, we don't have book signings like we used to. Yeah, where people would be lined up outside for books and for autographs, and all that. And what I was going to say, is the biggest seismic shift for me, has been the rise of indie writers.
Sarah MacLean 41:08 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 41:09 / #
Their refusal to be told "no." Their bravery and stepping out there on faith and saying, "My story has value." I don't think romance would have opened up the way it has in the last 10 years without them.
Jennifer Prokop 41:26 / #
Agree. Absolutely.
Beverly Jenkins 41:28 / #
I take my hat off to them because they were like, "Fuck this! You don't want my stuff? Fine!" And now publishing, realizing how much money they've been leaving on the table. They're still not on board all the way, but now they're saying, "Oh, well you were successful over there. So how about you come play with us now?" And the ladies are saying, "Sure, but I'm not giving up my independent and I'm still gonna do, you know, I'm still gonna do hybrid."
Sarah MacLean 41:57 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 41:58 / #
And they learned the format, and they learned the marketing, and they learned the distribution, how to do the data and looked at the metadata. I'm just amazed, and, you know, I bow to them for - 'cause they changed the industry.
Sarah MacLean 42:14 / #
Mmmhmm.
Beverly Jenkins 42:14 / #
They changed the industry. So those are some of the seismic changes that I have seen.
Jennifer Prokop 42:20 / #
Do you think your relationships with fans are different because of social media? I mean, you've always had such a strong fan base that you built.
Beverly Jenkins 42:29 / #
I don't think it's changed. I think it's expanded my -
Jennifer Prokop 42:33 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 42:34 / #
My base, because you know how much I love Twitter. [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 42:40 / #
Same.
Beverly Jenkins 42:43 / #
I think it's given me access to more readers who are like, "Oh! She's not a scary Black woman! Let me read her books." You know, and then they realized, "Oh, these are some good ass books! So let me buy more!" I think my readership has probably expanded a good 35%.
Sarah MacLean 43:03 / #
Oh, wow.
Beverly Jenkins 43:03 / #
Just from from social media. And you know, and I know it's a cliche, but I always tell my fans, when I count my blessings, I count them twice. Because they have been - I wouldn't be here without them! Books are expensive!
Jennifer Prokop 43:22 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 43:23 / #
And they're taking their hard earned money and they're buying me or going to the library and borrowing me when they can be using that money for something else. So I'm very, very grateful, and that's one of the things that I always tell new writers and aspiring writers is to, "treat your readers like they're the gold that they are" because they are gold. So, but yeah, I never met a, never met a stranger! So you know, I'm loving the love that I get from social media. People keep telling me I need to be on Instagram, and I'm like, my editor would slap me if I was on another [laughter] social platform.
Jennifer Prokop 44:05 / #
Write the book.
Beverly Jenkins 44:05 / #
Right, right.
Sarah MacLean 44:07 / #
So now I do want to talk about, I'm bouncing back a little to your career, but you moved from, you didn't move, you added contemporaries, at some point along the way.
Beverly Jenkins 44:19 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 44:20 / #
And sweeter romance. So can you talk about that choice? The choice to sort of expand? You write a lot of books!
Beverly Jenkins 44:29 / #
They asked me! Erica asked me if I had any contemporaries.
Sarah MacLean 44:34 / #
That's Erica Tsang, everybody. The editorial director of Avon books.
Beverly Jenkins 44:38 / #
Yeah, she is awesome. She's been my editor since she was 12. [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 44:44 / #
Doogie Howser, editor M.D.
Beverly Jenkins 44:48 / #
I always say "you never say no."
Beverly Jenkins 44:51 / #
You know, you never say no. So basically, what I gave her was (The) Edge of Midnight, but it was my first manuscript that I sent to Avon, in probably the late '80s?
Sarah MacLean 45:07 / #
Oh! Wait now, see? This is a new piece of the story!
Beverly Jenkins 45:11 / #
Yeah, this was my contemporary. It was so bad. [laughter] God! You know, I tell people, I said, "That book was so bad, that the rejection letter almost beat me home from the post office." [laughter] That's how bad it was. It was awful, but I put it away.
Sarah MacLean 45:31 / #
Wait! I'm sorry I have to stop. I have to put a pause on this. So you did write a contemporary?
Beverly Jenkins 45:36 / #
Mmmhmm.
Sarah MacLean 45:37 / #
While you were, was this simultaneous to writing Night Song? Like were you writing them at the same time?
Beverly Jenkins 45:41 / #
Mmmhmm.
Sarah MacLean 45:42 / #
And so, so why did you write a contemporary? Was that because that was what romance was?
Beverly Jenkins 45:49 / #
That's - because the stories started coming.
Sarah MacLean 45:52 / #
That's what it was for you.
Jennifer Prokop 45:53 / #
Yeah, right.
Beverly Jenkins 45:54 / #
The stories started coming. So I put it away, and then when she asked if I had a contemporary, I brought this very, very bad manuscript out again, and I looked at it, and I realized what it was. The reason it was so bad, was number one was I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I didn't know how to write. And number two, the characters were the descendants of Hester and Galen from Indigo.
Sarah MacLean 46:25 / #
Aaahhhhh.
Beverly Jenkins 46:25 / #
So that book could not have been published until after Indigo was written. So I went in, I cleaned it up, now that I know how to write, right? You're like -
Jennifer Prokop 46:37 / #
Sure. You've learned how to write commercial fiction now.
Beverly Jenkins 46:40 / #
Right. Right. You know, it's like 14 books in, I know what I'm doing now. I guess. And I realized, like I said, who the characters were. So that kicked off the, I think the five, the five romantic suspenses that I had. So it's (The) Edge of Midnight, (The) Edge of Dawn, Black Lace, and then the two Blake sisters, Deadly Sexy and Sexy/Dangerous. And then I did, I don't know how many, six or seven little novellas for Kimani in the middle of all of this. And then I realized, you need to take a step back, 'cause you are wearing yourself out writing all - 'cause I was doing like, you know, two big books and a novella, or and two novellas a year. So doing four books a year and I was no longer a spring chicken. So I had to put those away for a while. So the characters in my Avon romantic suspense, are descendants of my historical characters. And then the YA was something else that they asked me to do. I think there were five or six of us that they asked. We did two apiece. So I did Belle (and the Beau) and I did Josephine (and the Soldier). I think it was Meg Cabot and Lorraine Heath, and I'm not sure who the other ladies were.
Jennifer Prokop 48:11 / #
And then when did the Blessings series? Was that something you wanted to do? Or something they suggested?
Beverly Jenkins 48:18 / #
[She laughs] Nancy sold the series without telling me.
Sarah MacLean 48:20 / #
[Gasp] Oh, Nancy! What are you doing?
Beverly Jenkins 48:29 / #
She had been on me for years about writing a small town series. And I'm like -
Sarah MacLean 48:36 / #
Well, let's be honest. For a long time it felt like small town was where the money was in romance. If you could pull off the big small town where lots of people, there's just always a cupcake shop and a veterinarian.
Beverly Jenkins 48:49 / #
I know. I know, but I didn't want to do that.
Sarah MacLean 48:52 / #
Nancy was like "Beverly, you like money." [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 48:55 / #
Well, I do. I do, but I was content to continue to write these award winning African American historicals, right?
Beverly Jenkins 49:06 / #
So after Mark passed away, I was up north was his mom, and got a call from Nancy on my cell phone. She never called me on my cell phone. In fact, I didn't think she had a cell phone back then. And she said, I was like I thought somebody had died! You know, I'm like Oh God, is Erica okay? You know, that kind of thing. And she said, "Well, I sold the series." I'm like, "what are you talking about?"
Sarah MacLean 49:34 / #
What series?
Beverly Jenkins 49:36 / #
Exactly. She said, "Remember that small town series I've been trying to get you to write?" And I'm like, "Yes." [laughter] She said, "Well..." I (Ms. Bev laughs) I love Nancy to death. She's just, she's so in charge of me and I really need somebody to be in charge of me and she is just THE best. She said, "Well, I sold, they only want a paragraph. Here's the money."
Sarah MacLean 50:01 / #
Since then [laughing] 25 books.
Beverly Jenkins 50:03 / #
Right. They only want a paragraph to get it started and here's the money. And I'm like okay, well, I guess I'm writing a small town series.
Jennifer Prokop 50:12 / #
Well, and it's how many books now? I mean, 12 or - ?
Beverly Jenkins 50:15 / #
Ten. I'm at ten.
Sarah MacLean 50:15 / #
And a television show in progress, I mean.
Beverly Jenkins 50:18 / #
If Al Roker would, you know, get it together and call us [laughter] maybe we could figure out what we're doing, but -
Sarah MacLean 50:25 / #
I mean, that's an interesting piece too, Bev, because you started publishing in the early '90s, which felt like a real time in romance and now you are thriving in this new - it feels like we're in another new time in a lot of ways.
Beverly Jenkins 50:40 / #
Yeah. We're in a different era now.
Sarah MacLean 50:42 / #
You have a film that is complete and out and everybody can watch now.
Beverly Jenkins 50:47 / #
Yep, yep. Iris, bless her heart, she did such a great job and she made that movie with safety pins and rubber bands.
Jennifer Prokop 50:57 / #
And a very handsome man.
Beverly Jenkins 50:58 / #
Oh yeah. Travis is pretty good, easy on the eyes!
Sarah MacLean 51:02 / #
And then you have Forbidden.
Beverly Jenkins 51:04 / #
Then I had the Sony thing. We sort of got a green light and then the damndemic hit and the people who had been so gung-ho about it scattered. Yeah, we're now back out on the block again, looking for a home. And then Al Roker's, I didn't even know he had an entertainment arm. Frankly, I had no idea. My girlfriends are like, "Well, didn't you ever see the Holly Robinson Peete stuff on - " I'm like, "No. I don't watch Hallmark." [laughter] So you know, back then Black people didn't have Christmas on Hallmark. You know, no brown people and Black people did not have Christmas on Hallmark or Lifetime. So why would I watch that? Umm. Sorry.
Sarah MacLean 51:48 / #
No, it's real.
Beverly Jenkins 51:50 / #
It is what it is, you know. So, but now things have changed, which is awesome. Supposedly they're in talks with Hallmark. I'm not, you know, we're still waiting to see what is really going on, but if that is the case, I'm pretty, pretty excited and all that. So we'll see, hopefully soon, what we can talk about is going to happen. So.
Sarah MacLean 52:14 / #
Can we talk a little bit about legacy? I know that you still think about, you're still surprised people buy your books but - [laughter]
Beverly Jenkins 52:24 / #
I am! I am!
Jennifer Prokop 52:25 / #
We're not.
Beverly Jenkins 52:26 / #
Are they gonna throw tomatoes at me this time? [laughter]
Sarah MacLean 52:30 / #
I mean I'm really curious, I'm curious about a couple of things. I'm curious about, one of the questions that Jen and I, we've sort of been dancing around this. What's the question, the really, the best question to ask? So we have a few.
Beverly Jenkins 52:42 / #
Okay.
Sarah MacLean 52:42 / #
The first, the one that sort of came to me this week, is when did you know you could do this thing? When did you feel like I'm a writer? I can do it. This is my - I feel good about it.
Beverly Jenkins 52:56 / #
After I survived the first deadline.
Jennifer Prokop 52:59 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 53:01 / #
14 pages of revision.
Sarah MacLean 53:04 / #
Wite-out and tape.
Beverly Jenkins 53:04 / #
That they wanted in 35 days. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I did it. Hubby did all the cooking. He did all the, you know, grabbing the kids from school. He did all of the mom stuff. Fed me. And after that first book, and then when I saw it in the stores! One of the best things about that first book was that some of my elementary school teachers were still alive, and they were at those first signings, when I did signings in Detroit, and they just wept. They just wept. Because, you know, my mom always saw me, my momma always said, "You know, you're gonna be somebody special." And the teachers dealt with me that way. They put me on a stage in the fourth grade, and I've been on stage ever since. [laughter] Never, never met a microphone I did not like. [laughter] But the idea that they were there to see my success meant a lot. So I don't know, you know, legacy, girl... I don't know. I think your legacy should be written by somebody else, not yourself. I think the readers could probably tell you what the books mean to them more than than I can. I just like the idea of writing it and elevating our history and poking holes in the stereotypes, like you would do with a pen and a balloon. And always, always portraying the race in a positive way. So I don't know, is that a legacy? [laughs]
Sarah MacLean 54:35 / #
I think so.
Beverly Jenkins 54:37 / #
Standing on the shoulders of the actual historians who, are actual historians, and not kitchen table historians like me. [laughter] I owe a lot of people a lot for where I am today.
Jennifer Prokop 54:52 / #
I don't think there's ever been a time, Bev, when you and I have talked or when I've heard you speak where you haven't named the names of the people who have been a part of it.
Beverly Jenkins 55:02 / #
You know, it's so important because, you know, I didn't just show up and show out. [laughter] You know, this was - I've been a project all my life. My mother pouring stuff into me. My dad pouring stuff in me. My aunts who taught me style, wit and grace, pouring stuff into me. My teachers, people in my neighborhood, my church, my siblings. We all just don't start out as the sun, you know, issuing, gotta wait for the Earth to cool and all of that kind of stuff, so.
Jennifer Prokop 55:41 / #
When you think about your body of work, what do you think of as being the hallmarks of a Beverly Jenkins novel?
Beverly Jenkins 55:53 / #
Entertainment. Education. Heroines who know who they are, and the men who love them madly. I like the banter. I like that they all have the three gifts that I've talked about with Dorothy Sterling and the sense that they all work. They all have a commitment to community and they all in different ways push the envelope on gender and race. And they're fun!
Jennifer Prokop 56:22 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 56:23 / #
You know, they're inspiring to many people. They're uplifting. My stories center dark-skinned Black women in ways that have never been centered before. I'm just a little Black girl from the east side of Detroit trying to write a story [laughs] that I can be proud of and that those who read it can be proud of.
Sarah MacLean 56:45 / #
Do you feel like there was a book that turned the tide for you in terms of readership?
Beverly Jenkins 56:51 / #
I think my books are being discovered every day, which is an amazing kind of thing. Indigo, of course. Everybody talks about Indigo. And then we had a whole group of people with the Blessings series. That's a whole different group of folks. And then the YA, because there's nothing for young women that's historical that way, and in fact, I got lots of - this is why I had to add an extra chapter when we did the re-publishing. The girls wanted to know did they get married? [laughter]
Jennifer Prokop 57:25 / #
Sure.
Beverly Jenkins 57:27 / #
So I added the weddings.
Sarah MacLean 57:29 / #
Oh my gosh. What a gift!
Jennifer Prokop 57:32 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 57:32 / #
At the end of each book, and I got a lot of letters from the moms that were saying that she wanted her daughters or daughter, however many, to know that this is how they should be treated by a young man. Old school. I mean, so okay, so we got milestones. We've got Night Song, which is first, and then we've got the YA, and then we've got (The) Edge of Midnight, because that was my first -
Sarah MacLean 57:59 / #
Contemporary.
Beverly Jenkins 58:00 / #
And then from that very, very awful manuscript to my first romantic suspense, to the Blessings. So what is that? Four or five different milestones?
Jennifer Prokop 58:13 / #
So we talked a little bit about your covers.
Beverly Jenkins 58:16 / #
Mmmhmm.
Jennifer Prokop 58:16 / #
Okay, I have to ask about Night Hawk because it's hot. I mean, [laughter] I mean, look, I'm a simple woman.
Beverly Jenkins 58:26 / #
Hey, I'm with you.
Jennifer Prokop 58:27 / #
I don't know the order, because I my brain is full. Night Hawk is, I mean, obviously he's so handsome, but it's not a clinch cover.
Beverly Jenkins 58:36 / #
Nope.
Jennifer Prokop 58:37 / #
Right. So is that something you asked for, or is that something where they gifted you this present?
Beverly Jenkins 58:43 / #
Tom did that on his own.
Jennifer Prokop 58:46 / #
Okay. Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 58:47 / #
He sent it to me, and I tell the story, I was on deadline. I booted up the laptop and that was the first thing I saw.
Jennifer Prokop 58:58 / #
Okay.
Beverly Jenkins 58:58 / #
And it was just the picture. It didn't have any of the printing on it. There's no letters, just this very hot guy, and I went, "Oh hell, that'll wake a sister up!"
Sarah MacLean 59:08 / #
Yes, please.
Beverly Jenkins 59:10 / #
Yes, more please! Then I put him on the, because I was like okay, the ladies gotta see this. So I put it on the Facebook page and they went insane. [laughter] I told them around noon, "Okay, I'm taking him down now, so he can get a towel from y'all slobbering all over him and licking him everywhere and all of that. Right?" So then I got a request, a Facebook friend request from him. I don't remember his name now, it's been -
Jennifer Prokop 59:40 / #
Oh, the model.
Beverly Jenkins 59:41 / #
Yeah. It's like I said my head's full, just like yours is full. But yeah, no, that was you know, that was Tom's gift.
Jennifer Prokop 59:51 / #
Okay.
Sarah MacLean 59:51 / #
Tom. Tom knew.
Jennifer Prokop 59:53 / #
Yeah.
Beverly Jenkins 59:54 / #
And then it's, and that whole thing with Preacher is so interesting because if you read his Introduction to his character in (The Taming of) Jessi Rose, he's very underwhelming. Very underwhelming.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:08 / #
He just wasn't ready yet.
Beverly Jenkins 1:00:09 / #
I know and the women were like, "Preacher! Preacher! Preacher!" and some of my girlfriends were like, "Why in the hell do they want a book with him?"
Sarah MacLean 1:00:15 / #
But isn't that amazing? Romance readers, they just, they know. They know.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:20 / #
We know.
So I had to give him a makeover [laughter] in order to make him, you know, Jenkins worthy or whatever, but I always, that always tickles me because, he was not, he was just a bounty hunter. He wasn't even -
Listen, romance. Just a bounty hunter. Come on.
Beverly Jenkins 1:00:40 / #
I know. I know. I know.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:42 / #
Well and that's it. It's interesting and that was, let me look, I'm going to look here, 2010, oh, 2011.
Beverly Jenkins 1:00:50 / #
Okay. Okay.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:51 / #
Okay, so I mean, and that's the thing to me, it feels like, but he really is the star of that book. You know what I mean?
Beverly Jenkins 1:00:59 / #
He is the star of that book.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:59 / #
Right. He's such a fascinating character.
Beverly Jenkins 1:01:02 / #
Yeah, he's the star of that book, and then Maggie. I met the real Maggie. I was in Omaha, Nebraska for a book signing, and this young woman came up to me, and she was in tears. She was Native and Black. And she said, nobody's writing for me, but me. Nobody's writing for her but me and we really, really had a nice bonding kind of moment. This was before I wrote the book. So when we decided to do Preacher's book, I named the character Maggie. That was her name, Maggie Chandler Smith, and gave Maggie the real Maggie's ethnicity. So she does exist. Somebody told me this, "Oh, Ms. Bev, you know, all your characters really existed in life sometime." I'm like, okay, that's kind of scary, but Maggie does exist. She's in Nebraska.
Jennifer Prokop 1:02:09 / #
Wow, what a gift, Bev. Wow. Well, this is fabulous. [Ms. Bev laughs] Thank you so much.
Sarah, I love listening to Beverly Jenkins talk.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:23 / #
I mean, I could listen to her all day, every day. She's fascinating.
Jennifer Prokop 1:02:27 / #
I've been lucky enough to interview her when Wild Rain came out. I did a YouTube interview with her for Love's Sweet Arrow. So, you know, I have had the pleasure of talking to Ms. Bev, you know, several times, but I still think hearing someone's longitudinal story? Right? You know, the focus is different when it's like, oh, you've got a new book out.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:49 / #
I think it's worth listening to Bev's interviews on the Black Romance (History) podcast.
Jennifer Prokop 1:02:55 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:02:56 / #
As well, we'll put links to those in show notes. Over there, you'll get a different kind of history from Bev, and I think the two together will be really interesting if you're Beverly Jenkins fans like we are. You know, one thing we should say is that she in fact does have a new book coming out.
Jennifer Prokop 1:03:14 / #
This month Bev is returning to romantic suspense.
Jennifer Prokop 1:03:18 / #
And she has a book out with Montlake called Rare Danger, which, listen to this: a librarian's quiet life becomes a page turner of adventure, romance and murder!
Sarah MacLean 1:03:29 / #
Doo doo doo! Also, now you know that all that librarian stuff will be properly sourced from her own life.
Jennifer Prokop 1:03:40 / #
I mean, Rebecca Romney is gonna love this. For Jasmine Ware, curating books for an exclusive clientele is her passion. Until an old friend, a dealer of rare books, goes missing and his partner is murdered. You know, I really love Ms. Bev's romantic suspense. So I think it's really cool to see her returning to this. To have an author still be experimenting, you know, she's written YA, she writes romance, she writes historical. She's returning to romantic suspense. I love that there's - I think it's a real model for you can keep doing whatever it is you want to do.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:14 / #
Yeah. What's amazing to me as a writer, is we all kind of have quiet stories in our head that we think oh, maybe someday I'll write that book.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:22 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:23 / #
But it seems to me Bev has just an endless supply of them and I don't feel like that. I always sort of know what the next couple are, but -
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:33 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:33 / #
But I feel like she's, she's got romantic suspense. She's got the Blessings series. She's got all of her glorious historicals. I feel like someday there's gonna be some epic sci-fi or fantasy something from her.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:46 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:46 / #
And I just, every time I talk to her, I just feel really blessed to know her. And the other thing I really like from an author perspective, Bev always reminds me how valuable readers are. And what I mean by that is, I mean obviously, I love, I love the people who read my books, and I feel really honored to have them all read my books, but what Beverly reminds me of, every time we talk, is how important, how the relationship between author and reader fills us both.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:21 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:22 / #
And that is something that you can lose sight of when you're kind of deep in the manuscript, like in the weeds, you forget sometimes that the well is filled by readers in the end, and that is always a good, a good reminder. And I really value my friendship with Beverly because every time we talk, that's a piece that always comes through.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:46 / #
And we heard her describe how different it was back in the day, right? Where you're like sending actual newsletters, were not just emails or -
Sarah MacLean 1:05:58 / #
Yeah. In print.
Jennifer Prokop 1:06:00 / #
[laughs] Right? And I mean, I think that's a part of it too. One of the things I really have loved about the Trailblazers, I mean obviously just hearing people's stories, but also hearing what it was like. I mean, okay, this is everybody, you and me, we've seen Romancing the Stone, and at the beginning of this movie, and she's a romance novelist in the '80s. She's packing up her manuscript, is, you know, is a bunch of papers in a box!
Sarah MacLean 1:06:27 / #
We can't talk about it, but there's another Trailblazer episode where we fully forgot that, or I fully forgot that the world the technology did not exist.
Jennifer Prokop 1:06:36 / #
Yes!
Sarah MacLean 1:06:37 / #
Back in the day.
Jennifer Prokop 1:06:38 / #
And that's I think, part of what's cool about that, is anytime you hear a story where people talk about how the technology has changed, it just goes to show you how fast the world moves. I really love those stories too. Thinking about what it was like to curate a group of passionate readers, who are your devoted fans and doing it without social media.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:06 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:07 / #
And so that's the thing that I also found, that reader connection with Bev is so strong, so -
Sarah MacLean 1:07:13 / #
We're avowed stans of Beverly Jenkins here at Fated Mates. It will surprise none of you. So we are really, it's just one more week of feeling incredibly lucky -
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:25 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:25 / #
To be able to do this thing that we love so much. You've been listening to Fated Mates. You can find us at fatedmates.net, where you'll find all sorts of links to all sorts of fun things like gear, and stickers, and music and other things. You can find us on Twitter at Fated Mates or on Instagram at Fated Mates Pod. Or just you know, you can find me at sarahmaclean.net, Jen at jenreadsromance.com, where you can learn more about getting her to edit your next great masterpiece, and we are produced by Eric Mortensen. Thanks so much for listening!