Stop Book Banning: A Special Episode of Fated Mates
In 2022, book bans in United States schools and libraries are at their highest since the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom started collecting data. Bans are happening around the country, in every state, and disproportionately affecting books by and about LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC people. What’s more, challenges are likely underreported, because librarians who are resisting them are facing unprecedented workplace retribution and in some cases physical danger.
Book Bans are on the ballot on November 8th, in every state and local election, up and down the ticket. State legislatures, local town councils, county leadership and school boards are being overrun with candidates supported by conservative activists looking to limit access to books and ideas that offer identity, empathy, awareness, and power to young people around the country.
We’re concerned, so today, we’re releasing a special episode of Fated Mates focused on book bans across the country. We interview three experts on what’s happening, who is most impacted, and how we can all help. Show notes are extensive, and we hope you’ll take a look at them.
Thank you to librarians, teachers, and kids and families who are standing up and speaking out. We are proud to stand with you. And a huge thank you to our friends at the Big Gay Fiction Podcast for transcribing this episode.
Guests
Jarett Dapier, librarian, activist and author of Mr. Watson’s Chickens
Lily Freeman, activist and student in Central Bucks County, PA. Read Lily’s op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer and follow her instagram at ProjectUncensored.
Melissa Walker, political activist at The States Project, journalist, and Middle Grade and YA author of Violet on the Runway, Let’s Pretend We Never Met, Small Town Sinners and more.
Resources
The Youth Censorship Database at the National Coalition Against Censorship
Book Riot’s censorship coverage is excellent and updated almost daily. They have an excellent explainer for how to find and develop a local anti-censorship group
Intellectual Round Table Freedom Blog: an exhaustive list of links related to news about challenges, censorship, and banning incidents, developing issues, and controversies that is updated weekly
PEN America’s data on School Book Bans and Index of Educational Gag Orders
American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, full of resources and toolkits on challenges and how to combat them
What’s happening in Central Bucks County, PA is happening all over the country. Kids, families and educators are protesting loudly
Advocates for Inclusive Education, for more information on what’s happening on the ground in Bucks County, PA
A map from ALA Banned Books week at the University of Illinois Library, and another from Red Wine & Blue.
Teens around the country can get library cards from the Brooklyn Public Library. To apply for the card, teens can send a note to BooksUnbanned@bklynlibrary.org, or via the Library’s s teen-run Instagram account, @bklynfuture. The $50 fee normally associated with out-of-state cards will be waived
Learn more about the Book Ban Busters at Red Wine & Blue.
Ballotpedia is a resource for your local ballot and your local election maps
Vote.org, to check your voter registration, locate your voting place and more
How to Help
Educate yourself about the book challenge process in your school district: How it works, who sits on the book challenge committee, how those committee members are appointed.
If there are book bans and protests in your school district, attend local school board meetings and support students, teachers & librarians who are speaking up.
Tell your local public and school librarians they have your support. Write letters. Visit the library. Thank them for standing for intellectual freedom.
Research school board candidates in your district. Vote accordingly.
Consider running for something! Your school board and your state legislature need you! Consider this us telling you seven times! (We’ll phonebank for you!)
Vote to flip your state legislature blue. Rally your friends to join you in a Giving Circle at the States Project.
Donate to organizations (listed below) that support intellectual freedom and combat book bans.
Organizations to Support (and Volunteer with)
You can join PenAmerica, and your membership helps defend free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture.
Donate to the Freedom To Read Foundation and become a member. The Freedom To Read Foundation effectively conducts important first amendment legal work regarding book bans and censorship.
GLSEN, Creating a Better World for LGBTQ Students
Intellectual Freedom Endowment Fund at the American Library Association
The National Coalition Against Censorship, providing direct intervention for people and groups facing censorship
The States Project, helping to flip (or keep) state legislatures blue
The Trevor Project, supporting LGBTQ young people 24/7, all year round
We Believe in Education, a movement of parents and families fighting for students’ freedom to learn
The Most Banned Books of 2021
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Reasons: Banned, challenged, and restricted for LGBTQIA+ content, and because it was considered to have sexually explicit imagesLawn Boy by Jonathan Evison
Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to be sexually explicitAll Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson
Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content, profanity, and because it was considered to be sexually explicitOut of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez
Reasons: Banned, challenged, and restricted for depictions of abuse and because it was considered to be sexually explicitThe Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity, violence, and because it was thought to promote an anti-police message and indoctrination of a social agendaThe Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Reasons: Banned and challenged for profanity, sexual references and use of a derogatory termMe and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
Reasons: Banned and challenged because it was considered sexually explicit and degrading to womenThe Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Reasons: Banned and challenged because it depicts child sexual abuse and was considered sexually explicitThis Book is Gay by Juno Dawson
Reasons: Banned, challenged, relocated, and restricted for providing sexual education and LGBTQIA+ content.Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin
Reasons: Banned and challenged for LGBTQIA+ content and because it was considered to be sexually explicit.
Books from our Guests
A huge thanks to our friends at Big Gay Fiction Podcast for transcribing this episode!
Sarah: So we've got an urgent off-Wednesday episode today, Jen.
Jen: Yeah. We've been working on this one for a while, everybody. You've heard us talking about this wave of book banning that has been happening all over the country. We are concerned about this at many levels as readers primarily, as parents, as a teacher, but also as romance readers. Anyone coming for sexual content writ large, as all bad, is eventually coming for romance. And we are foolish if we think that it won't, but also even if it's not sort of...I don't want it to sound like it's just, like, self-motivated. I think it is deeply worrying as a reader to live in a country where book banning is so widespread.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jen: And in a way that isn't just like people saying, "I don't want this book in the library," but that is being written into laws in ways that make it impossible for librarians and teachers to even talk about the presence of these books. It's so...I almost, like, lack the words for it because it's so evil to me. Like, that's really the only word I have for it.
Sarah: And antithetical to what we like to call the fabric of, you know, a nation. When we talk to people who...you know, constitutional purists, like, book banning feels like it's a hard limit, or should be a hard limit in America. It's funny because I just recently did an event with Hilary Hallett, who is a professor at Columbia of women's history. And during our conversation, it came up that in the United States, you can't ban a book before it's written. It has to be written in order to ban it. And that felt for a long time like it was the safety net, like, you can't ban a thought.
But now here we are, and we are in a place where important texts are being written, texts that are about identity, and about culture, and about hope, and that give students and other people, you know, of all ages access to empathy, and storytelling, and identity, and are being stripped from our kids' libraries and our public libraries. And so this episode felt really important.
It reminds me that we have not introduced ourselves. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels and I write them.
Jen: And I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader, editor, and I'm a teacher.
Sarah: And you are listening to what we would like to call a very special episode of "Fated Mates." Because we've been recording it for a while, you'll hear from three really interesting people on this episode, people who are much smarter than us. And we felt that it was really important that this episode get out in advance of the election. Election day is the first Tuesday in November. And you can check your registration at vote.org, which is essential. Make sure you're registered. We need you at the polls in the United States. And we're gonna do this.
We're gonna hear from three people. We're gonna hear from an author and librarian who has a lot to say. We're gonna hear from a kid who's impacted every day by these bans in Pennsylvania. And we're gonna hear from an author and political activist.
Jen, tell us about our first guest.
Jen: So, our first guest is Jarrett Dapier. He is a Chicago guy. My friend Elisa set us up with him, so thanks to Elisa. He is an author and a librarian. And he also teaches a class at the University of Illinois, like, librarian school, whatever it's called, in censorship. So it was really important for us to talk to someone who has, like, the big broad scope not just of what's happening now, but of censorship, kind of the history of censorship in America. And he does a great job, I think, at laying out sort of what's happening, how it's impacting schools and libraries across the country, as well as teachers and librarians, and the legal ramifications of what's going on.
One other thing I guess I should say before we hear from Jarrett is our goal really with all three people, you'll hear us asking similar questions, is what can our listeners do? What can our listeners do? So we hope that as you listen to today's episode, that you are inspired to take some kind of action. And maybe all you can do is donate money, but writing letters, going to a school board meeting, you're gonna hear similar things from each person voting.
So our goal, everybody, like, we don't usually give you action steps, we give you books to read… is at the end of this, we hope that you will be inspired to do something. And one of those really important things is also, no matter what you are going to do, is to share what you have learned here with other people.
One of the things that I'm shocked to find, I think everybody is, that even though this wave of book bannings is happening, many people are unaware of it. They're unaware of what's happening in their local community, they're unaware of what's happening across the country. Or they feel like it can't happen in their local community, it can only happen somewhere else. And we're telling you that's just not true.
So we hope that you'll vote, you'll share the news, and that you yourself by the end will think, "This is something I can do." So I just wanna be really clear before we hear from Jarrett, like, you have a job to do, too, listeners. And that is to try and make this better in whatever way you can.
Sarah: Two, I just want to, before we start with Jarrett, point to show notes which will be filled with links. All of our guests gave us great links, great resources. Also, I wanna underscore, if you are curious about what's going on in your own community, you can visit the PEN America site, which has a comprehensive list as of now of book bannings and book challenges across the country. You will be shocked by the states where this is happening on the regular, including places like Vermont, which you would never expect to be on this list. So, yeah, it's important.
And, also we should say Jarrett is the author of a book called "Mr. Watson's Chickens," which is possibly the most delightful picture-book concept ever, about Mr. Watson and his partner, who have a house full of chickens.
Jen: All right. Without further ado, here's Jarrett.
Hello, everybody. So, as you know, we are talking about censorship this week on "Fated Mates." And we are lucky to have a very special guest with us. We're gonna let him introduce himself. This is a friend of...I have a friend, Elisa. They were really instrumental, their school librarian. And I was like, "Elisa, help me find the perfect guest to talk about censorship." And they said, "You need to talk to Jarrett." So, welcome, Jarrett, to "Fated Mates."
Jarrett: Thank you so much.
Sarah: Thanks for joining us.
Jarrett: I'm really happy to be here. Yeah.
Sarah: I said this before we started, but Jarrett actually wins Best Guest Award because he came with his own show notes, so it's terrific.
Jarrett: Like I said, also, I'm a librarian, so I have to come prepared.
Sarah: So, Jarrett, just for everybody, tell us a little bit about yourself, like, how you came to...you're an author, too. So, give us the whole frame. And then, why don't you bring us to how you came to be so interested in censorship, and what's happening now?
Jarrett: Yeah, of course. Again, thank you for having me. I've been really looking forward to this all week because things are so upsetting and so difficult right now that any opportunity to speak with people who understand what's happening, and why it's so severe and threatening to a lot of rights that that we hold dear or want to see strengthened, is important. And I think it's important to my own mental health. So thank you for talking with me about this topic.
So, yeah, I'm Jarrett Dapier, and I'm a librarian. I've worked as a young adult librarian with teens in the Chicagoland area since 2009. And I'm also an author of books for children and teens. So I have three picture books out. One is called "Jazz for Lunch!" The second is called "Mr. Watson's Chickens." And the one that just came out is called "The Most Haunted House in America."
And in one year, Chronicle Books will publish my first YA piece of writing. It's a graphic novel about an infamous censorship incident that occurred in Chicago Public Schools in 2013 when the administration for CPS sent out a directive to all schools to remove the graphic novel, "Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi, from every single school, classrooms and libraries.
And a group of students, it was a almost totally student-led response, they protested and made a very big deal, and were quite savvy about including media and comic artists, and just alerting the public. And as a result, it became a lot bigger than I think CPS ever thought it would be. And they were instrumental in getting the sort of blanket ban mostly reversed. I say that because there was a caveat.
But it's a graphic novel. It's a fictionalization of that whole sort of string of events. But I remember when it happened in 2013, and I've always just felt really, really connected to that story. "Persepolis" is one of my favorite books. And I was really inspired by the teens who organized very quickly to fight back against the censorship of that book. So that comes out in a year, and it's called "Wake Now In The Fire."
Jen: Congratulations.
Jarrett: Thank you.
Jen: What this also tells me is that you have been interested in censorship for a long time.
Jarrett: Yes, I have. My first job out of college was at the ACLU of Illinois. And I was a legal assistant for the First Amendment project. And I was always, first and foremost, passionate about the rights of teenagers, particularly their rights to speech and freedom of expression. It really sort of professionally started there, but I also know when I was a teenager, I felt really passionate about it then, too.
Jen: I'm in my late 40s. And, like, in the '80s when I was a teenager, a really popular movie was called, like, "Field of Dreams." I don't know if you remember this.
Jarrett: Oh, yeah.
Jen: But there's this throwaway scene where the people in this small Iowa town want to ban books. And, like, they're clearly the bad guys.
Jarrett: Yes.
Jen: And it's like Kevin Costner's wife is like, "Is that who we are? Like, book banners?" And I just remember sometimes I think about that scene and think, what happened to my generation, that we grew up with a movie where clear...this was like a easy shortcut for, like, being a bad guy.
Sarah: And it's not like "Field of Dreams" was like a way-out-there movie.
Jen: No. Exactly.
Sarah: It's pretty conservative, like, small C movie.
Jen: Yes. And I keep thinking to myself like, what happened to my generation that, like, now we're the book banners? And I mean, obviously, not we, but when we think about, like, the history of book banning, like, what's happening now does seem qualitatively different in some ways? Is that true or does it just feel that way to me?
Jarrett: I think it is absolutely true. It's unique to our time right now. And that is because the sheer pervasiveness of book challenges and book bans in schools, and also public libraries, it's staggering, and it's nationwide. And it has varying levels of extremity...extremity, extremity, extremeness? You know what I mean?
Sarah: I do.
Jarrett: Depending on the place and, I guess, the sort of twisted imagination of the people who are organizing these bans. So it's nationwide and it's affecting school librarians, teachers, public librarians. It's definitely affecting administrators whose feet are being held to the fire by very aggressive people. And it's, most importantly, really harming teenagers' access to a wide variety of materials that I would argue are life-saving at times, and are definitely affirming for many, many teens.
And the thing about the people who are doing this is that they are organized, they're strategic, and they are well funded. And while a lot of it looks very grassroots, a lot of it is funded by conservative right-wing, you know, political action committees, as well as just private donors in places like Texas and Pennsylvania, Tennessee, so on, and especially Florida, of course.
But looking specifically at American history of censorship, I teach intellectual freedom and censorship at University of Illinois for their library school, and we were just talking about this last week. That while we can say that now feels different, we have to acknowledge the strains of authoritarian laws that have constricted, and ruined, and harmed the lives of people of color, women, LGBT folks, religious minorities, people with disabilities, you know, throughout the history of America to the point that those stories were not allowed to be published. Or if they were, it was underground or it was, you know, even sort of samizdat. That's, like, the Russian sort of, like, underground, like hand-copied zine style, you know, passed from person to person.
Jen: The way people read, like, "Animal Farm."
Jarrett: Exactly. And, so we have to acknowledge that when you look at Jim Crow and the segregation of public libraries, and the fact that, you know, people of color had to go in a different door, if they were allowed in at all, and their materials were garbage. And there was no open access to information for, you know, Black folks before the Civil Rights Movement. And just the country in a lot of ways is founded on censorship of perspectives that are not white, heterosexual, cisgendered, and male.
Sarah: And wealthy, right?
Jarrett: And wealthy. Yeah. And I was listening to your interstitial podcast in 2019. The things you talked about, the patriarchy, and the white wealthy male drive to control bodies and minds has been alive since the beginning, and is alive right now. And we're seeing it in a different form.
But one thing I think is true is that it's good news in a way that these stories are out there to be censored in the first place. Because 20 years ago, they weren't, especially not in schools. Maybe a little bit in public libraries, but publishers just weren't publishing, you know, more than a handful of Black authors writing for teens, or less than that. And certainly not LGBTQ materials or representation unless it was, you know, probably, like, stories that, you know, warned.
Sarah: Exactly. The dangers of this.
Jarrett: Exactly. But, yeah, I think what is different is just how unabashedly out in the open the sexism, and misogyny, and homophobia, and racism going on right now.
Sarah: Can you talk a little bit about what's happening from the perspective of the librarians who are really, like, front-lining this? Like, what is going on among all of you to combat this? Or, I mean, what's it like? Well, I mean, this is sort of a...I mean, what's it like being the person the kids are coming to?
Jarrett: So, I really feel for the school librarians that are being attacked right now, because oftentimes if a school district has a school librarian at all, it's just one. And so that person is in, you know, by its nature, a kind of lonely role already. And they are being scapegoated, absolutely, for so many things.
There's a intellectual freedom expert named Dr. Emily Knox. She's a friend of mine. But she always, always encourages people to try and think about what is behind the motivation to ban a book? Not necessarily because we want to justify it or excuse it in any way, although I do believe, you know, empathy is a very important force. But to be effective and to be strategic in countering it, we have to understand not just what it is on its face, but what is driving it.
And a lot of librarians right now, I just think, are feeling...well, for one thing, a lot of people are running from the profession, because they're getting death threats. In some states, they are being criminalized. So some states are passing laws, or hoping to pass laws that will criminalize a librarian for providing a material that the state or the school board has deemed obscene or pornographic. And this, number one, threatens jail time, but also the possibility of being ruined financially because of lawsuits.
And so you're seeing this...librarians in a lot of ways are a very vulnerable population. We don't have much political power. The school librarians are often on their own, though they have networks online and, of course, professional networks. But I think, to answer your question, we're feeling very demoralized and very scared. Personally, I think public libraries are a bedrock institution of democracy. And the fact that some are closing down because they're being defunded, and the fact that some are closing down because the staff just, you know, in one fell swoop, quit, which I don't blame them for, is really alarming and scary.
Jen: Like, I mean, obviously right now, if everyone could see our faces, we're all just like...it's so scary. The weight of this is so overwhelming.
Sarah: It is worth saying that Nora Roberts...we'll put this in show notes, but Nora Roberts a couple of weeks ago funded a library that was closed by the town board...
Jarrett: Yes.
Sarah: ...because of the materials within. And I love the idea that she just called them up and said, "How much does it cost to keep you open for the year?" And she wrote them a check. And someday...
Jarrett: Absolutely.
Sarah: ...I promise I'll do it if I can. But what can we do in the meantime?
Jarrett: And I do want to be sensitive to the interests of your listeners. We should talk about, like, what materials are being challenged and banned, because I think it directly ties into the interest of your listeners.
Number one, there have been 1,500 or more instances of book challenges/book bannings that have been reported to the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association. That is more than has ever been reported to that office in the office's history, which is over 50 years old. And when I say 1,500, that's just reported instances. That's not 1,500 books.
What those 1,500 represent is probably thousands and thousands of books being challenged, removed, banned from school districts, classrooms, and libraries. And over half of them are young adult novels, a sizable sliver is adult novels for sure, but it's mostly children and young adult materials. And among children and young adult materials, it is materials that have even the slightest whiff of LGBTQ content or representation, the tiniest. And anything with that kind of representation is being deemed in, city after city, after city, in town after town, as pornographic or obscene.
So, one that I always talk about is Raina Telgemeier wrote a sweet, little graphic novel called "Drama." And it's for, like, third, fourth, fifth, sixth graders. And there's two boys who have a crush on each other. And I think maybe one kisses the other on the cheek, or maybe they just hug, but this book has been assailed as pornographic and obscene by hysterical parents and motivated school boards. And that's the thing. We have to acknowledge that they have targeted, like, extreme right-wing conservatives and Christians, you know. Or maybe they're all one and the same, but they have targeted school boards and library boards.
And so this is something I think they've been building towards for a while, but it's been a very big takeover. And usually when they just tip the balance of power, they go to town on the literature. And they have friends in town who bring challenges, and so on and so forth. But LGBTQ materials, absolutely, and then materials that depict, or show, or talk about, or feature characters of color. And then on top of those two, anything that deals with human sexuality.
A lot of the non-fiction books that are being targeted are books that provide just basic, respectful information about physiology, relationships, consent sex, and how it works. And if you look at...PEN America has an index on banned titles. And if you scroll through that...I was doing it yesterday. And it's not funny because it's so serious, but so many of these books on sexuality have titles like "It's Perfectly Normal," or, you know, "Sex." And they are written respectfully and appropriately for their audience.
Sarah: For "Field of Dreams" watchers.
Jarrett: Yes. Baseball fans who love Kevin Costner will love these books. But those are being removed completely from the shelves. And a writer in "The Washington Post" yesterday wrote something that, also, I was thinking about your listeners because romance readers are so passionate about the genre, and read so much. And I also teach a class on literacy and reading, and we talk about the romance genre as truly being a genre of readers, or the fan base is a fan base of true readers. And so many of them, as I'm sure you can attest, and I think you did in one of the episodes I listened to, read romance on your own, or motivated to read it, loved it, and it was your choice. It wasn't assigned to you, obviously. But you came to it on your own.
And this writer in "The Washington Post" was talking about what is different about now is that the books that are being targeted are overwhelmingly books that are available to teens and kids to choose to read instead of being assigned to read. And what we know about the motivation to read is that, number one, being able to freely choose your own book is crucial, and two, being able to see yourself or see some information that is identifiable or pertinent to you and your life, and your interests, those two things are the basis for the motivation to read.
So, you know, romance readers...romance has been, like, mocked and dismissed by critics and elites, you know. I mean, I don't think you can...maybe horror fans and mystery fans are, like, the other two fan bases, but I can't think of another fan base that, like, reads more books just from being in a library. Like, I know that and I've seen it, and having friends who own bookstores, you know.
So the fact that books that kids and teens can see themselves in and choose themselves are being yanked out of their hands is a disaster for literacy, but it's also a disaster just for their own education. And, I can't remember, one of you was talking about just learning about sex and body parts from romance books.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jarrett: And how that happened for you. And, so think about this country does such an abysmal job of educating children and teens about sex to begin with. And now, you know, any kind of mention of it or depiction of it in a graphic novel is just...it's verboten.
Sarah: Well, we talked about this on that episode, too, but, you know, understanding mitigates fear. So if we understand how our bodies work, which all of these books...which books like, you know, "Sex" teach us, then suddenly they can't use fear of what our bodies are and how they work to control us.
Jarrett: Exactly. Yeah.
Sarah: And these kids need that. I mean, they should not be learning about their bodies from romance novels. They should be learning about them from, like, real books.
Jen: Porn is easily accessible.
Jarrett: Yes.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jen: At least when I learned about sex from romance novels, like, it was deeply entrenched in the idea that, like, women and their pleasure were important. I learned that from romance. I didn't learn that anywhere else. If I learned about sex from porn, I don't think that's what I would have learned.
Jarrett: Absolutely.
Jen: It just, like, hurts. Everything in my brain hurts thinking about not every child is a reader. And as time goes on, less...like, there's so much competition for reading time.
Jarrett: So much. Oh, my God.
Jen: And as an adult, I'm already entrenched as a reader. Like, nothing's gonna take that away from me. But I have watched kids become less interested in reading over the course of a school year as they become really interested in something else. So when I think about what this will do, the long-term effects on an entire generation of kids who are told, "You aren't allowed to read the books that are interesting to you, that speak to you. That are real about the experience of, like, what it means to be in a relationship, to have human sexuality, that is not just like a binary. It only means this," it's painful for me to think about.
Jarrett: Me, too.
Sarah: Well, and empathy.
Jarrett: Absolutely.
Sarah: Like, raising a generation of kids who have no empathy or understanding of people outside of themselves. Which is maybe the point. I mean, it has to be the point.
Jarrett: Yeah. In a lot of ways, if you take it back to the patriarchy, which we have to, it's about like returning humans to being objects, you know, for the pleasure of white males. And easily manipulated and exploited. And that's the thing, is ignorance really begets suffering. And it's very ignorant to go attacking these books. But you're also spreading ignorance. And the irony is a person might be afraid, understandably, of a really wild and ugly world of imagery, sexual imagery online. A parent might be really upset about that and feel out of control. And I completely sympathize.
But the irony is that by removing well-written books about sexuality and relationships, you're sort of leaving the kids to only go looking for...because they're gonna go looking for information about it.
Jen: Yes.
Jarrett: And unless they're, like, naturally skilled at, you know, critically...
Jen: Discovering Scarleteen.
Jarrett: Yeah. Exactly. Critically surfing the web. Showing my Gen X roots by calling it surfing the web. But...
Sarah: The world wide web.
Jen: I support you.
Jarrett: Yes. Surfing the internet.
Jen: I think that, for parents who are not readers, there probably is nothing more threatening than seeing their children read books that they don't understand, or were not privy to, or did not...you know what I mean? And I will admit I also think, like, a lot of parents are wildly, to the point of hilarity, honestly, oblivious to what their kids can easily find on the internet.
So the book banning probably seems like, "Well, look, this book is in front of me, and I see that it's bad, and I don't agree with it." And it doesn't even occur to them what these kids can find in 0.3 seconds on the world wide web. And so there's part of me, too, that's like, it just shows also a really profound kind of ignorance about, like, what's out there.
Jarrett: Absolutely.
Jen: Like you're closing...it's not even like closing the barn door after, like, you know, the cow is out, or wherever that saying is. It's, I mean, like closing the mouse hole and the entire rest of the barn is open.
And as you said, and the thing I just want to reiterate over and over again, is, like, these books are the ones that are the safest. They are fact-checked. They are coming out of traditional publishing probably, if they're in a library. These are deeply researched. You know, these are people who've talked to psychologists and wrote there. Like, it's perfectly normal. You're not getting that from some rando site on the internet that kids aren't...you know, so it's just so backwards, if you love your children and you want them to be happy and successful. I am dumbfounded by it.
Sarah: So, Jarrett, we are going to talk in a bit with somebody about the political ramifications of all of this, how politics are impacted by, and are impacting this whole world. But for people who can't run for...you know, are not people who run for office, and, you know, people who... "Yes, I'm gonna go vote in November." But what can they do on the ground in their school districts, in their libraries, at their school board meetings? What are the things that our listeners can do today, tomorrow, next week to help?
Jarrett: Yeah. This is so important, because they're so organized and well-funded. We have to speak up and we have to show up. And absolutely, we need to look locally as much as possible. So, everybody needs to look locally, locally, locally. What is going on in your school district? What is going on at your public library? Who is running for school board coming up maybe this year or another year? Who's running for library board? What is their platform? Be very wary of the term "parental rights" because that's code for suppressing all of the stuff we've talked about today.
So find out about upcoming elections and do everything you can to support the people who are going to defend the right to read and the right to access information that children and teens need. One very tangible thing is, please thank librarians. Go into the library and tell them you support them. Because we do feel very lonely right now and feel very attacked. And honestly, a number of them feel extremely scared.
And I was just listening to a podcast the other day, or, no, it was an NPR interview with a librarian in Louisiana who was sobbing in this interview because her life has been threatened multiple times. And we shouldn't ignore the fact that predominantly this is a profession staffed by female workers. So that's another layer that, you know, makes, you know, them a target for scapegoating and attacks. But if you have children, please let your school librarian, if your school has one, know that you support them and that you are not down with this.
The Freedom to Read Foundation is an independent organization associated with the American Library Association. The Freedom to Read Foundation, they don't bring legal actions, but they join legal actions and reinforce legal actions to protect the right to read. And so, if you could donate and become a member of the Freedom to Read Foundation, it would be hugely helpful because they are all over the country, but they are a staff of, like, two people right now.
Make art and get it out in any way possible. You know, authoritarian systems depend on people, you know, isolating, not expressing themselves creatively, and not connecting with each other. And especially, they suppress art. So, especially if you're not in one of, like, the elite centers, you know, LA, Chicago, New York, definitely make art because your perspective and your point of view is important, and we need that in every community.
So, part of showing up, too, is if there is a challenge going on in your community, show up at those school board meetings to speak out to defend the materials being challenged. Because more often than not, it's just the teens showing up, and sometimes it's, like, one or two of them. And they feel terrified because there might be 50 or 60 parents who are enraged. And then you have two teenagers speaking up to say, like, "Leave us alone, and let me live."
Jen: How can people find out? I mean, I guess I would assume, like, your local newspaper. But, you know, of course, local news is...
Jarrett: Yeah, I know.
Jen: ...you know. I mean, it's like when you think about all of the ways the safety net for this...
Sarah: It's a big mess.
Jen: ...has been removed, is there, like, a clearing house or a place that is kind of keeping track of that? You know what I mean? Like, someone could find out, like, "Oh, this is happening in my community?"
Jarrett: So "Book Riot" is doing fantastic work to update readers about censorship news on a weekly basis. So is the Office for Intellectual Freedom. They've got a long sort of clearinghouse list of new developments. But PEN America now has not only just exhaustive, constantly updated index of book bans that is searchable, so you can search for your own town, you could search for certain titles, certain states, they also have an index on gag orders, which affects librarians, too.
We didn't even talk about how in Oklahoma you can be arrested for providing information to a patron about where they can obtain an abortion locally, which would be considered illegal there. That's criminal now. Gag orders are a new sort of weapon where librarians aren't even allowed to talk about certain things. And so, PEN America runs these indexes, and you can search both book bans and, sort of, like, actions against librarians and information professionals.
And then...yeah, those are the big ones. For me it's PEN America, "Book Riot." Kelly Jensen there does amazing work. And then there's a person on Twitter, Tasslyn Magnusson. And I wanna say that the index on PEN America is her index that she created. And she may be the one updating it, but she is doing incredible work advocating for readers. So follow her if you're on Twitter. But, yeah, make your support for freedom of expression as visible as possible. Talk to neighbors. And so many people don't even know this is going on. I was talking to a neighbor yesterday who has a child who would definitely be affected by this, and she had no idea.
Sarah: Well, I also just want to say, because I spent some time this summer in a small town in Rhode Island, and there were school board election signs everywhere, which is a great tell because that didn't used to happen, where there would be tons of school board with whole slates. Like, "Vote for this entire slate of school board officials this November." So if you see those around, that could be a very easy red flag that something's up on your ballot in November.
Jarrett: Absolutely. And I think we need to develop language to push back against the really vile language that the opposition is using to vilify librarians. They're calling them groomers, and they're calling them pedophiles for providing materials that might have sexual content or might have LGBT content.
And I think we need to really push...nobody wants to engage with those terms because they're so terrible, but it's also incredibly insulting to call a librarian a groomer, especially to people who have been targeted by predators, and have survived assault. It's just despicable, and we need to call it out for what it is, as just like a despicable tactic. And we need to come up with wording that, I think, counters their arguments about, like, "Well, how can you defend this graphic novel when on page 67, there's a penis, right there? It's drawn in this graphic novel."
And I think a lot of people shut down because it's like, then the second you go, "Well, what's the context for it?" You know, then they scream, "Groomer," at you, you know. So they pull things out of context. And we have to find an effective way to counter it, but I think strength in numbers is the key. The more of us that are there to say...
Sarah: And you don't have to be a parent to go to school board meetings. You don't have to be a parent to thank school librarians. It's okay, you vote for these people, you have a place at those meetings as well.
Jarrett: Absolutely. You're part of the community that...I mean, you're a part of creating the community you want to see. So that's a great point.
Jen: And I would even say, even if there are no challenges in your town, it's still worth it for you to write a letter to your local library, to your local school saying, "I hope this doesn't happen here. And if it does, please know that you have my support that kids in our community deserve to have books that represent who they are, to see a different world. And I hope that, you know, if a book banner comes along, you'll say, 'but, like, we've received these letters in support." So you don't also have to wait for it to be a crisis in your town, you can preemptively decide to, like, sort of make your voice heard.
Jarrett: Absolutely. Yeah. I wrote a letter to the staff of Downers Grove Public Library, locally here, just to thank them for their efforts to support LGBT, not just materials, but programs at their library. And they just shut down a Drag Queen Storytime because they were...nobody knows the details but people have been saying it must have been pretty severe what was coming in on the phone lines and on email, that they would shut it down. So, yeah, the opposition is a mix of Christian sort of fascists and white power groups like the Proud Boys, and, I think, misinformed parents who feel out of control in a really out-of-control world. It's a sort of confluence of a lot of factors, but it's all ugly.
Sarah: But there are more of us than there are of them.
Jarrett: There are. That's the thing.
Sarah: I know.
Jen: We just gotta all say something. One last thing is, if you are in a town like this and your child's access to these materials has been compromised, the Brooklyn Public Library has committed to essentially giving a library card to every teenager in America, if they ask for one. And so, we'll put out those links in show notes as well.
I mean, the thing that's really hard, I also think it's scary and not something we can predict right now, although, you know, publishing is a business, and one that I think has shown...I don't know, they seemed very quick to roll over. I've been really unimpressed in a lot of ways with publishing's response to this. It is not hard to imagine that the pipeline of why literature is now deeply compromised.
Jarrett: Yes. I agree.
Jen: And so, I think the other thing that's gonna be really important, I mean...and I think people sort of like to think, like, "Well, I'll just buy a copy and put it in my little free library." But, you know, that is not gonna stop necessarily what's happening. And if it is clear to publishing that these books are just too much trouble for them to deal with, they won't acquire and publish them. And that is tragic.
Jarrett: Yes.
Jen: The tragedy of this is like a ticking time bomb that's gonna explode at different levels at different times, like, a month from now, a year from now, five years from now. And so the important thing, too, is for us not to give up, to keep saying, like, these books are important to us, important to our community, important to our children, important to us as parents and teachers, and Americans as opposed to just saying, like, "Okay, fine."
Jarrett: Absolutely. The more points of view, the better. Yeah.
Jen: Jarrett, what else should we know, you know, before we go? Any last words of hope? Are there ways in which...are there, like, good stories out there we can share? Something?
Jarrett: I personally have a good story. "Mr. Watson's Chickens," my picture book, features a loving same-sex couple. And it was challenged in a very small town in Alabama. And a mom there who's very, you know, tapped in to the library and what's going on in town contacted me to let me know. And she was certain this book is done for at the public library. Everything you've seen in the movies is what my town is like, you know, small town, Alabama. She said it's just a matter of time till when they make the decision.
But, she did just absolutely heroic work gathering together 16 or 17 letters of support for "Mr. Watson's Chickens," including her ex-husband who wrote about raising their son who's gay, and friends and neighbors. And she made this package she handed out to every board member. She spoke passionately at the school board meeting. And then shockingly, they unanimously voted to keep the book. And that was huge. We were shocked.
Sarah: Listen, that's one person.
Jarrett: Yeah.
Sarah: Everybody out there...it takes one of you. One of us can do that. We can save "Mr. Watson's Chickens."
Jarrett: "Mr. Watson's Chickens." And books like it. You know, a book came out called "Bathe the Cat," maybe a couple months after "Mr. Watson's Chickens."
Sarah: Well, that does seem dangerous, bathing cats.
Jarrett: It is. The cat does not wanna be bathed. But, you know, it's a family with two dads. And they're a loving family, and they're dealing with having to get ready for a relative who's coming to visit. And one of the tasks is, someone needs to bathe the cat. And the cat keeps, like, subverting that. But, like, a book like that is an absolute target. And it's so delightful. And what a wonderful hopeful thing for kids to just read books with representation like that and not even question it, because the story is really about the cat, and the chickens. There's no issue with the relationship.
Jen: And I guess that's probably what makes it so dangerous to people, right?
Jarrett: Yeah. Exactly.
Sarah: We say all the time, happiness is subversive. The reason why, like, reading romance is powerful because joy is subversive. And...
Jarrett: So many books, especially the YA books that are being challenged, especially the LGBT content, are very, like, affirming books. They provide visibility. And a lot of them are stories of self-acceptance. And "Gender Queer," the number-one banned book now in America, even the scene that parents object to as, you know, graphic and obscene, it's a scene of consent. It's a scene where two people are trying to figure out, "What works for us sexually given the fact that one of us doesn't like certain things, and the other one does. But we're figuring it out."
I mean, if you look at the scene as a whole, it's two people communicating openly and lovingly with each other, and with respect. And that is what I took away from that scene when I read it.
Jen: Yeah. I think it's also just really important to say if you see, you know, a list of banned books, and it has, I don't know, like, "Catcher in the Rye," listen, that's not what they're trying to ban right now. We are talking about, like, the wholesale banning, essentially, like, trying to pull us all back, 35 or 40 years to a time when every queer kid had to be in the closet, preferably for the rest of their lives. And we just aren't gonna go back to that.
Jarrett: We can't.
Jen: We can't. And what we say inside the industry, and you mentioned at the beginning, is, like, having these books on your shelves, in your home, in your classroom, in your library, it is suicide prevention.
Jarrett: Yeah.
Jen: And the idea that anyone would take...I'm gonna cry. Like, we just can't. We can't go back. We deserve better, our kids deserve better. And this is just the most urgent work of any reader, has to be making sure that every other reader gets to read whatever they want.
Jarrett: Absolutely. Thanks for saying that. And the fact that even online resources like The Trevor Project are being filtered out of schools, projects and organizations that provide information about suicide prevention, and the fact that you're not alone, and there is help available, is really grim. And one thing I noticed in the list, too, is there are a lot of books that if there's sexual assault involved in the story, or if the book is about that, it's attacked. It's removed.
And one thing that is different about this time is boards are removing books when they're challenged instead of leaving them on the shelves until we decide whether or not we're gonna remove them. So that's how parents are getting away with submitting a list of 380 titles that they're challenging, and then half the library's gone. And so this is happening more and more, and boards just don't seem to care that they're violating, you know, their own policies.
Jen: And presumably they're pulling these lists. These are just lists that they have. And so they haven't looked at the books.
Jarrett: There's a story of a northern Idaho librarian who was vilified in her community by parents who were angry at her. They came in to ask if they had "Gender Queer," and they didn't. And this parent had a list of books, and they didn't have any of them. But they somehow turned it around on the librarian that she was...she quit. I mean, she quit and is moving from the town she'd lived in for, like, 20 years. But they vilified her, and she wasn't even providing the books they wanted to ban. She just...
Jen: Was a librarian.
Sarah: Right.
Jarrett: Absolutely. So...
Jen: I don't know. I mean, like, we're really far afield. I said we'd be on for 30 minutes, it's an hour later. But I think the thing I think about a lot is, like, you have to believe. I hope all of our listeners believe, like, your child is his or her, their own person. And book banning is really instead about control. Is, like, "I want to control the type of person my kid is." And let me tell you, it just doesn't work that way.
Jarrett: No.
Sarah: No. They fail. This will fail.
Jen: Yeah.
Jarrett: Completely. They're in for a big shock. But I think, if nothing else, let your motivation be the fact that the people doing this are trying to control what your child can have access to. And they're doing it under the mantle of parental rights. And what about the rights of parents who have LGBT kids, or who are passionately allies of LGBT folks, or have family, whatever, I mean, or are people of color? What about their rights? They're talking about a subset of certain parents' rights.
Jen: Well, as you said at the beginning, in America, that's always been our subtext, right?
Jarrett: Yeah. But do believe one person can make a difference. I'm glad you said that because that mom in Alabama gives me hope, because it might just take one person knowing about this, hearing this podcast, and then doing something. That might be enough.
Jen: Yeah. So if you're looking for the one thing to do while you're all listening right now, we're all book lovers. We all know how important school librarians and public librarians were to our own reading journeys. It takes no time for you to google what's going on in your own town. And that's your job right now. That's the task you can do today, and go from there.
Jarrett: Yeah.
Jen: Jarrett, thank you so much for being with us this week.
Jarrett: Thank you.
Jen: We really appreciate it. Jarrett gave us tons of information in show notes, which you'll see. We'll also put it on social media. But this is really all hands on deck. If you care about reading, if you care about freedom to read, then it's starting in YA, it's starting with kids. It's coming for all of us. And that doesn't mean it's, like, selfish or self-motivated. I guess it maybe is. But I care about kids, and I care about making space for them to be who they are. And librarians do that more than probably anyone, so they really need our support.
Sarah: Thanks so much, Jarrett.
Jarrett: Thanks for having me.
Sarah: What a delight.
Jen: I know. Amazing.
Sarah: Look, there is a double-page spread in "Mr. Watson Chickens" of the house full of chickens. And it's too many chickens, is what it is.
Jen: Yeah. It's like Richard Scarry's Busytown, only chicken town.
Sarah: If I can find all the chickens.
Jen: So, anyway, I was so grateful to have him really paint the picture of, like...
Sarah: What's happening and how scary it is for librarians and teachers.
Jen: Yeah. Absolutely.
Sarah: We can't afford to be losing librarians in this country right now.
Jen: I don't think...again, I keep using the word "evil." Like, the very idea that you would fire people for supporting their students is, like, beyond for me. I can't even wrap my head around it really.
Sarah: And the big takeaway for me from the conversation with him aside from all the obvious things is, like, just being a presence, a supportive, positive presence for librarians, and teachers, and other activists in the community, but particularly, like, sending a letter to your local library. You know, dropping in and telling them that you support them, even if, even if it's not happening in your community.
You know, we talk all the time in writer circles about how essential libraries and librarians are to not only how we became readers, but also how we became writers, and how readers find us. You know, those of us who are here, and able, and lucky enough to make a living doing this work, like, we wouldn't be here without librarians. And, so...
Jen: Yeah.
Sarah: I, sort of, was instantly, sort of, thoughtful about who are the librarians who I can write a letter to right now, and say thanks to?
Jen: I think the thing about school board meetings, I'm thinking back to a conversation… I was at a conference away, like, conference in Las Vegas. And one of the authors was talking about how, you know, these kids mobilized to show up at these school board meetings. And, like, maybe one teacher, or one author, or whatever, is with them to support them, and then it's like all these rabidly angry parents who have been stirred up by, like, watching Fox News.
Sarah: It's scary.
Jen: That is scary. I mean, and I know it's hard, but if you hear that there is a action happening at a school board meeting, one of the most important things you can do if you are free is to go and just sit there, and be a support to those students who need to see that not all adults feel that way. So those in-person meetings can also be very contentious and angry. And it is hard for me to imagine how brave it must be as a high school student or an elementary school student to get up and say, like, "You should let me read the books I want," right?
Sarah: Right. So, let's talk about students.
Jen: Yes.
Sarah: Because our next guest is one. Lily Freeman is an 11th grader in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And we discovered her because Jarrett actually pointed us in the direction of her incredible op-ed in the "Philadelphia Inquirer" about being Jewish woman of trans experience, and her experience with book bannings in Bucks County. Bucks County feels like it's the county that we hear about the most in the media, I think, because the school board and the superintendent have really made a coordinated effort to...
Jen: Allow book banning to go forward essentially.
Sarah: I mean, right? It's a very restrictive, really concerning level of book banning that's going on there. It's not that far from Philadelphia. Pennsylvania is somewhere we think of as a swing state, but it's usually blue. Like, it's an okay swing state. And I think Pennsylvania is a great example of, like, a real bellwether for what's happening for the rest of the country. But Lily is here to talk to us about how these book bans are impacting kids specifically, and families in schools every day, and how we as grown-ups, adults, and parents, and family members can do our part.
Jen: Hi. Good morning, Lily. Why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Lily: Yeah. So, I'm Lily. My pronouns are she/her. Some stuff about me, one thing is that I am a GLSEN National Student Council member. And GLSEN is an organization dedicated to disability, racial, and LGBTQ justice in schools. I am also a Jewish female of trans experience, and I am an 11th grader at Central Bucks High School East. But what I like to think of most importantly is that I'm a daughter, I'm a sister, and I'm a student in school. It's more than anything else.
Sarah: So, Lily, we found you because you have been a really active participant in combating a sort of move toward book banning in your home county, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what's going on actually on the ground in Bucks County, because it feels like it's just one example of what's happening nationwide.
Lily: Yeah. So, in my opinion, I feel like there's always been sort of, like, a discriminatory culture in Central Bucks. When I first started my transition, it was a lot of, like, harassment and just general lack of support from the school. But I feel like with the pandemic and with the increase in a lot of these situations happening in other states, our district has kind of taken on those...how do I say it? Like, they've taken on the challenges that have been brought up, which aren't really supposed to be challenges.
So one thing that's happened is a lot of book banning and censorship happening in my area. First it started off with a neighboring school district called Pennridge. And they start by pulling the book, "Heather Has Two Mommies" off the shelf in December of 2021. And me and my family, we were a little concerned because this district was very close to ours. And it didn't really make sense why this book would be pulled off. Like, we read it. It was very innocent. It was just about a little girl and her two moms. Like, nothing anything inappropriate in that book.
So, what we really wanted to do is, like, bring attention to this and highlight LGBTQ literature in K-12 schools, and why it's so important to have on shelves, and why censorship and banning is wrong. So I started my own little project, which I'll talk a little bit about later.
But our book policy that my district has adopted now, which was just passed this past summer, so it's the most restrictive library policy in all of Pennsylvania. And it was actually stolen from a school in Texas. So they have this policy. What it is, it's very, like, highly restrictive, and most importantly, it's very vague. So people could challenge books, they have the right to do that.
But the main focus that a lot of groups in my area are focusing on is that these books with LGBTQ and racial themes are sexually explicit, nudity and sex acts. Which, it doesn't really make any sense because a lot of people are pulling excerpts from the books when… how the librarian said it before is they would take a look at the entire book and they would kind of score it on who it was appropriate for, what grades they were appropriate for. But just in general, the wording of this policy is very vague.
So the superintendent gets to put together a committee of teachers, librarians, and parents to decide if the book gets removed. And then if it does, what book does it get replaced with? Which, again, it's like, what kind of parents? Who has the qualifications to read these books and decide whether it's appropriate or not?
Sarah: So, what's going on? Because that was enacted at the beginning of the school year. No, I'm sorry, last year.
Jen: That's over the summer.
Sarah: Over the summer. Tell us what you guys started doing. Yeah.
Lily: So, right now librarians can't even decide on their own anymore what books get to go into the libraries. And the superintendent will now...or the superintendent and the school board now have a say with this, like, whole committee and stuff. And so new books that have LGBTQ and racial themes won't be able to get into these libraries.
Jen: And I think it's worth pointing out, and I share in other segments, like we've mentioned this. But, like, "Heather Has Two Mommies" is a great example of, if this book had had a heterosexual couple, a mom and a dad, there would be zero objectionable things about it. So what these bans are really objecting to is the very presence of gay or queer people, or people that aren't white, and in the most benign ways as parents, as community members, as people who have chickens. So this is the thing that is really scary about these bans, is there's no sexual content in these books. They're queer people just living their lives.
Lily: Yeah. And there's, like, this whole vilification of librarians and teachers, that they're trying to indoctrinate kids or stuff, but really it's just getting that representation in schools and just putting these books that are good to read. And I'll talk a little bit about that later. But, yeah, there's really just no trust for, like, the teachers. And, like, one of the reasons school board meetings where this policy was put into place, like, teachers were crying, and they're honestly just scared to speak out against these policies because of fear of backlash and...
Sarah: And of losing their jobs, right?
Lily: Yep. They have to choose between supporting their students or being fired. And I really think that these books are just so important for kids because not only are they like mirrors for these kids, but for other people, for all students, they're like windows into other people's lives. And they can be used as, like, a really good education tool. Like, what I like to say is that, like, these books lead to education. And when you don't have that education, you're ignorant. And ignorance leads to that hate, and it causes that discriminatory culture which was seen in schools before these policies went into place.
Jen: Lily, do you think...one thing that I think people maybe don't quite realize is how highly organized these groups are that are bringing these bans. You know, this isn't necessarily like a grassroots group of people in Bucks County. Like, it's probably a couple of people backed by these big organizations. So, like, one of the goals of this podcast for our listeners is, like, what can people really do? What kind of support do you and your students in Bucks County need?
But the truth is every student everywhere is gonna need this. These bans are spreading really fast, even to places that, you know, people might be surprised to find out. Suburban Philadelphia doesn't really seem like a place where, you know, it's like the most discriminatory, you know, laws in the state of Pennsylvania. That's not where I would have guessed they would be. So one of the things that you can talk about maybe with GLSEN or other organizations is, how can people help?
Lily: I think that the number-one thing that, I mean, students like me are looking for is just speaking up in general. That's the most important thing, because a lot of us students, even though we're, like, speaking at school board meetings, we're not necessarily being listened to, because it's the school board and superintendent that are making all these decisions. For example, like pride flags being taken down in classrooms, and also with our, like, student portal, about name changes and stuff, it just...we are kind of being, like, silenced a little about these things. We're not being listened to.
And actually, the superintendent came to each of our schools to ask us, like, what they should do, and this was last year. And we were like, all this horrible stuff is happening to us in schools. And I actually said to him, like, "Well, what are you gonna do about it?" And he was like, "I'll bring it up with the board." And then at the next school board meeting, he said, "Well, why don't we all just move on?" But clearly that's not the issue. And I think we really need, especially adults and communities to really say, "No. This isn't something we have to move on from. This is something that we have to learn from, and we have to continue to fight for."
I think, like, another thing is to vote. Voting is, like, a huge thing because...or even running for school board. We really need those people who are willing to educate others, and who are willing to learn for themselves. And I think those two things are the most important.
Sarah: Lily, in your school district, are you finding that there are a lot of kids who are protesting? And, you know, I saw that you've had walkouts. I wonder if you could talk about, like, what is the support network that you have, that Lily has in Bucks County working against these bans?
Lily: Yes. So, definitely, in my community, we do have a lot of adult and student support. I know there have been, of course, like, community events. And I've had really supportive teachers in my school, so that's one thing. But yet again, it's been really hard for… and their students.
Yeah. So I've been working with this group called Advocates for Inclusive Education, which has a website that lists what's going on in Bucks County and stuff. And a lot of the things that we do is just educating on what's happening because a lot of people don't know. Like, a lot of my friends don't even know that these book bannings are happening in my school, which is kind of crazy. But, yeah. So, along with that, well, what we're really trying to do is just speak to the silent majority, which, kind of, don't know about what's going on, or don't really know how to help. And that's, kind of, what we've been doing, and that's kind of the student support network right now.
Sarah: That's what we've been saying in some of the other conversations that we've had for this episode. There are more of us than there are of them, but we need to be louder.
Lily: Exactly. Yeah. And I think that with a lot of people, they don't necessarily want to get involved unless it affects them. And I feel like the word that needs to be put out is, well, this affects all people. This affects all people. This affects all education because, again, if you don't have this education, and if you don't learn to be kind and to accept others, then that ignorance leads to hate, and it leads to a discriminatory environment in schools.
Sarah: So, Lily, what's happening in November in Bucks County? Is there an election that is important? Are we electing out a superintendent? What are we doing?
Lily: Yeah. So, in November in my area, it's some school board members that are being elected out. So that's definitely something that we've been trying to get running about the election, stuff like that, even with the governor, and with the House, and just voting in general. I feel voting is so important. It dictates everything this year.
Jen: One thing I also feel is, like, really important to mention, we in this segment just mentioned "Heather Has Two Mommies." Is that the title, right? And that's a picture book. That's a book for little kids.
Sarah: Like "Mr. Watson's Chickens."
Jen: Right. But a huge number of the books that are being targeted are actually young adult books, books that you would choose for yourself. And unlike, you know, "Heather Has Two Mommies," which is just about a family, these books are really about kids and teenagers exploring their own identity, making choices for themselves. And these are books that don't get...you know, kids by that age are picking out books for themselves really at the library, or in the school. And it's really important to realize this, too, like, these fights are not about curriculum. These aren't fights where, you know, someone was teaching with...although they could. I would have no problem with it.
But these are books that are, like, free reading. These are just widely available in the library. And so it's especially pernicious because, again, to have adults say, "I don't want these materials available for anyone," as a choice. And so that's the other thing that, I think, people don't realize, is, you know, it's not targeted like, "I don't think this class of kids should be reading 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' I don't want any books that have to do with an identity that's not white, straight, cishet in the library at all." And that raises, like, what are libraries for? They're not just for, you know, that constituent group of people. They're for everyone. And I think that that's part of what is really scary about it to me. Yeah.
Lily: Yeah. Exactly. And a lot of people, I mean, especially, like, in my community, people that are for the book bannings, they just say, "Well, those students, they can just, like, buy it off of Amazon." They can do that, but not every student can. Not every student can go to a public library. Not every student has a supportive family to bring those books home to. And it's the school's job to best support those students as they're discovering their…
Jen: I think the other thing about people who are like, "I can just buy these books," is what they don't also understand. And I think we talked about this maybe with Jarrett, is the pipeline for these books is gonna dry up. Publishing is a business. And if they think libraries won't buy these books, they're not gonna take a stand because it's the right thing to do. They're gonna be like, "Well, we shouldn't publish these." And that's my other, like, big concern, I think, all of us, is fighting for these books now isn't just fighting for kids who are in school now. It's fighting for kids who are gonna be in school in 10 years and in 20 years. Like, it's keeping this robust and available for everyone, everywhere.
Lily: Yeah. Exactly. I think there's, like, this big question right now. It's like, where does this end? When is it gonna end where we're banning books and taking down pride flags, and stuff, you know? I'm reading "Nineteen Eighty-Four" in school right now, and I'm like, "This… is, like, crazily similar right now."
Sarah: That's so ironic to me that you're reading "1984" in school and the school district is doing this. I mean...
Lily: I know. And it's all about, like, banning books and media.
Sarah: It's like the school board has not read "1984." So that's a lot. I'm gonna just have to sit with that for...
Lily: All of these classics have that, like, "pornographic material" or, like, allusions to stuff that they're trying to ban from schools. I mean, it's very hypocritical that when it involves an LGBTQ couple or people of different races that it's seen as inappropriate.
Sarah: Lily, can I ask a more personal question about your family? Your mom is so active in all of the work around protesting these bans. And I wonder if you could just give us...because we have a lot of parents who listen to the podcast who wanna know, like, how to be the best parent they can be in situations like this. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, like, ways your mom and dad, or, you know, your whole family have helped you with this.
Lily: I think something that has been, of course, taken away by all this stuff in the school district is just having a safe place. And my parents, they really strive to make a safe place for anybody. So if they want to talk, then they can talk, and just kind of highlighting other students' voices and helping to uplift people. I feel like that's the best thing that you can do to best support students right now.
Jen: Lily, anything else you wanna tell us about or, you know, organizations that our listeners can support?
Lily: Yeah. So, like, besides GLSEN, which I work with, I also have an Instagram account called Project Uncensored where we're sharing student stories and, like, different LGBTQ books. I would go follow that. And, of course, The Trevor Project and the National Coalition Against Censorship are also really good places, as well as that website I talked about specifically with Bucks County, advocatesforinclusiveeducation.org.
Sarah: We'll put all of that stuff in show notes, everyone. You'll have access to it all. And, Lily, you're the best. So, I'm watching you from New York City, Jen's watching you from Chicago. We want to help however we can, and you're doing amazing work. So thank you.
Lily: Thank you.
Jen: Thanks for being with us today, we really appreciate it.
I think it's impacting students the most right now, and so we really wanted to have a student voice on. And, you know, everyone, we'll put in show notes, Lily wrote an amazing op-ed for the "Philadelphia Inquirer." And I think that's one of the things where we first kind of found her. And, you know, just really teaching your kids...what I think people don't realize is you teach your kids to stand up by standing up yourself. And sometimes kids stand up and we have to support them, but ideally we're all doing it. We're all in it together.
Lily: Yeah. I mean, what my mom tells me the most is, like, "Even though you're feeling, like, down, and even though you are not being supported in schools, you're paving the way for other people to be supported in schools." And I feel like that's what really motivates me, is that it'll be an easier time for people like me going through schools.
Sarah: Yeah.
Jen: Well, you're a rock star, Lily. We love it.
Sarah: Thanks so much for joining us, Lily.
Lily: Of course. Thank you so much for having me.
Sarah: The kids are all right.
Jen: I know. I'm like, what an amazing kid. But also, I just think I know how proud I am of, like, my... Little Romance, when, you know, he does something. And I'm just like, "God, her parents must be amazing." I don't want to, like, give all the credit to them, but, like, what an amazing kid. Yes.
Sarah: I wanna bring my daughter to Bucks County to meet Lily and, like, hang out.
Jen: Yeah. Well, and the truth is, you know, Lily spoke really powerfully about, like, organizations that helped her and her fellow students, but also, you know, how hard it is to have adults, sort of, ask you...you know, like to have the superintendent come and have a meeting, and say, "How can we support you?" And then not do any of those things.
Sarah: And then, like, pat you on the head and send you along like Cindy Lou Who, like you don't really have opinions.
Jen: Yeah. So that's the thing, I think, one of the...it's just really important, I think, for us to hear from students because they know that the teachers that support them. And to have that support be something that can be litigated by the school, or that teachers can be punished for, like, that's our job as teachers to support students. And so to be snipping away the safety net under these kids as they are actively in school. And that takes a lot of bravery for Lily to be such an active voice, but also is really inspiring to hear her say, like, "I'm doing it because I know it's gonna make it easier for the kids coming after me."
Sarah: Yeah. I wanna talk about two things that came to me after we talked to Lily. One is, your school district, wherever you are right now, has a system in place for challenging books.
Jen: Yes.
Sarah: And in many, many school districts, part of that system is a board of...it's not the school board. It's usually sort of connected. There's maybe a school board member on it. But it's a panel of adults whose job it is to read these books when they are challenged. You, whether or not you have a child in the district, or whether or not you have a child, period, are able to volunteer to sit on these boards. It's a really powerful volunteer position that needs more people who...like us. Yeah.
Jen: I think the thing that's really become clear to me, though, is that...and this, like, will shock no one, is watching conservative, evangelical fascists essentially run the table using the rules that are...essentially, like, using the rules against us. Because in a normal school year, this rule exists. Like, these sort of, like, procedures exist. For like, you know, one parent who, like, "I'm worried about this one book," or whatever. But when people bring hundreds of books or list hundreds of books, you essentially are, like, jamming up the law.
Sarah: Sure.
Jen: And it's all bad faith. That's, like, a bad faith effort. They have not read these books. They don't actually have any kind of knowledge of what's in these books. They just know that they don't want books like this to exist.
They don't want books that make kids feel safe to exist. They want everyone to just crawl back in their holes so they can do whatever they want. And I feel really strongly like...I will be honest, and I don't know if it's ever gonna happen. But until school boards refuse to, like, let people use these procedures in this way, it's gonna continue to be really messy. I just feel really strongly, like, you know...I don't know if I'm explaining that right. Like, at first I was like, "Yeah, just use the procedures." And I'm like, "Oh, no. They're using the procedures." And it's different.
Sarah: You're saying we need to be ungovernable?
Jen: Yeah. Right.
Sarah: Yes, cool. But also there are the...you should know in your own district how school book challenges and public library book challenges work. Yeah. And if you have time to help be ungovernable by being on this committee, we love you, and we'll send you "Fated Mates" stuff.
The other thing that I just wanted to say, too, is the city of Brooklyn, my home city is providing young people across the country free library cards to the Brooklyn Public Library collection so that they can access eBooks through the Brooklyn Public Library anywhere in the country. So if you and your children or students, or friends of yours live in a district where these bans are restrictive and pernicious, as Jen says, you can access the Brooklyn Public Library and get a free library card from them. We'll put links to that in show notes. I'm really happy that my tax dollars are going to do this, be ungovernable.
Jen: Yeah. I mean, and that's it. It's, you know, look for the helpers.
Sarah: Okay. Oh, next. Our final person is Melissa Walker who, aside from being a friend of mine, is a magnificent YA writer. She's written YA, she's written middle grade. And after the 2016 election, Melissa got very active, became very politically active with an organization called The States Project, which, it's a fundraising organization that connects the importance of state legislatures to every aspect of our lives, the idea being that these laws, particularly laws around school boards, around book bannings. And lots of other laws...I mean, we just saw the overturning of Roe v. Wade, all these laws are built at the state level.
And this is a perfect time to talk about state legislatures because this is an off-year election. Off-year elections tend to get fewer and fewer voters out. The name of the game in off-year elections is voter turnout, and it's voter turnout for, yes, Senate seats and House seats, and sometimes governorships, but it's also voter turnout for literally your school board representatives in a lot of places, for your local district, for your local House, for your state House, for your state representatives, for your mayors, your, you know, town councils, all of this stuff up and down the ballot.
The State Project, and Melissa work really hard to flip these state legislatures that are eminently flippable. So we'll put links to the project in show notes. You'll hear more right now from Melissa. But this is really about what we have to do in November.
So, thanks, Melissa, for joining us.
Melissa: I'm so happy to be here.
Sarah: We're thrilled to have you. Can you tell us a little bit...why don't we start with The States Project first, which is where you are? And tell us what the project does and how it works.
Melissa: Yeah. Absolutely. So, at The States Project, we focus exclusively on state legislatures, which are an area of government that often gets overlooked. And we work to help elect majorities that are focused on improving people's lives. So that's electing folks into state capitals that are people-focused and ready to pass bills that will help. And we do that through the work of Giving Circles, which are people organizing their communities to… target state and help change the balance of power, and also through our broader community and amazing groups of lawmakers who are working on all of these policies as well.
Sarah: I think a lot of people when they think about, like, law making think of Congress. So, why focus on states? Why is that so important?
Melissa: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I will say that I am a little bit new to this world, since 2016, which, I think, is an activation point for a lot of folks. And I really realized how important state legislatures were when, really, I attended a holiday party. I heard a New York state senator speak, and I started to realize that everything that he was talking about and everything that I cared about was being controlled in state legislatures and not in Washington D.C. So everything from education policy to environmental protections, to gun safety, to healthcare, to civil rights, and then to the core of democracy, voting rights, controlled state by state. And, of course, gerrymandering, the drawing of the district lines that decide who goes to Congress.
And I started to see state legislatures as the ultimate power center, because they were controlling the kitchen table issues. Things like, I started realizing I'm in my home state of North Carolina right now visiting my mother. This is the state where the bathroom bill was passed under President Obama, and I started realizing, "Oh, that was lawmakers in Raleigh who did that." And thinking about Florida and the stand-your-ground gun law that let Trayvon Martin's murderer go free, and realized, "Oh, that was Tallahassee that did that." And then it passed in 25 other states.
And things like the Flint, Michigan water crisis. I started to realize, "That's a Lansing problem, not a Washington D.C. problem." So I started to see the power of these state lawmakers. And most people don't really know who their state lawmakers are. Most people don't know who's in their state capital for them. They're not the names we see on TV.
But they have this immense power. And they also have the power, again, over voting rights and deciding who goes to Congress. So they touch the kitchen table issues. They also touch who's in power in Washington D.C. And it's a real lever of control that the radical right wing has built up and co-opted over decades, while we stared at Washington D.C. and felt good about the direction the country was headed in.
And, you know, I learned that from 2016, we lost nearly a thousand state legislative seats as we stared at Washington D.C. And in those states where right-wing lawmakers took over, they made people's lives bad. They defunded education, they put in right-to-work laws, they gutted environmental protections. But when people's lives got bad, they didn't say, "Oh, that must be my state legislator," because no one knows who their state legislators are, or sometimes even that they have one. But they look at Washington D.C. and they hit a change button there because that's what we hear about on the news every night. Little did they know that the roots of Trumpism were being seeded in state legislatures, and they are such immense power centers.
Sarah: And we're really seeing that right now in the...I mean, we've been seeing that for so many years. But obviously the reason why we're doing this episode is about a very specific kind of state and local problem, which is book banning. And obviously we've talked on the podcast about the ban on trans books and books that touch on sex and sexuality for kids. In a lot of these states, we've talked about the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Florida.
And then, of course, this month we've seen in Oklahoma a ban on both sexual assault awareness programs and romance novel book clubs in local libraries. Which, you know, feels like the sublime to the ridiculous in a lot of ways, but obviously is like a much larger question of sex and sexuality, and identity, and experience, that is being silenced. And so we're really interested in how these kinds of laws come to pass, and, you know, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how books, and libraries, and schools, and all of that gets sort of rolled together.
Melissa: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, this has been happening for a little while. So, you know, it's nothing new to have certain books banned. And, you know, for a long time, like, in publishing, we've known that states like Texas, which is a huge book market, has requested changes in textbooks in order to sell to their education market. And because of the size of the Texas market, publishers are willing to do it. And so, you know, conservatives influenced what's been taught to all American kids for a while, you know. And that has been happening.
This new wave is something a little different and bigger. You know, these bans that target first, kind of, school libraries, and then school librarians and teachers, and then moving to public libraries, this is expanding. And really, like, make no mistake, these bans which can look very local and small, and battles to be fought district by district, are much bigger than that.
I know that the American Library Association has reported that in 2021, it recorded 729 efforts to ban books at school or public libraries, which is the most that had ever happened since they started tracking this in 2000. And, of course, the most challenged books were from black and LGBTQ+ authors or centered on characters from those communities.
But, you know, this fight is expanding to right-wing state legislative efforts to create statewide policies, which is what you're talking about laws designed to… more books, and the silencing of more of these voice voices. You know, Florida just rejected 40% of math textbooks for claiming they included things like social-emotional learning and critical race theory. You know, that just happened. And this is a long-standing multi-pronged effort to undermine faith in public schooling. It's part of the work to dismantle public education. It's a decades-long campaign, and this is one prong of the takeover at the state level for the right wing.
So, in thinking about it, you know, how does it connect to these other laws that we've been hearing about passing state by state? So, Oklahoma legislature just proposed a state law that would allow parents to seek up to $10,000 for each day a book is kept in their child's school library after it was nominated for removal. And that hasn't passed but it's been introduced. And it reminded me of something. It echoes the abortion bans that Texas passed, where you can have a… on your neighbor. And how terrifying is it that you can turn your neighbor into the government? I mean, these are wild, and they are part of a larger plan.
Sarah: So, I guess, I mean, that's a terrifying thing to think about, especially when you're...many of our listeners are women and non-binary people, marginalized people.
Jen: And also I would like to say, like, living in states that they love with their families, and, you know, having people sort of partly be like, "Well, why don't you move?" And I feel like this is such a grave misunderstanding of, you know, the world and the way it works, and fascism, and how it spreads. And I think one of the things that we are really concerned, I think it's so easy when it's summed up like that to have the, like, "let me go lay down now" moment, and feel powerless. And I think what we really want to give our listeners is a sense of power. What can we do? More than just raising money, maybe. What can we do?
Melissa: Yeah. Absolutely. So, thank you for asking that question, because I start with doom, but I'm really here to deliver some hope because I give a lot of hope. You know, and this is true for the book bans. It's true for the other laws that we've talked about today. And it's also true, honestly, for the death of democracy, which we also are reading a lot about lately at election subversion efforts, fraudits, all of those things. But this is all being organized through state legislatures. And there is a path to action here. And the path to action is changing the balance of power in state legislatures.
So, here's a sentence that'll give folks a little bit of hope. It is often cheaper to change the balance of power… than it is to win a single competitive congressional seat. Congressional races cost millions and millions of dollars. State legislative races do not. They are still local, they are still small, and there are many states that are very close to shifting majorities. And when you shift the majority, everything changes in the state. And state laws spread.
So states are meant to be laboratories for democracy, they're meant to be marriage equality going from state to state, to federal, or healthcare going from Hawaii to Massachusetts to becoming the ACA. And that's what they can be. Right now, too many are laboratories for other laws that are passing state by state. But if we can win back some of these majorities, we can shift the tide there.
And some more hope, there are many states that are close. In Arizona, we are one seat away in each chamber. One state house seat, or one state senate seat stops right-wing control in Arizona in 2022, in November. In Michigan, it's three state senate seats or three state house seats to tie, four to flip the chamber entirely, stopping right-wing control, or gaining Democratic control in Michigan in 2022. In Pennsylvania, it's 12 seats in the House on better maps than we've had in a decade. So there's real places for movement here and real places for action, in terms of focusing on state and local elections.
And I live in New York which is a state that has a majority, that is mostly focused on improving lives. There can always be improvements anywhere. But I really care about these other states, because this is where the foundational stuff is decided for our country, you know.
If we think about something like the ACA, we think about how, okay, that was the law of the land. But 12 states still haven't expanded Medicaid because their right-wing-led legislatures don't feel like it. So there are people who don't have the full benefits of the Affordable Care Act in their states, and that's because of their legislatures. And so what happens at the federal level, yes, has a lot of power, and carries a lot of weight. But when we feel frustrated at watching not a lot get through in Congress in D.C., we have to understand that anything that gets through gets implemented at the state level, and that is determined by who's in the majority there. Focus there, watch things move very, very quickly.
So, there is hope in focusing on these state elections, and knowing who goes to your state capital for you is a huge piece of it. Most people don't. I will admit that I did not, until I heard that New York state senator Daniel Squadron, who's also now...he's the… Project, by the way. He started it in the summer of 2017. But I realized that, you know, this is a place where people aren't looking, even people who feel really well-informed. So focusing there and knowing whether your state has a majority that represents your values is key. And then helping to change the bounce of power is key.
Sarah: Melissa, is there a website or somewhere that we can go...?
Melissa: Yes. So, to find your legislator, there's a great site called openstates.org. So you can go there and you can find your state legislator. It's actually kind of hard to find, so that's a great site resource. If you go to statesproject.org, which is my organization site, in our states, it'll show where we're targeting this year. And it shows the current balance of power, the stakes, the landscape, the opportunity, and then some clicks for how to get involved. We mainly work through Giving Circles, which is people organizing their friends and family to raise money to try to change the balance of power in a state. And it is about raising, you know, our electoral dollars. It is also about organizing, about learning how to bring attention and resources to something that you care about.
So we do kind of core trainings and storytelling, fundraising, and organizing, because those are the three key elements of leading a Giving Circle and getting involved. And when you have those skills, you'll be able to bring attention and resources to anything that you care about throughout, you know, in your local area, for a Giving Circle project, for all of these things. And you walk with more power and more hope when you do that. And when you walk with power and hope, people will walk with you, because everyone is looking for a way to get involved right now.
Everyone...the path that feels impactful, and organizing friends and family is incredibly impactful. So it is about giving a little bit, but then organizing 10 other people to give the same amount. Because that is where real power lies. And I have to be honest, we are up against a very, very well-funded right-wing machine, and money is the sharpest tool in the drawer… We have to level the playing field on that to win some of these races. So that is one way that folks can get involved in. We give everyone the tools to do so through our Giving Circles program. So that is a big way. I also have some other ideas for local involvement.
Sarah: Yeah. Tell us.
Jen: Good.
Melissa: Great. So, there's an amazing group called Red Wine & Blue. Their website is redwine.blue. They've created a resource to help people fight back against far-right extremism in kids' schools. So there's a ton of helpful information. They have a handbook that kind of tells how to organize a group within your community and get the message out on social media, how to speak out at school board meetings, and how to run for school board.
Sarah: Which is so important. For those of you listening and thinking about how to protect your kids and how to keep this kind of stuff from happening in schools and from your kids hearing about it in schools.
Melissa: Absolutely. Know what majority of your school board looks like. And if it doesn't reflect your values, run, or find someone in your community to run. There's a stat that says that women, to run, need to be asked seven times, or it needs to be suggested to them seven times. Men, it's more like once, or they usually...
So, you know, definitely, I know that running for office isn't for everyone, it's not for me. But I do also know who of my friends, every once in a while, say, "Thought about running? Thought about running?" Because that's really important, too. And I will say, you know, school boards, again, like we talked about, they're really important. They're a great way to get…
I would also encourage folks to run for state legislature because, again, these are still local races. It sounds bigger, but it's a part-time job. It pays very little in 40 out of 50 states. And, you know, people are going to their state capitals once a year for session and deciding whether to ban abortion, and deciding whether to expand healthcare, and deciding on gun safety laws for your state and your kids, and deciding on these curriculum decisions that, like Florida is making in this wild way.
And, by the way, those laws that have passed in Florida, we're now seeing pop up with almost the exact same language, state by state, by state, being spread. So if it's not your state, it can be. And we have to make sure that we are protecting democracy, electing majorities that stand for your values. And, you know, running for state leg is not a bad idea either, because school boards are important, but the rules of the road, the laws are determined at the state level. And the laws will rule what local is doing, what school board is doing at the state level. So that's where we have to secure these foundations.
Jen: And I would also...you know, I think the three of us...I live in Chicago, or, you know, kind of live in...I don't know, it feels like "safe," you know, "states." And, you know, they are still organizing in Illinois. So it's also really important to, you know, call your state legislators, you know, keep up the pressure that says, "This is, like, who we are and what we stand for." Continue to vote and support, because, you know, they are working just, you know, as hard as we are working. They are working the same way.
And so I feel like that's the other thing is, like, you know, what does it...I mean, I live in the blue bubble, but I would like to keep my state that way. So, you know, I can't just let...you know, if you are in that lucky position, you have to work to keep it that way. And I feel like in Illinois, you know, we had a Republican governor, and then now it's J. B. Pritzker, who is a great governor. And I really was like, wow. Those four years, you know, where we had a Republican, like, I noticed. And so, you know, that's the other thing is...I know I'm preaching to the choir, but it's, you know, don't feel like, "Okay, I don't have to worry about that in my state." We all have to worry about this.
Melissa: Absolutely. You feel it. You feel it when it's coming out of your state capital in a way that you don't from Washington D.C. I think that's, like, an important point for folks to know, you know.
And the other thing is this is 2022, and there's a lot of talk and chatter about the federal elections, and what's gonna happen there. And not that they're not important, but the thing that's not getting attention is actually foundationally important for our country. And it is where this right-wing movement grew. It is where we have to push back. And, like I said, it is also a fraction of the cost. These races, getting involved in them with your time, your talent, and your treasure, as the Giving Circles world likes to say, is a huge bang for your buck. Huge bang for your buck.
I mean, you know, after 2020, we saw things like, you know, Sara Gideon, who mounted an unsuccessful campaign against Susan Collins in Maine, finished her campaign with $15 million left over… And that's because this is where we focus, this is where we give emotionally. There will be so much emotional giving in 2022.
If you are organizing for a state legislature, and you're doing a Giving Circle, or you're working in a state, you know, locally, when you can channel people's emotional rage, sadness, donations into a pot, that actually has this impact and they can watch what it does, that feels really key, as well. It helps people come together and have a shared goal and mission, and, you know, impactful total to bring to these things. And it's really...like I said, it's the sharpest knife in the drawer at this point.
Jen: So, the other knives, the knives that are less sharp, I think that one of the things that we keep coming back to and we think about a lot here is, you know, we flipped the country in 2020 without Democrats even knocking on one door. But this year, we get to knock on doors. So all of the things, all of the people who joined us for "Fated States," the phone banking, the door knocking, the canvassing, the postcards, everything, that's all still in play, right? And is it in play locally, as well?
Melissa: Yeah. That's a great question. And it's huge, I would say. We have a very specific lens on state legislative races, which is that door knocking, door knocking, door knocking, door knocking. And specifically candidate door knocking, the candidate themselves going out on doors. We actually measure and we get weekly door knocking reports from all the candidates we endorse because it's a really key piece.
Jen: So here's something fascinating. Everybody knows that I moved in February. Within 10 days, our local person knocked on my door.
Melissa: Wow.
Jen: I mean, we're having primaries this year, just like everywhere else, so, you know, he was introducing himself and telling us about the primary. But he knew we had just moved in, and I was like, "This is wild." I mean, because we live in New York City, so...
Melissa: That's good organizing.
Sarah: Yes.
Melissa: That's really cool. Yeah. It's absolutely about that. And I would say that, like, door knocking is incredibly important. And, you know, the other things that you mentioned, too, it's all about how many touches a candidate has, how high their name gets. Something that often happens in states is that we organize for the state level races, so for governor's races, secretary of state races, attorney general races, and then we watch something happen like what happened in Georgia, which was incredible. It's like organizing on the ground for 10 years, Stacey Abrams in Fair Fight, and all the other groups that worked on that. Incredible, incredible, incredible. We win those two federal senate races.
And it didn't touch Atlanta. Atlanta still has a Republican super majority that then gutted more voting rights, closed more polling places, and still holds the power over voting rights in Georgia and over all the other things that we've talked about. And so, when people say Georgia went blue, we have to say, "Look, the frosting on the Georgia cake may be blue, but the inside is deep red. And unless we focus on these target districts to shift, we're not gonna be able to get to this foundational level of power."
So, I would ask folks to get involved and organize in phone banking, postcarding, door knocking, all of those things, and look at state legislative districts. And it's not easy to do. Whenever people are talking about gerrymandering, they're talking about congressional districts. But the truth is that state legislators also draw their own districts. They're different from the congressional maps, but they're drawing themselves back into power in many cases, and that's a key piece of why they're doing it. And so, looking at state legislative districts and knowing whether you're in an area that you could really make a difference in with your volunteer time is huge.
Sarah: So, is that something that The States Project also has for states that you're not, you know, super focused on? Where do we find those districts? And how do we understand those maps, I guess?
Melissa: Absolutely. Yeah. No. It's difficult. And I think it's difficult by design in a lot of ways. But I think it's about kind of just looking up where you live. Looking up your state legislator, and understanding, "What's the balance of power in my state?"
We have a lot of states listed on our website. If your state's not there, Ballotpedia is a great site to go to look at maps. And, you know, understanding, like, is there a place where I can work in my local area to knock on doors and try to shift a district? Or try to protect a district. I mean, these races are really won on the margins. That's something else. You know, that's one reason why it gives me a lot of hope.
In Arizona in 2020, you know, if we'd shifted 1,024 votes, we would have won in Arizona. And in Michigan, it was something like 2,600 votes over 3 districts. So knowing that, like, these are the margins, and this is what we're fighting for, it can go either way. We have to hold ground. We have to win a few more seats in these states. But shifting power would change everything.
Jen: And also getting involved even on the things that don't feel so political like joining your local library board. I mean, it feels like everything is political these days. And we've talked about this a thousand times on the podcast, but it's all politics. But the truth is that, you know, you can join your local library board pretty easily. That is not an elected position. So, thinking about those kinds of things, too. And that's a nice low-hanging fruit for somebody who's, like, interested and doesn't quite wanna run, or doesn't quite know how to get involved. It's a good place for passionate people to get started.
Sarah: And just to go back to your recommendation, Melissa, for Red Wine & Blue, those documents also have ways to speak up at school board meetings, ways to participate. So we'll put everything in show notes, guys.
Melissa: Absolutely. And I think, you know, once people do kind of tiptoe into involvement, which is really what I did, it can really sweep you away in a very powerful and positive way. And when you're the person in your community who kind of rallies people, who organizes people, who does that, it just gives you a lot of hope and you start to recognize that you're part of this long chain of people who've come before, and people who've had to push back and fight for democracy in ways that our generation has never known.
I mean, I will say I didn't know that I was stepping into a place where I was gonna need to tend to democracy for the rest of my life when I started doing this, but I know that now. And I know that it's an area where a lot of us feel tired and, like, we want to lie down and pull a blanket over our heads. But that is not the way, you know.
And for me, I always think to myself, like, I lead a very comfortable life. You know, the pain of what's happening in this country has not knocked on my doorstep yet. And so it is my job to not get tired, and to get up and do what I can, and, of course, to protect my joy around certain moments, like those Georgia senate races, yay. And then to say, now what's next? What else can we look at? What are the… we need to impact here? And I will say one more piece of hope is that...I don't know if y'all have talked about this yet, but the Brooklyn Public Library.
Sarah: Yes!
Jen: Yes.
Melissa: Yes. Okay, great. Shout out to the Brooklyn Public Library for making books accessible to kids around the country. It's really super exciting.
Jen: Yeah. It's a beautiful thing.
Sarah: Melissa, thank you so much for joining us.
Jen: Yes. Thank you.
Sarah: Thanks for making time for us. Thanks for being so quick to turn around and say yes. And thank you for all the work that you've done since 2016. I've known you from the jump, and I'm so proud to know you. So...
Melissa: Thank you. Thanks for all…
Jen: Can we just have, like, two minutes where you talk about your books? We didn't even say that you're a writer. Melissa is a fabulous YA writer, and middle grade. So just give us a little bit, a little taste of what you've got.
Melissa: Sure. So, I write mostly contemporary coming-of-age stories, some YA romance and some middle-grade dabbling into romance, I would say. And I think I miss writing, I have to say. My last book came out in 2018. It's called "Why Can't I Be You." It's available, if you all want to check it out. And I do miss writing, and I've talked to my writer friends about this a lot. And they've all said to me very comfortingly that life is good for writing, and that when I sit back down at my writing desk one day, I will have a lot more stories to tell, and writing is always there.
So...exactly. I'm really excited about it. I will say that, like, my inner introvert is, like, crying in a corner somewhere because...but I will absolutely return to it. And I miss writing. And just so grateful to, like, all the readers who are still reading and all the writers who are still writing, because I think it is a way for us to see each other, you know. And it's so important and so valuable. And we have to work to make sure it doesn't get taken away. So just appreciate all the organizing y'all are doing around this.
Jen: We will put links to Melissa's books in show notes so you can hear more from her in all the ways. So, thank you so much. Thanks to The States Project for all of the work that you're doing. Everyone, all of the resources that Melissa has referenced and that we talked about during this segment will be in show notes. And, Melissa, let us know if "Fated Mates" can ever help.
Melissa: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Sarah: Feels like we ought to talk about "Fated States," Jen.
Jen: I think we should.
Sarah: Look at us. We're so...
Jen: Bringing it right back around to the states. It's like we planned it all in advance. We didn't think. That's what's great about everybody. So, everyone, one of the...so we've talked a lot about what you can do, how you can support your local school district, your local library, your kids.
We also think that we can support people in other states, and that is what "Fated States" is all about. This is our phone banking initiative where we are calling a different state pretty much every weekend to phone bank on behalf of Democratic candidates, and for abortion access. And, you know, although there aren't...we can't really phone bank to a library district. Like, trust me, we've...
Sarah: We're school board members in tiny places.
Jen: They're not enough numbers in the dialer for this. That's an inside joke for all of our phone bankers. We can get on Pennsylvania State, you know, voters' lines and talk about John Fetterman. We can call Georgia and talk about Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock. So we hope that if you are inspired by this, one of the other things you might consider doing is joining us between now and election day, every Saturday from 3:00 to 5:00 Eastern, where we will be calling a variety of states, like, one state every weekend, or a different call in order to help keep the Senate and Congress blue, and to try and get governors to be Democratic in some of these places, again, that we feel are really close.
Sarah: Yeah. We have a friend who's a constitutional scholar, and he was here yesterday. And he said that one of the things that he's most concerned about with the Supreme Court over the next term is there's a sort of obscure reading of a law that would allow for secretaries of state and state legislatures to basically deny election results. And there is precedent at the Supreme Court level for that to potentially be legal, and he thinks that's not great, and we think that's not great.
So the answer is, don't give them the chance. Which means, Tuesday, November 8th is election day. You can go to vote.org to check your registration, to check registration deadlines, to check absentee ballot deadlines, mail-in ballot deadlines. And, of course, you can always volunteer for your local candidates. There are more of us than there are of them. And there are kids like Lily, and librarians like Jarrett, and people like Melissa working every day to do everything they can. And we can help them.
Jen: I know. A very special episode of "Fated Mates" is sometimes a downer, but I also feel really inspired by hearing people that are doing good work, and being told really explicitly what we can do to help. So, you know, it's only hopeless if you let it be. The thing is we can't afford that mindset or attitude. So we hope that you have heard some ideas today that you feel like you can, like, you know, turn off this podcast and take some action.
Sarah: Show notes, show notes.
Jen: That's what's really important.
Sarah: I'm gonna make it as easy as possible.
Jen: Get out there and read a banned book.
Sarah: Yeah. We'll see you on Wednesday when we're back on our bullshit.
S05.05: Moonstruck: A Wolf Without a Foot Redux!
It’s our 200th Episode and we’re finally doing the thing we’ve been talking about doing for 200 episodes! A full deep dive into one of our favorite — or possibly our favorite! — romcoms…Moonstruck! Moonstruck was released December 18th, 1987, one day after Sarah turned nine…auspicious Sagittarius energy! It’s set in Brooklyn, is a perfect romance novel on film, and features more than one wolf, bewitched by the full moon. It is everything.
Go watch it (you won’t be sorry), then come back here and listen to us wax poetic about it.
Thank you for being with us for 200 episodes…you’re the moonlight in our martini.
Show Notes
Moonstruck was released on Dec 18, 1987. It was nominated for several oscars. Cher won for best actress, Olympia Dukakis for best supporting actress, and Best Original Screenplay for John Patrick Shanley.
Everyone loves Moonstruck and there are lots of fun listicles and essays about the movie. Here’s a great thread from Vulture where a movie critic named Rachel Handler live-tweeted a rewatch.
Most of the film’s exteriors were filmed in Brooklyn, but many interiors were shot in Toronto.
Sarah mentioned an essay by Emily VanDerWerff, Moonstruck: Life in the In-Between, about the beauty shop scene and how it can be analyzed as showing the power of the female gaze in Moonstruck.
The last scene at the breakfast table is a good example of farce. An article about the making of Moonstruck and the ending scene played in the style of a farce, with lots of cool info on Loretta's grandfather, played by Feodor Chaliapin Jr.
Jen liked all that moon stuff.
When Cher won the Oscar, she was wearing a very memorable dress. May we all vow to live our 40s with her as our guide.
Learn more about Sarah's Start Your Romance Novel Today class on her website.
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry a Viscount,
available at Amazon.
Visit alyxandraharvey.com
and
Forever, publishers of
Season of Love by Helena Greer
Find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Bookshop.org
or wherever you get your books.
and
Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order
S05.04: What to Read If You Liked The Love Hypothesis...
Today we start one of our new features for Season Five: If You Liked…Read This! We begin with Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis, a book that took romance and BookTok by storm last year when it burst onto the NYT best seller list and hung out there for nearly a year, bringing so many new readers (and Reylos!) to romance.
This one is full of tropes romance loves, and we take them topic by topic, recommending read alikes for everything from grumpy/sunshine, to academic romance, to STEM heroines, to that spicy sex scene that was a delightfully unexpected surprise! That, and we’ve got a bunch of Reylo fic recommended from Ali herself (check the end of show notes)!
Notes
ReyLo is the ship name for Kylo Ren and Rey from the Star Wars movies. And the actor who plays Kylo Ren is Adam Driver.
All about Pansexuality.
Censorship on TikTok is so widespread is has its own wikipedia page, which makes it rife for misinformation about sex and sex education.
Small point of order, Jen was at the LPI (Lunar and Planetary Institute), which is close to the Johnson NASA Space Center in Houston. Obviously, she wasn’t at the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), because that’s in California.
Ali Hazelwood’s Books
Pining Main Characters
The Professors
STEM Heroines
Great Banter
Microtropes
Reylo Fic recommended by Ali Hazelwood & Adriana Herrera
$15 New, $15 Used, Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard
Abash the Little Bird, SecretReyloTrash
All Our Days, voicedimplosives
Can’t Turn Off What Turns Me On, audreyii_fic
Coarse and Rough and Irritating, frak-all
Composure, Skyelo_Ren
Count the Rings, lachesisgrimm
Cupcake Wars, crossingwinter
Embers, Sciosophia
The Girl in Terminal B, nightsofreylo
Juniper and Bergamot, SaintHeretical
Lascivious Weapons, CoraRiley
Let Go (Never Let Me Go), crossingwinter
Light Carries on Endlessly, lachesisgrimm
Misprint, JenfysNest
A Night for Firsts, TheAlchemistsDaughter
Shade on a Sunny Street, tigbit
Sharp Dressed Man, audreyii_fic
She Uses Tangerines, Yours_Truly_Commander_Shepard
So Long, My Adversary, Like_A_Dove
Something Beautiful but Annihilating, SecretReyloTrash
Why Don’t You and I Combine, Crossingwinter
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Blair Babylon, author of Twisted and Tangled,
available in print and ebook, wherever you get your romance,
and
Emjoy, your audio journey to female pleasure.
Visit letsemjoy.com/mates for your 14 day free trial.
S05.03: Marrying Winterborne by Lisa Kleypas: A Professional Driver on a Closed Course
It’s official! Sarah has broken the glass and taken Marrying Winterborne out of the vault and she has exactly as much to say about it as you expect! We’re talking perfect heroes, heroines who deserve to be revered, brilliant writers and plots that require the kind of skill you only get with Lisa Kleypas. Rhys Winterborne is nearly crushed by a building and still shows up at traditional calling hours (with 30 minutes to spare) to propose. An absolute king.
Thanks to Lucy Leroux, author of Making Her His, and Emjoy for sponsoring the episode. Visit letsemjoy.com/mates to access your 14-day free trial.
Show Notes
Maybe you’d like a very fast-talking man to describe the organization and countries of the United Kingdom to you, so watch this video Jen shows her students.
Rhys Winterborne isn’t the only one who thinks Wales is better than England.
Along with being a guy you definitely wouldn’t want to be your dad, the word Albion means England.
They say Helen of Troy started a whole war, but probably a bunch of dudes were just looking for something to fight about.
The state of Sex Education in America is bad and getting worse.
The oathing stone in weddings, and Rhys’s description of the word hiraeth, along with the TikTok Sarah mentioned.
We partnered with The Bawdy Bookworms, and selected A Caribbean Heiress in Paris as the book! Check it out!
Join us this weekend and every Saturday between now and the midterms as we phonebank for Democratic candidates.
The Ravenels
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Lucy Leroux, author of Making Her His, available in print,
in ebook and via Kindle Unlimited.
Visit authorlucyleroux.com
and
Emjoy, your audio journey to female pleasure.
Visit letsemjoy.com/mates for your 14 day free trial.
S05.02: Romance Novel Beginnings: Starting With a Bang!
Not that kind of bang! We’re talking about beginnings today, on the first interstitial of Season 5! This one edges into a bit more writing shop talk than usual, but we’re still name checking lots of favorite books, many of which we’ve done deep dives on already! So consider this your nudge to go back and read some great books we’ve talked about! Also, Sarah has Covid, Jen’s on the mend, Fated States is back, and next week, we’re reading Marrying Winterborne.
Thanks to Lucy Leroux, Eva Moore and Torie Jean for sponsoring the episode. Read Making Her His, Caught a Vibe and Finding Gene Kelly now.
Next week, our first read along of the season is Lisa Kleypas’s Marrying Winterborne. Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or at your local indie.
Show Notes
When a book starts in the middle of the action, it’s called in medias res
If you’re in MA, check out the Rom-Con, a full day celebration of “rom”ance at the “Con”cord free public library this Satruday, Sept 24, from 10-3. Tickets are free!
Fated States has returned, and it looks like we’ll be phonebanking every Saturday starting Oct 1 through the election.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Lucy Leroux, author of Making Her His, available in print,
in ebook and via Kindle Unlimited.
Visit authorlucyleroux.com
and
Eva Moore, author of Caught a Vibe, available in print and ebook
at Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and Barnes & Noble
Visit 4evamoore.com
and
Torie Jean, author of Finding Gene Kelly, available in print,
in ebook, and via Kindle Unlimited.
Visit toriejean.com
S05.01: Season Five! Romance World Domination!
Season Five starts today, you Magnificent Firebirds!
Season One gave us a full lAD deep dive (if you’ve never read Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark, general existential malaise is a really good reason to start), and Season Two gave us The Books That Blooded Us -- the books that made us the romance readers we are. Season Three was during a pandemic, so just let us live (but also, there was a Roy Kent episode). Season Four introduced the Trailblazer episodes, where we featured interviews with the people who have built the romance house over the last fifty years.
Season Five will build on all this — Deep diving on books that are new and fabulous, old and transformative, and generally reveal how vast and magnificent the romance pool can get. We’ve got great interstitials planned, trailblazer episodes already recorded and waiting for you, and a few new episodes that will focus on the books that are putting romance on the map these days…and where readers should go from there.
We’re excited! Aren’t you? Head over to your favorite podcasting app and subscribe so you don’t miss a moment of it!
In the meantime, today’s episode covers some of the romance new that happened while we were away the publishing DOJ trial, the absolute explosion of great books on August 23rd, and what on earth is happening with TikTok? There's a new theme song! And Jen broke her arm!
Next week is an interstitial, and our first read along of the season is Lisa Kleypas’s Marrying Winterborne. Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or at your local indie.
Show Notes
If you’re in MA, check out the Rom-Con, a full day celebration of “rom”ance at the “Con”cord free public library on Sept 24.
That skeleton in your high school might have been real bones. All about the radius and the ulna.
Gross Anatomy was a 1989 movie starring Matthew Modine.
The blood hand job from A Heart of Blood and Ashes continues to amaze new readers, and we are here for it.
Parking at Chicago’s hospitals is so prohibitively expensive that a grieving family created The Jackson Chance Foundation to honor the memory of their beloved son who spent all but 48 hours of his life in the NICU. The Jackson Chance Foundation provides parking assistance and transportation at three downtown hospitals where parking can often run almost $100 per day.
A few useful explainers we found about the PRH vs DOJ trial, a breakdown of why the statistics about books sales are so confusing, and why Stephen King was the government’s star witness.
That NPR article about TikTok, Gen Z, and romance.
The August 23rd Book Bonanza
Other Books Mentioned
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Blair Babylon, author of A Billionaire in Disguise, available at in print,
in ebook via Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo and Nook.
Visit blairbabylon.com
and
Mary Rudder, author of the Kindle Vella series
Love on the Ropes
and
Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order
Bonus! Fated Bosoms/Heaving Mates Crossover
We’re still on our break (back next week!) but this week we have two episodes coming to your earholes! Today, we’re releasing our crossover episode with the brilliant Melody and Erin of the Heaving Bosoms podcast to talk Burn For Me by Ilona Andrews!
Burn for me is a longtime favorite of Jen’s and the first book in the Hidden Legacy series and Sarah deeply regrets taking so long to read it because WOW IT IS GREAT. Here is one for the slow burn lovers in the group!
We get to the bottom of sexy times at the mall, whether or not slow burns and lawn mowing go together, and we talk a lot about waterbeds. You’re going to love it.
Head over and subscribe to Heaving Bosoms!
Season 5 starts next week! Our first read along of the season is Lisa Kleypas’s Marrying Winterborne. Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or at your local indie.
Bonus! Fated Mates Live in Alexandria, VA
We're on hiatus until September 14, when we'll start Season 5, but you won’t miss us, because this week, we have the recording of Fated Mates Live, our first-ever in-person live! Headphones in for this one, y’all.
We were joined in Alexandria, VA by Kate Clayborn, Adriana Herrera, Tracey Livesay, Naima Simone, Ali Hazelwood, Diana Quincy, Andie J. Christopher, and Sophie Jordan, and we had the best time! This audio is imperfect, but there’s so much laughter here — we hope you’ll join us for the next one (which will hopefully be in the spring)…stay tuned on that front!
Be sure to subscribe to the podcast in your favorite podcasting app so you know the moment we return.
Thanks to Fox & Wit, creators of the Foxglove Special Edition Book Box of Kennedy Ryan's Before I Let Go, available for preorder now. The box comes with a special edition cover of Before I Let Go, a signed book plate, and a letter from Kennedy herself.
Season 5 starts in two weeks! Our first read along of the season is Lisa Kleypas’s Marrying Winterborne. Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, or at your local indie.
Show Notes
Our first in-person Live event was a smashing success! We welcomed Kate Clayborn, Adriana Herrera, Tracey Livesay, Naima Simone, Ali Hazelwood, Diana Quincy, Andie J. Christopher, and Sophie Jordan. Thank you to Old Town Books for partnering with us on this event.
Thank you to the audience for their participation! We used a platform called Menti, which turned the screen behind us into an interactive platform (like an Instagram Live) where our audience could respond and comment. If we all have a reaction to something you can't hear....it's because someone in the audience said something brilliantly funny using Menti.
The book Sarah accidentally interstitialed during the recording is C.M. Nascosta's Sweet Berries.
Sponsor
This week’s episode of Fated Mates
is sponsored by:
Fox & Wit,
Book subscription boxes delivered right to your door.
Get a beautiful, exclusive edition of Kennedy Ryan’s Before I Let Go
from their Foxglove series of romances at foxandwit.com
S04.49: Heartbreaker: Meet the Hell's Belles
Sarah has a new book out, so as is tradition for our last episode of the season, Jen is playing host, and Sarah is playing guest, and we’re talking about journeys vs. quests, how being a romance heroine is political, and why Heartbreaker just might be Sarah’s most romantic book. It’s mostly a spoiler free episode, but you might prefer to finish your read before listening. Enjoy! And don’t miss the first two chapters of the magnificent Heartbreaker audiobook, narrated by the incomparable Mary Jane Wells, at the end of the episode!
If you haven’t purchased Heartbreaker yet, you can get it at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, at your local indie, or signed and with special swag (and a Fated Mates sticker!) from Sarah’s local indie, WORD in Brooklyn!
Thanks to Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry a Duke; to Amazon’s Kindle Vella, publishers of Rebecca Zanetti’s Knife’s Edge, Alaska series; and to Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies, for sponsoring the episode. Use the code FATEDMATES for free shipping and 30% off your first order at microdose.com.
This episode wraps up Season 4 of Fated Mates! Jen’s returning Lil’Romance to college, Sarah’s taking a break from social media, and we’ll be back in September with Season 5, which will look similar to Season 4, with read alongs, interstitials, trailblazer episodes and some other fun things we’ve got cooking.
Thank you, as always, for listening! Please follow us on your favorite podcasting app, and if you are up for leaving a rating or review there, we would be very grateful.
Show Notes
Next time you’re in Brooklyn, check out The Center for Fiction.
You can register (it’s free!) to see Sarah and Adriana Herrera in conversation with Greta Johnson from the Nerdette Podcast at the Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago. The panel is at 11:30am on Saturday, Sept 10, 2022.
If you’re in MA, check out the Rom-Con, a full day celebration of “rom”ance at the “Con”cord free public library on Sept 24.
Jen’s planning a pilgrimage to The Book Barn in Niantic CT on Labor Day Weekend.
Pick your local gathering spot: The Peach Pit, Central Perk, Luke’s Diner, or in the MacLeaniverse, The Place.
Every book in the Hell’s Belles series has a cold open.
Adelaide stole the tesseract!
On TikTok, check out this amazing video by emmkick that compares MacLean to Kleypas, and friend of the pod Brittney has an entire TikTok series about the MacLeaniverse. Start with the first one here.
What’s a Himbo? I bet you’re glad you asked.
Speaking of Kleypas, our first read along for Season Five (what!) will be Marrying Winterborne, but we recommend that you read Cold-Hearted Rake first to get “the full Winterborne.”
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry a Duke,
available at Amazon.
Visit alyxandraharvey.com
and
Amazon Kindle Vella
Publishers of Rebecca Zanetti’s Knife’s Edge, Alaska series
and
Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order
S04.48: J. R. Ward: Trailblazer
The final Trailblazer of Season 4 is a very excellent one—we’re welcoming JR Ward to Fated Mates! Best known as the author of The Black Dagger Brotherhood (a series that blooded Jen), JR began her career writing contemporary romances under the name Jessica Bird before turning to the vampires the romance world adores. In this episode, we talk about the twists and turns of her early career, about the influence of her mother and other powerful women in her life, about the business of being JR Ward, about her process of writing the Black Dagger Brotherhood, and about her relationship to her characters.
We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did, and we are so grateful to JR Ward for spending some time with us.
Thanks to Avon Books, publishers of Beverly Jenkins’s To Catch a Raven, Blackstone Publishing, publishers of Nora Zelevansky’s Competitive Grieving, and Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry a Duke, for sponsoring the episode. Stay tuned at the end of the episode for an audio excerpt of Competitive Grieving.
Next week, we finish out Season 4 as is traditional — with a deep dive episode on Sarah’s summer release, Heartbreaker! Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, at your local indie, or signed and with special swag (and a Fated Mates sticker!) from her local indie, WORD in Brooklyn!
Show Notes
Welcome J.R. Ward, author of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, a series of paranormal romances. She also wrote category romance under the name Jessica Bird.
We did a deep dive of JR Ward's Dark Lover in Season Two. Listen here.
People Mentioned: editor Hannah Braaten, publisher Jennifer Bergstrom, publicist Andrew Nguyen, editor and publisher Kara Cesare.
Authors Mentioned: Sherilyn Kenyon, Laurel K. Hamilton, Christine Feehan, Kresley Cole, Nora Roberts, Kristen Ashley, Christopher Rice, and Gena Showalter.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors:
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Avon Books, publishers of Beverly Jenkins’s To Catch a Raven, available at
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, and your local indie.
Visit beverlyjenkins.net
and
Blackstone Publishing, publishers of Nora Zelevansky’s Competitive Grieving,
available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Kobo.
Visit norazelevansky.com
and
Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry a Duke,
available at Amazon.
Visit alyxandraharvey.com
S04.47: Antiheroines in Romance
Our final interstitial of Season 4 and we’re talking Antiheroines! If she’s a criminal, a grifter, a villain or a generally bad dude, we’re here for her, we support her, and we’re rooting for her to fall in love! Today we’re talking about the way antiheroines play in romance, about how we hold them to different standards than antiheroes (it’s the patriarchy, that’s why!), and about why they seem to be more prevalent in historicals and paranormals than they are in contemporaries. Please tell us about all the bad b*tches in books you love so we can love them, too!
Thanks to Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry a Duke, and Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies, for sponsoring the episode. Use the code FATEDMATES for free shipping and 30% off your first order at microdose.com.
Next week, we have a trailblazer (so exciting!), and then we will finish out Season 4 as is traditional — with a deep dive episode on Sarah’s summer release, Heartbreaker! Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, at your local indie, or signed and with special swag (and a Fated Mates sticker!) from her local indie, WORD in Brooklyn!
Show Notes
Lots of housekeeping this week: Bookstore Romance Day is coming! We will be hosting a kickoff event online with Christina Lauren and C. Travis Rice. Check out the official Bookstore Romance Day site to sign up for any of the virtual panels. If you’re in NY metro area, you can see Sarah live in conversation with Tessa Bailey at RJ Julia on Saturday, Aug 20, 2022 at 4pm.
Sarah will be on a panel with Adriana Herrera and other authors for the Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago the weekend of Sept 10-11, 2022. Check the site, which should have a schedule of events coming soon. Jen will be in the audience!
You can preorder signed copies of Heartbreaker from Word in Brooklyn, and you can order signed copies from the authors at Fated Mates Live from Old Town Books in Alexandria.
You don’t have the library extension on chrome yet? You should!
Here’s an interesting article that tries to define the antiheroine archetype. Check out Harley Quinn from movies, and Alice from the show Luther as examples.
That article in the Atlantic was called The Subversive Power of Romance Novels. The book Sarah talked about is Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry a Duke,
available at Amazon.
Visit alyxandraharvey.com
and
Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order
S04.46: Two Girls, One Microphone, Headphones In: Sarah and Jen at Apollycon
You’re getting the full banana this week, y’all, because we were together! Like, actually face to face, across a table in a hotel room! We’re talking Apollycon and Fated Mates Live, answering your questions, recommending fun books, and generally being delightful in your earholes (listen, if we’re not delightful, don’t tell us, we had a great time)!
Thanks to Grand Central Publishing, publishers of Farrah Rochon’s The Hookup Plan, Blair Babylon, author of Rogue, and Amazon’s Kindle Vella, publisher of Audrey Carlan’s The Marriage Auction series, for sponsoring the episode.
We’ve got interstitials and trailblazers coming your way this month, and we will finish out Season 4 as is traditional — with a deep dive episode on Sarah’s summer release, Heartbreaker! Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, at your local indie, or signed and with special swag (and a Fated Mates sticker!) from her local indie, WORD in Brooklyn!
Show Notes
You can check out The Steam Box, which is a great romance + toy subscription box.
A very funny twitter thread about what Mary Shelley might have to say to Joyce Carol Oates.
Speaking of Joe Manganiello, he was in the news this week after finding out about his racial ancestry on the TV show Finding Your Roots.
Sarah says the best feminist double feature is Magic Mike XXL and Mad Max Fury Road and you should try it and report back. You can not only watch Mad Max Fury Road, you can read about it, too.
Don’t forget to order signed copies of Heartbreaker from Word in Brooklyn.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Forever, publishers of Farrah Rochon’s The Hookup Plan, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo, and your local indie.
Visit farrahrochon.com
and
Blair Babylon’s Rogue, free digitally this week at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and Kobo.
Visit blairbabylon.com
and
Amazon’s Kindle Vella, publisher of Audrey Carlan’s The Marriage Auction series,
available at amazon.com/kindlevella.
S04.45: Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert
This week, we’re talking about one of our (and many of your!) favorite recent contemporary romances, Talia Hibbert’s Get a Life, Chloe Brown. We’ve talked about Talia on a number of episodes before, and we’re so happy that our final read-along for Season 4 is this one — which is a straight shot of sexy joy directly into readers’ hearts. Also…these two are so thirsty for each other and it’s great.
We talk about artists and handymen and cats in trees and heroines with bucket lists who are just a delight. Sarah goes on a Seth MacFarlane tangent, and yes, we’re still cataloguing the greatest romance grandmas around.
Fated Mates Live, in person is happening — if you have tickets to the live show in Alexandria, VA on July 30th — let us know on our Twitter thread (and find friends!). If you didn’t get a ticket, but want to order signed books from participating authors, you can do that at Old Town Books in advance of the event!
Thanks to Alyxandra Harvey, author of, How to Marry a Duke, Kate McBrien, author of One Night Together, and Amazon’s Kindle Vella, publisher of Nikki St. Crowe’s Hot Vampire Next Door series, for sponsoring the episode.
We’ve got interstitials and trailblazers coming your way in August, and we will finish out Season 4 as is traditional — with a deep dive episode on Sarah’s summer release, Heartbreaker! Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, at your local indie, or signed and with special swag (and a Fated Mates sticker!) from her local indie, WORD in Brooklyn!
Show Notes
Get a Life, Chloe Brown is the first book in the Brown Sisters Trilogy by Talia Hibbert. Here’s a great interview with Talia Hibbert in Kirkus, written by Jen's editor Laurie Muchnik. Jen reviewed some of Talia’s books for The Book Queen back in 2017.
If you would like to help out with Kansas’s constitutional amendment vote, you can phone bank on your own with the ACLU. Fated States will return in late August or Early September.
You can still sign up for Sarah’s “Mastering the Art of Great Conflict” class!
Check out all these starred reviews of Heartbreaker from Kirkus and Library Journal. You can order signed copies from Word in Brooklyn. Um, there are a lot of songs with lyrics about heartbreaker, soulshakers, and lovemakers, but the one Jen was mangling was Don’t Let Go by En Vogue.
Here’s the story about Seth MacFarlane oversleeping on 9/11.
Here’s a great twitter thread about ableism in fictional characters.
Some great romance grandmas: Gigi in Chloe Brown, Grandma Frida in the Hidden Legacy Series, Genevieve in Lord of Scoundrels, and Grandma Carol from Every Road to You by Phyllis Bourne.
Here’s a quick primer on potential vs kinetic energy in case Jen’s deranged cat explanation didn’t make sense.
The Brown Sisters Series
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Alyxandra Harvey, author of How to Marry an Earl,
available at Amazon.
Visit alyxandraharvey.com
and
Kate McBrien’s One Night Together, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Apple Books.
Visit katemcbrien.com
and
Amazon’s Kindle Vella, publisher of Nikki St. Crowe’s Hot Vampire Next Door series,
available at amazon.com/kindlevella.
S04.44: Daddy Romance
Four seasons in, we’re just throwing caution to the wind now. It’s Daddy week! Yes, that kind of daddy. No, it’s not for everyone, but it is for us and we’re talking about the whys and hows and wtfs herein. Headphones in, obviously.
Romance-Leaning Daddy Books
Erotica-Leaning Daddy Books
Show Notes
It’s Daddy week on Fated Mates. Here’s a few classic articles and explainers that might help you understand the phenomenon: a Daddy explainer from Esquire, an advice columnist from The Cut helps you get over your feelings about Daddy Kink, a woman in a relationship with a Daddy helps you understand the appeal, and why it’s totally find to think Oscar Isaac is the best (stern brunch) Daddy, even if he is having some sort of Daddy-off with Pedro Pascal.
Sarah’s newest release is Heartbreaker, and it comes out Aug 23, 2022. You can preorder signed copies from Word in Brooklyn.
A local Chicago indie, [Women and Children First],7 sponsored a panel on historical romance. You can watch the recording of Adriana Herrera, Harper St. George, and Joanna Shupe in conversation with Jen.
Tickets for both Apollycon and Fated Mates Live are sold out, but you can still get books signed and shipped from: Andie J Christopher, Kate Clayborn, Ali Hazelwood, Adriana Herrera, Tracey Livesay, Sophie Jordan, Diana Quincy, Naima Simone or Sarah by ordering from Old Town Books!
If you are coming, we hope you’ll say hi! You might also want to order an avatar button from the Romancelandia Shop.
The TikTok where a woman calls her husband Daddy and he’s surprised at how much he likes it.
Here’s Bill Pullman’s speech from Independence Day, which is so weirdly hopeful I don’t even know what to say about it.
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Avon Books, publishers of Charis Michaels’s A Duchess by Midnight, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo or your local independent bookseller.
Visit charismichaels.com
and
Juniper Butterworth, author of Priest Queen, available now in Kindle Unlimited.
S04.43: [Sex on the] Beach Reads
It’s July, which means it is officially summer reading time in the northern hemisphere! We’re so excited to share this week’s episode, in which we talk about Beach Reads that aren’t just beach reads but are actually beach reads, by which we mean, romances in which the characters — *ahem* — on the beach. It’s all part of the service we provide here at Fated Mates. We’re taking little trips to Spindle Cove and Lucky Harbor before we take a tour of some very naughty beaches indeed. We hope you’ve got 🔥🔥 beach plans this summer!
Fated Mates Live, in person is happening — if you have tickets to the live show in Alexandria, VA on July 30th — let us know on our Twitter thread (and find friends!). If you didn’t get a ticket, but want to order signed books from participating authors, you can do that at Old Town Books in advance of the event!
Thanks to Avon Books, publishers of Tracey Livesay’s American Royalty, and to Julie Puckrin, creator of SkyMed for CBS Studios and Paramount+.
Next week, we’ve got another interstitial coming your way, but the final read along of season four, in two weeks, is Talia Hibbert’s Get a Life, Chloe Brown. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, or Kobo.
Show Notes
Humidity is terrible! And it really does make it difficult to line dry clothes if you're into that sort of thing.
You can see Sarah at Apollycon (Jen will be there, but at the bar); Fated Mates Live in Alexandria is sold out; and preorder signed copies of Heartbreaker from Word in Brooklyn. You can also sign up for Sarah's conflict in romance class, which will be happening virtually the first week of August.
Jen is looking to do a book event at RJ Julia in Middletown CT, or anywhere in CT. Even better if it’s Labor Day weekend. For reasons.
The pineapple thing and the Adirondack chairs thing.
Seal training is called BUD/S. Sure.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Avon Books, publishers of Tracey Livesay’s American Royalty, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo or your local independent bookseller.
Visit traceylivesay.com
and
Julie Puckrin, creator of SkyMed for CBS Studios and Paramount+
Watch the Skymed Trailer or Stream SkyMed now
S04.42: Brenda Jackson: Trailblazer
Our Trailblazer episodes continue this week with Brenda Jackson, contemporary romance juggernaut, the first African American romance novelist to hit the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists, and the author of more than 140 romance novels.
In this episode, we talk about her journey to romance writing — from writing in high school for her friends, while parenting, while thriving in a completely different career. We also discuss her career at multiple publishing houses including BET Arabesque, Silhouette Desire, Kimani, Mira, HQN, and now, with her own publishing company. We also talk about Brenda Jackson’s legendary families — the Westmorelands, the Steeles, the Madarises and the Grangers — about her relationship to readers, about her writing, about covers, about why 36 is a magic age in romance, and about keeping romance alive beyond the pages.
We are thrilled to share this incredible conversation with all of you, and we are so grateful to Brenda Jackson for taking time to talk with us.
Thanks to Blair Babylon, author of Blair Babylon, author of Once Upon a Time, and Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies, for sponsoring the episode. Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order.
Interstitial next week, but our next read along is Talia Hibbert’s Get a Life, Chloe Brown. Get it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, or Kobo.
Show Notes
Welcome Brenda Jackson, author of over 140 romance novels, with more than 15 million copies of her books in print. Her first romance, Tonight and Forever, was published in August of 1995 and there was a short bio of both Brenda and author Angela Benson in that month's Romantic Times, and her 2001 novel A Family Renuion was the cover story. RT also covered the launch of the Kensington Arabesque line in 1994.
Several authors mentioned in today's episode were also guests on the Black Romance Podcast: Brenda Jackson, Gwyneth Bolton, Rochelle Alers,
In November of 2021, Brenda Jackson signed a deal with The Cartel to bring 25 of her books to the screen. You can learn more about Truly Everlasting, the film Jackson financed, here.
People Mentioned: Romantic Times publisher Kathryn Falk, editor Monica Harris, publisher Walter Zacharius, General William Westmoreland, author Gwynne Forster, author Marcia King-Gamble, author Gwyneth Bolton, author Rochelle Alers, publisher and editor Linda Gill, editor Glenda Howard, and editor Mavis Allen.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Blair Babylon, author of Once Upon a Time, available at in print,
in ebook via Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo and Nook and in audio wherever you get your audiobooks.
Visit blairbabylon.com
and
Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order
Transcript
This transcript is temporarily offline. Rev.com made substantial errors with the transcription and refuses to fix them, so it'll take some time for us to repair the damage. If you know of a more reputable transcription service, please let us know.
S04.41: Unputdownable Romance Novels
We don’t even know, y’all, so this week, we’re doing a little bit of flailing and a lot of talking about books we found unputdownable when we read them the first time. We did our very best to avoid repeats — which is difficult this many episodes in! We talk about what makes a book unputdownable (we’ve got buckets!) and about other things too…like our annual reader survey and how skilled a musician Sarah is.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Show Notes
Abortion is lifesaving healthcare. We are devastated and urge you to support the National Network of Abortion Funds, which removes financial and logistical barriers to abortion access by centering people who have abortions and organizing at the intersections of racial, economic, and reproductive justice. They partner with organizations already in place on the ground in places where abortions are banned to do the work of helping people who need abortions.
We’ve talked about bodily autonomy in romance novels before, and in our trailblazer conversation with Elda Minger, she spoke extensively about what birth control and abortion were like for people back in the 70s.
We remain Big Mad. Also, we are here for you, always. Find Jen (mostly) at Twitter and Sarah (mostly) on Instagram.
Sarah broke her ukulele, which is a pretty cool instrument.
It's Lizzo leading the charge to donate proceeds from her tour to Planned Parenthood, joined by (of course) Rage Against the Machine. Although Harry Styles did make a statement about the Dobbs decision.
London Has Fallen is a deeply silly and very entertaining movie that absolutely does not even try to pass The Bechdel Test.
Back when Jen read the first Scorpius Syndrome book, she did notice a funny thing about the main character’s sense of smell.
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Avon Books, publishers of Julie Anne Long’s You Were Made to Be Mine, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo or your local independent bookseller.
Visit julieannelong.com
and
Leighann Hart, author of Darling Descent
available at Kindle Unlimited
S04.40: Royalty Romance #2
We were going to do a deep dive this week, but then we read the book and decided that was a hard pass! So, we do a very shallow dive and then get to the good stuff this week…talking about Royal romances! We talk about the strange fascination the world has with royalty, about the way fake countries hit the spot, and about why it’s so rare to see a gender-swapped Cinderella story. Sarah also offers a peek at her newest research project, preliminarily titled—Alexbastian: Is Name, In Fact, Destiny? It’s better than a deep dive, we promise.
Fated Mates Live, in person is happening — if you have tickets to the live show in Alexandria, VA on July 30th — let us know on our Twitter thread (and find friends!). If you didn’t get a ticket, but want to join the wait list, you can do that at Old Town Books!
Thanks to Adriana Herrera, author of A Caribbean Heiress in Paris, for sponsoring the episode. Thanks, also, to Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies. Visit microdose.com and use code FATEDMATES to get free shipping & 30% off your first order.
Show Notes
Turns out we are not reading The Dragon and the Jewel…because yikes. Eleanor Plantangenet and Simon de Montfort were real people, but this 1991 romance is too problematic for a full discussion.
Yes, we talked about royalty in romance with Nana Malone back in season 1, but there’s always fresh content!
The Oprah interview with Prince Harry & Meghan Markle is worth a watch, if you can stand all the commercials.
The launch event for American Royalty will be in Richmond on June 28, 2022. Go check it out— Tracey will be joined by Kate Clayborn.
There is a real His Royal Highness Prince Sebastian in Luxembourg, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Order an avatar button from The Romancelandia Shop! This is a great way to announce your presence at in-person events and help people find you. It really works!
Books We Mentioned this Episode
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Adriana Herrera, author of A Caribbean Heiress in Paris, available at
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Kobo or your local independent bookseller.
Visit adrianaherreraromance.com
and
Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order
Transcript for Episode S04.29: Nora Roberts: a Trailblazer Episode
A full transcript is now available for season 4 , episode 29. Enjoy!
Show notes: S04.29: Nora Roberts: a Trailblazer Episode
Nora Roberts 0:00 / #
I got my first royalty check for Irish Thoroughbred, which was my first published Silhouette. And I didn't understand. And I called her and I said, "I got this check and it was, I never had this much money." I said, "They already paid me, because they've given me, you know, $3,000." That was my advance for my first book. And she said, "Nora, they keep paying you." Maybe that was the moment, "Oh! I'm Nora Roberts, and they keep paying me!"
Sarah MacLean 0:30 / #
That was the voice of Nora Roberts. Whoo! It's happening.
Jennifer Prokop 0:37 / #
Yes, it is happening. And you know what, I'm going to say we have been blessed to have amazing people on, but I think you and I both, when we sent the email, when you sent the email to Nora Roberts, were like, what's going to happen? (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 0:55 / #
My favorite is that I texted you and I was like, "Hey, Jen, do you have time to interview Nora Roberts?"
Jennifer Prokop 1:04 / #
Here's the other thing that happened last night. So Mr. Reads Romance said, "What are you doing tomorrow?" And I was like, well, we're going to be recording an interview with this author. And you know, he has no idea who anyone is, bless you all. And I said, "Yeah, with Nora Roberts." And he was like, "Oh, I know that name." I was like, Okay, now I'm nervous. Everyone knows her name.
Sarah MacLean 1:27 / #
Yeah. My in-laws are here this week, because, you know, we're still renovating this house or, you know, putting up bookshelves. And I literally this morning was like, you all need to leave this house. I can't have you in here.
Jennifer Prokop 1:39 / #
Goodbye.
Sarah MacLean 1:42 / #
Welcome, everyone to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah MacLean. I read romance novels, and I write them.
Jennifer Prokop 1:48 / #
And I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor and you're about to hear our conversation with Nora Roberts.
Sarah MacLean 1:54 / #
Do we need to explain who Nora Roberts is for people who are not Mr. Reads Romance?
Jennifer Prokop 2:02 / #
Actually, go do your homework, and know your betters and come back and listen then. Fine. Here we go. Nora Roberts.
Sarah MacLean 2:13 / #
Okay, so let's get started. I think we should begin, if it's okay with you, at your beginning. How did you come to romance? There's sort of a legend about your romance, your first book.
Nora Roberts 2:27 / #
It's a true legend.
Sarah MacLean 2:28 / #
So good.
Nora Roberts 2:28 / #
It's a true legend.
Sarah MacLean 2:32 / #
Would you tell us?
Nora Roberts 2:33 / #
Yeah, well, first, I was really lucky to grow up in a family of readers. Everybody read in my house. So books were everywhere. So I grew up with stories. My father was a movie projectionist. So those kind of stories do and so I always read, and I always thought everyone made up stories in their head. So I never really thought about being a writer until the blizzard of 1979. But I lived in the country, back, a lane about a quarter of a mile. I didn't have four wheel drive. I had a kindergartener and a preschooler.
Sarah MacLean 3:12 / #
Oh my gosh!
Nora Roberts 3:13 / #
Three feet of snow. And I'm walking to kindergarten day after day, and during the period after I had kids, I started reading Harlequins because I could chain the kids down for a nap, and read a book. So I'm really you know, these are great by Violet Winspear and Anne Mather and all of that, and the Gothic romances, Phyllis Whitney and Victoria Holt. Mary Stewart, my absolute favorite. So then I thought, well, I'm, I'm going crazy, going crazy. This is, you know, day six -
Sarah MacLean 3:53 / #
Totally understandable!
Nora Roberts 3:54 / #
Of not being able to leave the house. And so I got a notebook, and I just started writing a story down. A notebook, because first, I didn't have a typewriter at that point. And because I couldn't leave my kids. I had to be there or the older one would have murdered the younger one. And I just fell in love. I mean, it's like, this is so much fun! Why didn't I ever think of doing this before? And that, that was it. And I just never looked back.
Sarah MacLean 4:23 / #
Was that your first book? That notebook book?
Nora Roberts 4:26 / #
No, it was my first book, but not the first that I sold.
Sarah MacLean 4:30 / #
So at that point, I mean, so this is 1979, where do you go from there with a notebook full of story?
Nora Roberts 4:39 / #
Well, exactly. There was no Silhouette at that time. There was only really Harlequin. I think Dell had Candlelight Romance, if I remember correctly, it's a long time ago. So I sent things off, you know, cheerfully, to Harlequin, and the rejections, many of them, because I would just start another book and keep going. So that the news was good. And I showed a lot of promise, but they already had their American writer.
Sarah MacLean 5:12 / #
Gosh, we've heard that story again and again. We've already got our American.
Nora Roberts 5:17 / #
Yeah, it was Janet Daily, which you know is a whole nother story.
Sarah MacLean 5:22 / #
Maybe we'll get there.
Nora Roberts 5:23 / #
Yeah, but then Silhouette opened up in 1980 and they were looking for new American writers. And I fit. I was new. I was American. And so I started and sent a book off to them, and I got a phone call. I know it was hot. So it had to have been in the summer. The kids were screaming in the other room. Then Nancy Jackson, with her British accent was on the phone from New York, said they wanted to buy my book. And it was, "What?" (laughter) It was the best moment of my life. And I had just hired Amy Berkower with Writers House as an agent. I mean, like, like the day before.
Jennifer Prokop 6:15 / #
Oh, wow.
Nora Roberts 6:16 / #
And so when I told Nancy, I just hired an agent. (Huffs) "You should have told me that right away. I need to talk with her." And hung up! I didn't know then that Nancy Jackson never said goodbye. That was just her way. (laughter) And I thought, I've screwed myself. Totally. But no, it all worked out.
Sarah MacLean 6:39 / #
And that's, I'm sorry, you said Nancy Jackson?
Nora Roberts 6:42 / #
Nancy Jackson.
Sarah MacLean 6:43 / #
You're still with Amy, all these years later, right?
Nora Roberts 6:46 / #
Oh, yeah. Mmmhmm.
Sarah MacLean 6:47 / #
Nancy was with you for a long time? Or -
Nora Roberts 6:51 / #
Yeah, several years. And then she shifted to Young Adults. I think they, did Silhouette started Young Adult, with some other line.
Sarah MacLean 7:02 / #
Mmmhmm.
Nora Roberts 7:03 / #
And they passed me to Isabel Swift, who is phenomenal. I've been very lucky. And I was with Isabel until I stopped writing for Harlequin.
Sarah MacLean 7:15 / #
So let's talk about that. You write very quickly. And I think everybody who's listening probably knows that. But were you a fast writer, even then in the early days?
Nora Roberts 7:26 / #
It's just my wiring, I'm, I have a fast pace.
Sarah MacLean 7:29 / #
One of the things on my list that I'd like to talk about, and I think this is a good place for us to talk about it, because it probably comes from the early days, too, is you have, I think, when I think as a writer about protecting the work, and making space for the work and for the writing, you are often the first person I think of because you are so focused and so committed to making space for writing and protecting that space. Could you talk about that? Does it come from, you know, having kids screaming outside in the hallway and just insanity?
Nora Roberts 7:58 / #
I can still write, I like the quiet, but I can still write in any situation because I started writing with two kids in the house, but we had rules. We had rules. And when they were little guys, the rule was when I was writing and I was right there. Don't bother me unless there's blood or fire. (laughter) And sometimes there was blood. We never had any fire. But sometimes it was blood and stuff and you deal with it. When they got older and more responsible, it was arterial blood and active fire.
Jennifer Prokop 8:38 / #
These are book titles. Have you ever called a book Blood or Blood or Fire? Because missed opportunity? (laughter)
Nora Roberts 8:45 / #
No, I'm working here. So this was my job, what would they have done? I would have a sitter or daycare, or something. If I've worked in an office outside the home. This is my writing time. This is my job. Now I did write when they were in school, and when they came home from school, I stopped because you got homework, you got snacks, you know you got kids. And I would go back to work when they finally went to bed. And I did that for a lot of years. I was a single parent for a while, so it was just me and them. They outnumbered me. You know, your kids are your first responsibility. But when you've got to work to pay the bills, so the kids don't starve and don't go naked. So you make work.
Sarah MacLean 9:39 / #
Now your kids are grown and one of the things when we were emailing about this time you said you know can we do it on a weekend because the weekdays are my writing days. And I said to Jen, "I think this is something that, you know, I need to internalize as a writer too." It's a job. You sit in the desk and you do the work.
Nora Roberts 9:56 / #
It's a job. It's a really great job, but it's a job,
Jennifer Prokop 9:59 / #
So it's interesting, you talked about starting off in writing in longhand. So how did that change? I mean, obviously, are you a person now who can write on your phone?
Nora Roberts 10:10 / #
Oh, my phone. My God, I don't do anything on my phone.
Jennifer Prokop 10:13 / #
Okay. Well, because I feel like there's a movement now to younger writers who are like, yeah, I wrote this book on my phone. I feel like it's a weird new longhand. Like I just did it where I could. That's where I was, when I could write.
Nora Roberts 10:26 / #
Whatever process works for you is the correct process. There's no one way.
Sarah MacLean 10:31 / #
So at this point you're writing, it's the '80s, and you're writing Silhouettes, and you're writing Harlequins?
Nora Roberts 10:38 / #
No, I never really wrote for Harlequin.
Jennifer Prokop 10:41 / #
Oh, okay.
Nora Roberts 10:42 / #
They bought Silhouette.
Nora Roberts 10:44 / #
I forget when, but I really wrote for the Silhouette imprint.
Sarah MacLean 10:49 / #
Is this the time when you start to really feel like romance is coming? We know the '80s is when the romance world just sort of exploded. And at what point did it really feel like, oh, this is happening. This, this romance is real, the readers are showing up, and this is a big deal.
Nora Roberts 11:09 / #
I don't know that I ever had a like, come to Jesus moment on that. It was all gradual. And I'm, again about the work. So I don't know that I noticed so much. I mean, I went to conferences, and that sort of thing. And I had a local chapter. But I didn't really go to meetings because -
Sarah MacLean 11:34 / #
Of RWA.
Nora Roberts 11:34 / #
Yeah. I mean I went to one meeting of Washington Romance Writers, way, way back. I think my first book was out, and I had sold two more. And I went to my first meeting, and there was some controversy at the time about the Silhouette contract. And most of these women, I'm gonna say, right off, were not published. A couple were, and they're all bitching and whining and carrying on about Clause 19B, I still remember. And one of them turned to me at one point, I didn't know what the hell they were talking about. And she said, "Nora, what do you think about Clause 19B?" And I said, "Oh," because I really didn't know, "I don't read contracts, I sign them." (laughter) And that was the end of that. And it's absolutely true. I have an agent. She reads the contracts.
Nora Roberts 12:35 / #
If she told me not sign, I wouldn't sign it. You know, so it was, it's my community. It was my community. And RWA offered so much support and the local chapters so much support, and information and networking opportunities. And I met a lot of my friends there. People I'm still very good friends with today, but I never really, I mean, it all just sort of built and, and happen. So I couldn't say that I had this, "Oh, my God, look at all this." It was just, I was just writing books.
Sarah MacLean 13:12 / #
So you have a bookstore, in Boonsboro, Maryland. You have several things in Boonsboro, Maryland. But you have a bookstore in Boonsboro, Maryland, and you're so welcoming to new and established writers to come and you do signings every time you have a book out in Boonsboro. And I've been there twice and both times, it's just an amazing experience, because people come from all over the country and world to Boonsboro to meet you and to and to get books signed by you at these book signings. And they stand in line for hours, they wrap around the building. It's an incredible experience. And you also have this very rich reader community online, that you clearly built when the internet arrived. So I'm curious about your relationship with readers and how this community, how you built this community and then the work as you think of it through readers.
Nora Roberts 14:14 / #
I think it's really important to be accessible. And I like being accessible through the internet because you don't have to put makeup on. (laughter) Worry, you know, you haven't had your hair done, so your roots are showing, stuff like that. But I'm happy to hear from readers most of the time. Now, Laura, Laura Reeth is my publicist. She handles social media. If I were to try to do the social media, I wouldn't be writing.
Sarah MacLean 14:47 / #
I would much rather be and she's much better at it anyway. But in the early days, you know, there were message boards on AOL, stuff like that, and I would, I'd go on here and there and it was fascinating. Just fascinating. And you did build relationships. Problems started with some people, and now you've got a target on your back. So they, they just can't help themselves. And we have some problems with that certainly in the social media that Laura does. We just had to put up another post yesterday, you know, knock it off with the, I love that it's the In Death books in particular. I love, love, love these books, but you need to do this, this, this, this, this, this, this. You need to do this, this, this! No. I don't. Read them or don't. Like them or don't. Don't tell me how to do my job. I know you used to ghost writer on that last one, because it didn't sound like you. Oh, fuck you. Just completely. Because I've been very clear about that. I work really hard. And I love my work. That's the downside.
Sarah MacLean 16:11 / #
Mmmhmm.
Jennifer Prokop 16:11 / #
Yeah.
Nora Roberts 16:11 / #
If I had to do it myself, I wouldn't do it at all, at this point, but Laura is so good at it. That we've got a really nice community on Facebook, on both pages, and I do the blog. And I handle things like I'm wearing my, "I have personally explained the process to you Deborah" sweatshirt. (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 16:35 / #
We all love that.
Nora Roberts 16:36 / #
Because I will, I'm very patient, I think. And I try to be very gracious, because some people don't know they're being offensive. So you give them chances, because, and you try to explain. But then when you just keep at it, you're gonna piss me off. That's really a mistake.
Nora Roberts 17:04 / #
A big, big mistake.
Sarah MacLean 17:06 / #
Well, let's talk about that. One of the hallmarks, I think, of your place in romance and in publishing in general is your intense and important advocacy around the issue of plagiarism because you've experienced it multiple times.
Sarah MacLean 17:23 / #
And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that experience shaped your work, your writing, your life, and then it feels like it happens more in romance or in genre in a really interesting way. And I wonder if you have thoughts on that.
Nora Roberts 17:41 / #
I still remember exactly, I was on a message board. Again, and there's that connection with the readers. And I read this on a message board that this reader had read, Notorious by Janet Dailey, shortly after she had read a reissue, because my book was six, seven years prior to Notorious, Sweet Revenge, and said, they're big chunks that are the same, word for word. And I'm thinking she's wrong. Because I knew Janet. That, that has to be wrong. But my younger son was working in the bookstore that day, and I said, "Bring a copy of Notorious," it was out in paperback, "home with you." And I opened it up to one of the pages that she had cited. And I couldn't believe it. I mean, I literally just lost my breath. There, it was obvious, it was word for word, not just a sentence, but a chunk. And then you look on and there's another chunk, and there's a scene, and on and on and on. And I, it was on a weekend, I called my agent, you know, we started dealing with it, and it was ugly, and hurtful. And I knew her. So then I'd never experienced anything like this. And a lot of the advice was we'll just keep it quiet.
Nora Roberts 19:17 / #
We'll just keep it quiet. She will, you go through, her agent said, go through the manuscript. Go through them, I think they sent me the manuscript, and just take out whatever is in question.
Nora Roberts 19:36 / #
And I actually started to do that.
Nora Roberts 19:39 / #
And I sit was sitting on my deck. And I was doing that and thinking, "this is crazy!" There are pages, and it's like, you take this and I called my agent again. And I said, "Amy!" She was so hot because Janet's agent had just called her to tell me to hurry up, because the publisher wanted to go to a second printing.
Sarah MacLean 20:05 / #
Oh, so they were gonna just take out all of that stuff and reprint?
Nora Roberts 20:09 / #
Oh, you don't back an Irish woman into the corner! And that was it. That was all, that was over. I wanted her blood in my throat after that. That was just, uh-uh.
Jennifer Prokop 20:21 / #
Yeah.
Nora Roberts 20:21 / #
There was an RWA thing coming and she, we agreed that we would keep it quiet and deal with the lawyers, that I would not go to the press. She would not go to the press. We would see, without pulling the book, and then I, I went down to speak to a library, a Friends of the Library thing, the day before an RWA conference in Orlando. And she broke it. She broke the story. So she's a liar, on top of being a thief, and put me in a really big, terrible spot.
Sarah MacLean 20:59 / #
How did she spin it?
Nora Roberts 21:00 / #
Oh she had -- it was inadvertent. It was unconscious.
Jennifer Prokop 21:06 / #
Oh, right.
Nora Roberts 21:06 / #
She was so sorry.
Sarah MacLean 21:08 / #
Ohhh, feel bad for me.
Nora Roberts 21:09 / #
Yes, feel bad for me. I'm the victim here.
Sarah MacLean 21:12 / #
I made a mistake.
Jennifer Prokop 21:12 / #
I don't know how it happened. Boy, I just must have read that thing.
Sarah MacLean 21:15 / #
I don't know how I copy and pasted.
Nora Roberts 21:17 / #
Then I was I was going down the elevator the next morning to get the paper because I'd spent I don't know how many hours dealing with reporters after it broke. and I'm riding in the elevator and I'm reading this article, and it said that, you know, her brother had been sick and this was Janet speaking -
Sarah MacLean 21:43 / #
Oh, the the full banana here.
Nora Roberts 21:45 / #
And her dog died. And I love dogs. I've always loved dogs. I have dogs. I just laughed hysterically and there's some strange woman and I punched the woman you know, not like, "POW", but like, "her dog died!" (laughter) "Oh, no, I'm so sorry." I said, "No, no, you don't get it. That's why she had to steal from me." And she told me it was only the one time because they finally convinced me to talk with her on the phone.
Sarah MacLean 22:17 / #
Oh, and you were friends.
Nora Roberts 22:20 / #
She told me, she swore, she swore to me it was only the one time. And I went up and I got another one of her books, because I had collected them, opened it up and immediately found another book with my work in it.
Nora Roberts 22:37 / #
So two years of court battles, and just bullshit from her lawyer until we settled.
Sarah MacLean 22:45 / #
And why do you think, I mean, do you think there's a reason why you were told to keep it quiet?
Nora Roberts 22:49 / #
Because that's what they want you to do. That's what everyone wants you to do, basically, because it's ugly. And it's hard.
Sarah MacLean 22:57 / #
It really became a conversation in romance writ large. There were factions, right?
Nora Roberts 23:05 / #
And a lot of people were really, really pissed at me.
Sarah MacLean 23:11 / #
Shocking.
Nora Roberts 23:11 / #
A lot of writers were really angry with me. RT did this, Romantic Times did this whole article on, on how I should have left her alone. She's an icon.
Sarah MacLean 23:23 / #
It's really interesting, because it, of course makes you think if these were men, would we be having this conversation?
Jennifer Prokop 23:30 / #
Right.
Sarah MacLean 23:31 / #
Do you feel like that's part of it?
Nora Roberts 23:33 / #
Oh, absolutely. The press was all, "See? We told you romance was all the same." They made fun of it.
Jennifer Prokop 23:40 / #
Oh, yeah.
Nora Roberts 23:41 / #
And that was, you know, so there you go. But I didn't make fun of it. And, and she lost. So -
Jennifer Prokop 23:49 / #
Right. To me when I think about this, I think this is Nora Roberts saying this is a business and this is not just fun and games and a cute thing we do.
Nora Roberts 24:00 / #
No. This was my my career. This was my work and she stole it. I remember one writer coming up to me at the conference and saying, you know, it's really a form of flattery. Instead of punching her in the face, (laughter) I just said, "You know, if you compliment my earrings, I'm flattered. If you steal them. I'm calling the cops."
Jennifer Prokop 24:26 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 24:27 / #
Yeah. And what's shocking about this, is that it's not the only time it's happened to you. So, it's really, it is something that we see rise up again and again in romance. And I mean, I'm sure it happens in other genres too. But -
Nora Roberts 24:44 / #
Oh yeah.
Sarah MacLean 24:45 / #
Personally, you and I have had many conversations about plagiarism, and I'm really grateful for all of your guidance.
Nora Roberts 24:52 / #
The Brazilian woman really does take the cake. I mean she stole from so many.
Sarah MacLean 24:57 / #
Nora and I were both plagiarized by a woman who pla
Sarah MacLean 25:00 / #
giarized, I think, it was in total, almost 60 authors.
Nora Roberts 25:04 / #
Yeah, almost 60. Just amazing.
Sarah MacLean 25:07 / #
That was fun times. We'll put links in show notes to all of this. So -
Jennifer Prokop 25:11 / #
What I kind of as a reader, more on the reader side struggle with, is this seems like something Amazon could easily cross check. You know, documents against other documents. So -
Nora Roberts 25:23 / #
Oh yeah! Could not agree more.
Jennifer Prokop 25:24 / #
You know turnitin.com exists for students, so why couldn't it exist for Amazon?
Jennifer Prokop 25:29 / #
So I'm curious about your opinion, if you have one about why can't the gatekeeping be to stopping this before it gets out? And then you guys are all stuck trying to sue this woman in Brazil?
Nora Roberts 25:40 / #
Well, I will say that it's difficult for the publishers, although I got a lot of, with um, is it Surya or whatever her name was
Sarah MacLean 25:53 / #
Serruya.
Nora Roberts 25:54 / #
A lot of support from my publisher on that one, but the copyright's in the author's name, not in the publisher's name. So copyright infringement is the author's problem.
Jennifer Prokop 26:05 / #
I see.
Nora Roberts 26:06 / #
And when I when I sued Janet, I got a lot of support from my publisher. There were two. I had more than one at that time. In fact, Silhouette sent me a manuscript that they were going to publish of hers and asked me to look and yeah, she had plagiarized me and then they dropped the book.
Sarah MacLean 26:32 / #
In that one too! Oh, my gosh! You would think she would have pulled everything back at that point and said, "I want everything back."
Sarah MacLean 26:42 / #
Thank you for talking to us about that. Let's move on to more fun conversation. [AD BREAK]
Sarah MacLean 26:50 / #
We talked about your category work. Let's start there with the move from category to single title. How did that happen? Was it you moving as an author? Was it the publisher saying you know Nora, you're so fabulous. We need bigger books, more books.
Nora Roberts 28:50 / #
I always wanted to write romantic suspense. Always, always always, but there just wasn't a market for it, unless you were Mary Stewart or Victoria Holt or Phyllis Whitney. And I remember my agent telling me way back in the day, build a good foundation. That's the first thing you do. So not only did I take that to mean the work and the quality of the work, and your relationship with the readers and everything else and the business, but category, which I respected a great deal or I wouldn't have written them gave me a foundation. How to write an entire story with character, plot, setting, subplots, themes, description. A friend of mine once said, "A book is Swan Lake on the stage with the costumes and the lights, and the choreography, and category is Swan Lake in a phone booth." And that's perfect.
Jennifer Prokop 30:00 / #
Yeah.
Nora Roberts 30:00 / #
You have to learn how to tell a story briefly and still make it good. And I wanted to do something bigger. I knew that I wanted to write suspense. So when I felt like I had an idea and I had built my foundation, I tried with Hot Ice. And yeah, Bantam bought that. And that was the next step to doing, you know, mass market paperback, bigger, romantic suspense sort of books.
Jennifer Prokop 30:41 / #
And you also seem to have a real affinity for a certain kind of fantasy?
Nora Roberts 30:47 / #
Yeah, I love writing fantasy and magics, and fairies and dragons and -
Jennifer Prokop 30:54 / #
You know you really are a triple threat. You know you write straight, kind of contemporary romance, but then as time evolved, there's the romantic suspense, but even the In Death books are futuristic. As you then enter the '90s, where you have kind of more of an opportunity to write single title. How did you balance, I guess, the needs of the market versus your own interest as a writer?
Nora Roberts 31:20 / #
Never think about the market.
Sarah MacLean 31:22 / #
That's good advice.
Nora Roberts 31:23 / #
Think about what I want to write. What interests me, well, the idea that's there, and pulling at me, is much more important to me than the market, but that was after I built my foundation. And then, you know, if I write this book that I really want to write, and it's crap, or nobody wants it, I'm writing another one. Because the market changes. It changes. So by the time I'm going to write this because this is really hot right now, but by the time you write that, and it gets published, it may not be hot anymore. So write what pulls at you. Write what you need to write.
Sarah MacLean 32:06 / #
So let's talk about that, because what pulled at you was the In Death series at some point, and you changed your name for it. So can we talk about that?
Nora Roberts 32:16 / #
Oh, yeah. That. Phyllis Whitney. Oh my God, what a brilliant, the most brilliant woman in publishing. She was CEO of Putnam, when I went there. And she called me one day in that New York accent, "Nora, you need a hobby."
Sarah MacLean 32:37 / #
"You need a hobby!" (laughter)
Nora Roberts 32:38 / #
"You need a hobby." "Phyllis, I don't want hobby. I just want to write." And my agent and Phyllis had both been nudging me to take a pseudonym. Oh, no, I don't, wah wah wah, I don't want to take a pseudonym. Those books have to have my name on it. Blah, blah, blah. And then Amy said to me one day when we're talking about it, after Phyllis and the hobby, she said, "Nora, there's Pepsi, there's Diet Pepsi, and there's caffeine free Pepsi." And I thought, oh, it's marketing. And I can be two popular brands. Let me, I have this idea, this weird idea. Let me play with it. And we'll see. 'Cause I had had this idea for the Eve Dallas character, and, and this setting in New York and all of that. I sort of had all of that, but I thought, I don't know what to do with that. I don't know what to do with that. She's so dark and difficult. You know, I know, I'm not sure what I would do. And then this is like, all right. They want something. I said I would do it, but I would have to do something completely different than what I do. And I started writing Naked In Death, and really, really fell hard. It was a three book contract. I started it thinking it would be a trilogy. So I sort of structured it that way. And by the time I was into the second book, I was really hoping I could, they would do well.
Nora Roberts 34:30 / #
Write 50 more? (laughter)
Nora Roberts 34:30 / #
Yeah. 'Cause I'm loving this. These are so much fun. And I, a lot of people, since we're on this one, think I took the JD so people wouldn't be sure, would think I was a man, and that is not true. They're my son's initials. I just thought that would be fun. I didn't, yeah, they're my son's initials and they wanted me to use a last name that would be close to where people would look for me in the bookstore shelves, so -
Sarah MacLean 35:03 / #
Sure. At the time was it public that you were both?
Sarah MacLean 35:07 / #
Some people keep that a secret.
Nora Roberts 35:09 / #
Yeah. My agent felt it was really important for the books to build on their own. If they were going to build, let them build on their own, and then you'll be two popular brands. And she was right again. As you see, you might understand why I've been with Amy for decades.
Jennifer Prokop 35:31 / #
How is writing a long running series with the same main characters different from writing other trilogies? How does that, as a writer, how do you plan for, okay, it's even work again?
Sarah MacLean 35:46 / #
How do you keep that fresh for yourself, too?
Jennifer Prokop 35:49 / #
Yeah, exactly.
Jennifer Prokop 35:50 / #
How does that interact then with the other stories that might be, you might think, oh, this is a three book series. I can conceive of this at the same time.
Nora Roberts 35:58 / #
With the In Death, I know that world and those characters really, really well. I should by this time, 50 odd books. So it's, it's more when I, when I think about what am I going to do with them next? It's what, what will drive them? Usually I'm going to think of the murder. You know, people, a lot of the readers think of them more as relationship books, because they're very attached, as I am, to the people in them, but they're murder books. The murder is the core of it, because if she didn't have a murder to solve, what would she be doing? You know? So I have to think of what, what's around that, and I might have to think, or try to think, what secondary characters might I bring in this time. Sometimes that just, I don't think about them, it just flows with the story. Oh, this is good, Nadine's coming in, because it just makes sense. I enjoy them a lot. I don't have to think about the world. Like when I'm starting a trilogy, I have to build a whole new world again. With the In Death, that world is built. And I just have to follow the rules I set up in 1995 or whenever it was. And I want the characters to evolve and change because people do and their relationships evolve and change. So we're, where are we here, and I then, I just sit down and get started and see what happens. With a trilogy, I have to, I have to have an idea that will work in three parts. A big story that I will tell in three parts, but each has to be self-contained enough. So it has an ending of some sort, but some thread that is going to continue through into the next book and the next for the resolution. And with the trilogies I've been doing the last few years, that means a lot of world building. With Year One, I have to build that whole. And who knew that there would be a global pandemic? At least billions that, and hasn't wiped us all out yet. So there's that. I just had that idea and I have to do that. Even though it's different than, you know, because it wasn't a romance.
Sarah MacLean 38:44 / #
Right. Well, that's what I'd like to talk about. I mean, it really feels to us, you know, when we were talking, before we we started talking with you, it feels to us that there was a kind of significant shift in the way that you wrote or you write and it came, in our mind, somewhere around the Bride Quartet. Are we in the right area?
Nora Roberts 39:07 / #
It might be. It's so not analytical.
Sarah MacLean 39:14 / #
But now, I mean, the difference between the Bride Quartet say and -
Nora Roberts 39:18 / #
Oh, yeah. completely different.
Sarah MacLean 39:18 / #
The Chronicles of The One, right.
Jennifer Prokop 39:21 / #
Right.
Sarah MacLean 39:21 / #
Exactly. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you have, how you are changing as a writer, how because it seems a lot of times people get to a certain point in their career and they you know, just coast and they write the same book over and over again and you are definitely not doing that.
Jennifer Prokop 39:40 / #
Not doing that.
Nora Roberts 39:41 / #
Well, I get accused of that, though, all the time, by some readers.
Sarah MacLean 39:45 / #
Well, we would never!
Nora Roberts 39:47 / #
And I don't think it's true because I do write in different areas. Many -
Sarah MacLean 39:52 / #
No, it feels like people are not paying attention.
Jennifer Prokop 39:56 / #
Right.
Nora Roberts 39:57 / #
I think that goes back to I have to write what interests me. When the idea comes on, they're not all good ideas. So you have to work on how you're going to articulate that idea and do a story on paper. So with the Bride Quartet, I liked the idea of using the whole wedding thing and have each one of those women, that have their own place in it, yet interact. And of course, you know, the romances. And I think those were the last straight relationship books that I've written. I can't think of anything I've -
Sarah MacLean 40:41 / #
Where the relationship is the primary driver.
Nora Roberts 40:43 / #
Yeah. Where the relationship is the reason. It's the reason. So those were probably the last romances I wrote. The books that come out in the summer in hardcover are generally, they're going to have a relationship in them, because that's what I like to read too. I like books with relationships in them. But the relationship often doesn't start, as it would in most romances, pretty much in the first quarter. even sooner. So they're more thrillers with romantic elements or suspense with romantic elements,
Jennifer Prokop 41:26 / #
Or fantasy with romantic elements. I've just read book two of a series that is kind of more fantasy.
Nora Roberts 41:32 / #
Oh it's The Awakening and then The Becoming.
Jennifer Prokop 41:34 / #
Yes. Yeah, clearly relationships are at the core of the story, but definitely the romance is not the core of the story.
Nora Roberts 41:40 / #
Yeah. Lots of relationships.
Jennifer Prokop 41:41 / #
But it's still so satisfying.
Nora Roberts 41:43 / #
I like writing about family. I like writing about friendships, the family you make, the family you're born with, that sort of thing. I mean, it's the world we live in and those relationships are a part of who we are. So if you're gonna write about people, you write about relationships,
Sarah MacLean 42:01 / #
Do you feel like, appreciating that you don't think about the market, do you feel like the readers have come with you really readily?
Nora Roberts 42:10 / #
Some don't. Some do. Some drag their feet. I had a comment the other day, this woman has read all my books under Roberts, but she just didn't think she would like the Robb books, so and then, I guess a lot of people picked up more books during the pandemic, I don't know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna read, so. And you know, she loved them. But she, no, I don't think I want to read something that's set in the future. So and I get that a lot. Or you get men who will read the Robb books, because they think it's a guy. They just automatically think that and then you know, their wife or girlfriend or whatever, haha, you just read Nora Roberts. (laughter) That's a hard one for some men to take.
Sarah MacLean 43:04 / #
Well, with that in mind, it sounds like, I mean between Amy and your publisher and your editor, you know, you have such an incredibly supportive community helping you publish, but I wonder is there ever, has there been over the course of your career, the book that you, the fight you had to fight in order to tell the story you wanted to tell, to make the change to -- has there been a challenge or have you ever had to really, really push for something?
Nora Roberts 43:34 / #
Not for, not to write something now. No, no. No one's ever told me that won't work, or that won't do. Plus, I don't talk about it before I start it.
Sarah MacLean 43:47 / #
Oh and that helped, right?
Nora Roberts 43:48 / #
Never like go I'm thinking of and who would I say that to? My editor? Oh no. She can read. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 43:56 / #
Right.
Nora Roberts 43:56 / #
Now she will often ask, "You know, so what are you working on? You know, can you tell me anything?" And I'll, I'm really bad at it. She knows I'm really bad at it. But I'll try to, you know, walk her through the basics. You know, I'm setting it in, and the one that's coming out, Nightwork in May. When you said it's all over the place because he travels, so it doesn't have until the last part of the book where he settles, you know, she's thinking covers and stuff too. Give me, give me something.
Jennifer Prokop 44:36 / #
Right.
Nora Roberts 44:37 / #
And names and things like that, but I I don't and never did. Now I'll tell you an early story which may explain some of this. After I started selling to Silhouette, I'd sold several books to them, my agent called me up, bearing please, you no longer have to submit a completed manuscript for their contract, you can just submit an outline. And I said, "Great!" Hung up the phone and like, oh, shit. I don't know how to do an outline. (laughter) I don't know what I'm writing until I'm writing it. So what I did, I did three times. I wrote the book, and then I wrote an outline and I sent it in.
Sarah MacLean 45:25 / #
Oh my gosh! (laughter) They gave you more work!
Nora Roberts 45:29 / #
We were together somewhere, I think it was on the Queen Mary, some RWA thing at the bar, and I confessed and she thought that was the funniest. Never mind, Nora, never mind. You don't have to write them. (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 45:42 / #
That's, oh that's really funny.
Nora Roberts 45:46 / #
A synopsis, I guess is what it was. You can, you can sell them synopsis. I still couldn't write a synopsis if you held a gun to my head.
Sarah MacLean 45:53 / #
Oh, no, they're the worst. (laughter) Nora, this one is, some people feel awkward about answering it, but I hope you won't, and that is you are Nora Roberts. And when people talk about romance in the world, you forever will be associated, you know, you are the first name many people think and I wonder if you can speak to, when did you realize that you were something bigger than all of it? (laughter) In many ways. I mean when did you realize that you were, you know this is a Trailblazer episode, this is the Trailblazer series. Let me rephrase it. When did you realize that you were kind of a legend?
Jennifer Prokop 46:36 / #
Nora Roberts!
Sarah MacLean 46:38 / #
You're Nora Roberts!
Nora Roberts 46:38 / #
I think a lot like how romance just, you know, kept rolling and exploding. It just, it was a gradual thing. I think one of the milestones for me was hitting the Times list the first time. That was huge. And that was -
Jennifer Prokop 47:02 / #
Was that Hot Ice or was it something later?
Nora Roberts 47:04 / #
No, that was Geunuine Lies.
Jennifer Prokop 47:06 / #
Oh, okay.
Nora Roberts 47:07 / #
Genuine Lies was the first one to hit and so that sort of thing. And I started this business so naive, another story, which Amy laughed at quite a bit, is I got my first royalty check for Irish Thoroughbred, which my first published Silhouette. And I didn't understand. And I called her and I said, "I got this check." And it was for like, I never had this much money. I said, "They already paid me."
Nora Roberts 47:45 / #
Because they'd given me you know, $3,000. That was my advance for my first book. And she said, "Nora, they keep paying you." (laughter) Maybe that was the moment -
Sarah MacLean 47:56 / #
And you were like this is a good job!
Nora Roberts 47:59 / #
I'm Nora Roberts and they keep paying me! (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 48:05 / #
Well, and you know what, if people buy enough Irish Thoroughbred after this, you're going to see that return on your royalty statement again. (laughter) [AD BREAK]
Jennifer Prokop 49:44 / #
So you were in romance from the beginning and how have you seen the genre changing? Do you think it has changed?
Nora Roberts 50:04 / #
Oh my god, yeah. It's always changed and if you don't change you stagnate. When I first started, the big part of romance was the historicals. Kathleen Woodiwiss, who was the -
Nora Roberts 50:19 / #
Rosemary Rodgers
Nora Roberts 50:20 / #
Yes, that's the name that wouldn't come to me. That was, that was the thing, and I didn't want to write those. I read some and I enjoyed them, but it wasn't like what pulled at me. So what gradually category romance became really big over the course of the '80s, and then contemporary romance became really big. Before that, then, you know, there was gothics, which I did love, you know they had the woman running away and the light in the window.
Jennifer Prokop 50:51 / #
(laughter) Right.
Nora Roberts 50:52 / #
All the covers.
Jennifer Prokop 50:52 / #
Woman running away. A night gown. That house is coming to get me! (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 50:57 / #
Well, you said Victoria Holt. I mean that labels you as a gothic lover from the beginning.
Nora Roberts 51:03 / #
The beauty of romance was always that you could, I will absorb elements from any other genre, from any other area of fiction, as long as you have that core relationship. The two person love story, and emotional commitment, sexual tension, happy ending. You have that, you can do anything, absolutely anything. Use any spoke on the umbrella. Over the course of time, it seemed to me that the two person evolved a bit, so that the sex wasn't about sexual tension and emotional commitment, but is more about 50 Shades of Grey. Let's just have lots and lots of sex. And when I read books like that, and I'm not dissing that particular book, but that sort of thing, I didn't feel the heart. And for me, romance, always had heart, because it was about emotion and commitment. And it seemed to me pieces of the genre were changing again, which you know, things change. And that's not the direction I wanted to go. So I went my direction, and the genre sort of took a different one. Not that there aren't still books that are about two people falling in love and having that sexual tension before they jump into bed and, and then having really good sex is a great part of romance, if it's articulated well. And that commitment again. And that upbeat ending. You've got to give me the upbeat ending. I don't, no. Anna Karenina. She throws herself in front of a train. Why do I want to read that? I don't want to read that. I want to read Jane Eyre. She, everything -
Nora Roberts 53:07 / #
All the horrible things that happened to her but she wins! She wins in the end. That's what I want.
Jennifer Prokop 53:13 / #
Right.
Sarah MacLean 53:14 / #
When we had Jayne Ann Krentz on, we talked a lot about core story, and is there something that you feel like when you sit down, there's just no way you're going to avoid?
Nora Roberts 53:23 / #
I think one of the most important elements to me, is character. So the characters are key for me. Character is plot to me. If I don't love the characters, or hate them if it's a villain and I'm supposed to. I can't write them well. I can't write their dialogue well if I don't know how they speak. I need to know, whether I put it in the book or not, what they want to eat for breakfast and what they have in their top drawer. Where they come from, why they left there, why they stayed there, what they do for a living, why they do it, and where they do it. So I think most of the readers from feedback, it's the characters that pull them in. And for me as a writer and a reader, it's the characters that pull me in.
Jennifer Prokop 54:23 / #
One of the things for me, I've always really respected about your characters, especially that women always have really interesting jobs. You know, she's an arson investigator or or you know, she's a sculptor. When I talk about how I imprinted on romance, I often talk about that sense that every woman had a cool, interesting job, or was doing something she loved.
Nora Roberts 54:43 / #
Doing something you love. Yeah. Whatever. You were someone's administrative assistant, but you loved being that, that's all great and good. I like writing about strong women or women who find their strength over the course of the book. That's key. I certainly don't want to write about weak men, either, but I'm a woman, and I want to write about women who find, who stand up for themselves or finally stand up for themselves.
Jennifer Prokop 55:18 / #
Do you have books of yours that you consider your favorites? Or that you're most proud of?
Nora Roberts 55:24 / #
No. My favorite book is the one on sale now, because I never have to think about it again. (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 55:31 / #
We hear that a lot.
Nora Roberts 55:33 / #
The least favorite is usually the one I'm working on because it's giving me all the trouble. (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 55:42 / #
Fair.
Sarah MacLean 55:43 / #
There must be books that you feel just landed in the world in a really special way. Do you have books that you hear the most about from readers?
Nora Roberts 55:53 / #
I don't think so. What I try to tell the readers, because it's absolutely true, when they say, "But you need to do this, this and this." I said, "If I listen to you, and I did this, this and then, Reader B over here is going to say, "Why the hell did you do that, that, that? I hate that."" Listening to readers, that way lies madness.
Sarah MacLean 56:19 / #
I'm writing this down. Take note.
Jennifer Prokop 56:20 / #
Yeah, take note.
Sarah MacLean 56:22 / #
Put this on my wall.
Nora Roberts 56:23 / #
You cannot write with a reader over your shoulder. You cannot do it.
Jennifer Prokop 56:26 / #
One of my favorite things on your website is a definitive list of things that Eve and Roarke will never do, and half of them are like get pregnant, have a baby, be pregnant, be worried about being pregnant, babysit. And I was like she must be hearing from readers who really want this and she's like, look, no.
Nora Roberts 56:43 / #
It never stops. No matter how many ways I say no, but, but, but cops have babies. Yes. This cop isn't having one. The changes they don't understand.
Jennifer Prokop 56:56 / #
Right.
Nora Roberts 56:57 / #
Because they're not writers, it would change the direction of the series. And they love the series. But it would be so funny. Babies are, it would be so funny to see Eve pregnant. Yeah, for the next five years, ten years.
Sarah MacLean 57:14 / #
But then she has a baby! (laughter)
Nora Roberts 57:15 / #
And then what is she going to do? Oh, she can give it to Summerset, he'll, he'll - why would you have a baby and then say, "Here. Take care of my kid." (laughter)
Sarah MacLean 57:26 / #
She just gives it to Summerset! (laughter)
Nora Roberts 57:28 / #
She could have a kid, she could adopt one. What's the difference between a biological and adopted child? They're children.
Sarah MacLean 57:35 / #
They still need to eat.
Nora Roberts 57:36 / #
Yes, they need love and they need your attention. They need to be the center of your world. They're entitled to that.
Jennifer Prokop 57:42 / #
Not the murder of the week. It's interesting to me because it feels like that exact push-pull that sometimes what readers want is not really what readers want.
Nora Roberts 57:53 / #
That's exactly right.
Jennifer Prokop 57:55 / #
I said it first. (laughter)
Nora Roberts 57:57 / #
They think they want it, and then they would be like, oh, but she, they're not having sex. Well, no, because the baby's crying! Or you know she's not about getting her face beat in, yeah, 'cause you know, you gotta change the baby's diaper. (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 58:14 / #
That's funny. That sounds grim. Nobody wants that.
Sarah MacLean 58:18 / #
Nora, one of the questions that we always ask is, is there anybody who we should make sure that we've talked about or thought about or names that people should know from the early days? People who maybe still aren't with us, or stopped writing, or writers, designers, editors. You've named a number of people but -
Nora Roberts 58:41 / #
Well, there's my good friend, Ruth Langan. Ruth Ryan Langan. She writes as RC Ryan too. She has many names but Ruth Langan, who I met at the very first RWA conference in Houston in 1981. Ruth and I have been friends ever since. Dixie Browning. Ruth and Dixie and I did a lot of Silhouette: How to Write a Romance workshops when Silhouette used to send us around like this little dog and pony show. It was amazing and great fun. Patricia Gaffney doesn't write any more. She's still with us, but she doesn't write anymore, but oh, she had some marvelous books. Just marvelous books. Mary Kay McComas doesn't write anymore but she wrote for Bantam Loveswept. She wrote a lot of books for Loveswept. These are good friends of mine. Elaine Fox. Mary Blayney. They're all pals of mine. Mary wrote Regency type historicals and Elaine wrote a lot of romcoms. Those are off the top of my head.
Sarah MacLean 59:54 / #
No, that's great. We want to fill these episodes with just as many names as we can. So that's great. Patricia Gaffney. My gosh!
Jennifer Prokop 59:55 / #
I know. That name. I remember those. Yeah.
Nora Roberts 59:58 / #
Yeah, and Ruth, she's still writing. She's like the Energizer Bunny. She never quits.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:14 / #
This was really fabulous. Thank you so much for joining us, Nora.
Nora Roberts 1:00:19 / #
Well, thanks for asking me.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:20 / #
Oh, we loved having you, and we know that all of our listeners are going to just be over the moon when they hear it.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:28 / #
Whoooo (laughs). Listen -
Sarah MacLean 1:00:35 / #
Well, that was delightful.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:36 / #
That was amazing. Yeah, that was amazing.
Sarah MacLean 1:00:38 / #
Listen, the thing that I liked the most about having conversations with Nora Roberts, and I have had three in my lifetime. No, that's not true. A few more. Well, let me start over. The thing that I liked the most about when you talk to Nora Roberts is that there's nothing she won't talk about, because she's Nora Roberts.
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:38 / #
Right!
Sarah MacLean 1:00:38 / #
So what are you gonna do?
Jennifer Prokop 1:00:40 / #
I mean, we talk every time about how different the Trailblazer episodes were. One of the things I found myself thinking was to be a woman who started off not really knowing what royalties were, right? Which is a charming story, of course!
Sarah MacLean 1:01:21 / #
But I don't think that's -- I think that's real.
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:23 / #
Of course!
Sarah MacLean 1:01:23 / #
I think a lot of women who were selling books in 1979 were -- thank god for Amy Berkower!
Jennifer Prokop 1:01:31 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:01:31 / #
It sounds like Nora really, she made such a good decision in that, the earliest days. And we've talked about agents before, and how important an agent is, but the idea that she had somebody who could really help her move through this industry, with purpose and confidence, is amazing. But also, I do think that speaks to a large number of women mostly, in those early days signing contracts, and just sort of on a wing and a prayer,
Jennifer Prokop 1:02:05 / #
I think this still happens. I still think that there are authors -
Sarah MacLean 1:02:09 / #
1000 percent.
Jennifer Prokop 1:02:09 / #
Who sign their first contracts, not really knowing what's going on. But I also think it really speaks to her professionalism, that 15 years later, she is the person who understands entirely that it is not okay for someone to steal from her, and that she is willing to essentially take on publishing, in a way a lot of people probably would not have been. And that I think, that arc really is important to me, because one of the things we're doing is talking about who built the house, and kind of how romance became romance as a genre, but romance is also a business. And one of the things I really appreciate about Nora Roberts is how clear she is that that is what -- she loves telling stories and she loves writing, but she also realizes that it's a business. And I found that I was just really fascinated with that whole part of the conversation.
Sarah MacLean 1:03:09 / #
Yeah, I just, I'm so glad we got to talk about a number of things. I'm really glad we got to hear her talk about, you know, the, the work as a job. I think that is a thing that over the years I have struggled with personally, and a lot of writers struggle with, particularly women writers who are in relationships and have families.
Jennifer Prokop 1:03:36 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:03:36 / #
Because there is a sense that if you are home and you are writing, then that is fluid work -
Jennifer Prokop 1:03:43 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:03:43 / #
And you have time to run and take care of the kids or do the laundry or whatever the thing is. And I mean it felt really kind of life changing when I got that email from her, and she was like, "Can we do it on a weekend?"
Jennifer Prokop 1:03:49 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:03:55 / #
"Because the weekdays are for work."
Jennifer Prokop 1:03:59 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:02 / #
And those kinds of things, there are so many lessons embedded in this interview, I think for all of us, not just writers, but people.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:12 / #
Right.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:12 / #
Take ownership of yourself. Hold the space that is yours. Prioritize your joy and your work and the things that make you feel most you. I feel like there were a lot of moments in this particular conversation that made me feel like oh, that's not just writing advice, that's -
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:34 / #
Life advice.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:40 / #
Everything advice. Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:42 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:43 / #
And I mean, I think that's the part too about protect that work. But you know, that's the thing I think -
Sarah MacLean 1:04:50 / #
Don't think about the market.
Jennifer Prokop 1:04:51 / #
Right. Right.
Sarah MacLean 1:04:54 / #
Don't talk about your projects before you're ready to talk about them, which is obviously a slightly more complicated than when you're early in your career, but -
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:02 / #
Sure, and also be willing to stand up for your work and what's right in a lot of different ways. And I think that's the part that I mean, again, I think anyone could apply that to what they do. I think there's so many ways in which we're willing to collectively kind of give up space. And it's tricky, because our work does define us in a lot of ways, regardless of what that work is, that do what you love mentality. Do what you love, but then be really good at it or -
Sarah MacLean 1:05:37 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:38 / #
Protect it. Or -
Sarah MacLean 1:05:39 / #
Well, I thought it was interesting, because we talked about jobs. Was it Elda Minger who talked about giving women interesting jobs, because you wanted them to see that they could have, be, live however they wanted, and in happiness and success?
Jennifer Prokop 1:05:58 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:05:58 / #
But I thought it was fascinating that what Nora's heroines do, she doesn't give them interesting jobs, because they're interesting jobs. She gives them jobs they would love.
Jennifer Prokop 1:06:09 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:06:10 / #
Right?
Jennifer Prokop 1:06:11 / #
Right.
Sarah MacLean 1:06:12 / #
This bedrock concept of happily ever after is embedded in the characters too, in a Nora Roberts novel. You know, maybe this is an urban fantasy. Maybe this is high fantasy. Maybe this is a contemporary romance. Maybe this is something else, but the characters have joy.
Jennifer Prokop 1:06:36 / #
RIght.
Sarah MacLean 1:06:37 / #
They get joy from their lives and their work. And I love that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:06:44 / #
Well I was really inspired, I think too, by thinking about, (sighs) I mean, obviously I love romance, right? That's what I want to read, happily ever after, but I think what she's saying is these characters still win at the end. I might not be writing a romance, but I am still writing characters, who at the end, have come out with a win. And that to me, makes a lot of sense, right? And it makes a lot of sense why readers, for a long time now, have been really drawn to her books,. She can do anything. She's really willing to take big risks with the kinds of stories that she tells. But in the end, if it's Eve and Roarke, or if it's a fantasy or magic, you're still going to have that. You're going to get what you need from a Nora Roberts book, even if it's not -
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:34 / #
Straight romance anymore, right?
Sarah MacLean 1:07:36 / #
And so many love letters in these Trailblazer episodes to category. To the way category not just built the genre, not just exploded the genre in the '80s, not just brought the genre to the US, all of that.
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:53 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:07:53 / #
But in the way that writing category teaches us storytelling.
Jennifer Prokop 1:07:59 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:08:00 / #
And I've said that a thousand times because I really believe that category writers do it better -
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:08 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:08:08 / #
Than all the rest of us. (laughs) And I think they get a real bum rap. I think about this. I think about Jayne Ann Krentz. I think about Elda Minger. I think about many, many people who we have not, I don't know when this one is running. I'm not going to give all the other names that we've interviewed.
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:29 / #
Right.
Sarah MacLean 1:08:30 / #
But so many of the Trailblazers have just nailed that. That idea that category is doing the storytelling in a different way, and in a more distilled, in a more refined way.
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:45 / #
It's a really good example of the phrase, "learning on the job."
Sarah MacLean 1:08:49 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:08:50 / #
Right? I mean that's the thing, I think we don't often see that necessarily in action and as clearly as we do. Although I think now with self-publishing we do, where you can really see an author's growth arc as you read their books. And that is something that I think is really cool about romance, but I also think a lot about, I think it's Julia Quinn who says, "Romance is the only genre where people are graded on the quote unquote worst writing as opposed to the best." But we want authors to be getting better on the job. I'm not interested in -
Sarah MacLean 1:09:30 / #
You don't have a choice.
Jennifer Prokop 1:09:32 / #
That's how it should work. Right?
Sarah MacLean 1:09:34 / #
Yeah. I mean, if you think about, it's the only job, aside from maybe comedy? (laughs) Right? Where we have to get better by virtue of putting our product into the world not knowing, right? We can't focus group it. We can't practice. I mean, we can practice but we can't practice over and over and over again to run the mile slightly shorter. We have to put our work into the world and then see if it lands and then try again.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:09 / #
But at the same time, I was very interested in Nora Roberts saying, "I can't think about the market either."
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:16 / #
I have to write what I want to write, and readers are going to go with me or they're not. There's a way in which it's also madness to try and chase the market maybe, right?
Sarah MacLean 1:10:32 / #
I think that's the key, right?
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:33 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:34 / #
Chasing the market is just -- and again I mean there's something slightly -- look -
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:35 / #
It's Nora Roberts.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:40 / #
There's a lot different, right?
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:42 / #
Right.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:42 / #
I mean, Nora Roberts doesn't have to think about the market anymore.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:46 / #
Right.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:46 / #
And when you were writing category in 1980 it was the Wild West.
Jennifer Prokop 1:10:51 / #
Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:10:52 / #
If you could just deliver 60,000 solid words that was good. We were all eating it up.
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:00 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:11:01 / #
I will say that I think that the challenge now is that, for a lot of romance writers, production, writing fast, being able to write the stepbrother romance at the stepbrother romance time -
Jennifer Prokop 1:11:15 / #
Right.
Sarah MacLean 1:11:16 / #
Is a way to survive as a romance writer. I think what's interesting here, and it's something that I wish that we had talked a little bit more about, or maybe the whole conversation is this conversation, but that kind of quick turnaround, chasing the market, making sure that when X is popular you're writing X, is a way to survive in the market. But is it a way to create a legacy? As in the market? And I don't I don't know the answer to that. Because I think we are so early. We're just now what, six or seven years out from that kind of writing in romance. So I will be interested to see how that progresses.
Jennifer Prokop 1:12:04 / #
Right. I mean that's the thing. Self-publishing makes it possible for people to get something out, that's really responsive, that's really fast.
Sarah MacLean 1:12:14 / #
Yeah.
Jennifer Prokop 1:12:15 / #
And at the same time, and that's the thing people maybe don't understand, the Nora Roberts pipeline. She's writing books that are going to be published two years from now, probably.
Sarah MacLean 1:12:27 / #
Nora is an incredibly fast writer.
Jennifer Prokop 1:12:30 / #
Yes.
Sarah MacLean 1:12:31 / #
So when we talk, when you point to the people who are writing six, seven, eight books a year in independent publishing, in self-publishing, you're talking about Nora Roberts's, right? As she said, Phyllis Whitney said, she called her up and said, "You need a hobby." Because she was just writing too much. (laughter) Quote, "Too much."
Jennifer Prokop 1:12:53 / #
Sure. Sure.
Sarah MacLean 1:12:55 / #
You need a hobby.
Jennifer Prokop 1:12:56 / #
She's like, okay, JD Robb is a hobby
Sarah MacLean 1:12:58 / #
The publisher of HarperCollins should call me and say, "Sarah, stop with your hobbies." (laughter) "We need you to write some more books." (laughter)
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:05 / #
There's so much pressure on authors now to be on TikTok or Twitter or Instagram, and at some point, I am like, what about the books? Right?
Jennifer Prokop 1:13:21 / #
What about the books? What is it costing you?
Sarah MacLean 1:13:23 / #
She said that, right? If she had to do it, she wouldn't do any of it. She's lucky enough, she has her PR person who manages the boards at Nora Roberts headquarters. And I will say that is a thing that a lot of us are asking. How much of this do we, I hate to use the word "have" to do, but I mean, how much of this is a requirement for the job? And how much of this is selling books? Is actually in service to the books? And how much of this time could be better used writing?
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:05 / #
And I think that's the part that every individual author is sort of answering for themselves. I think it's clear from the outside that publishing houses are kind of, "Okay, PR is on you. So make that happen." And that becomes something that feels really -- I can only be sympathetic. This is not me shaming people for being on TikTok by any means. This is me saying, "I just hope that it's not costing you something. Right? I just hope it's not costing you something." And that's the part where I think people have to figure out.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:42 / #
Well, you know what? I hope that it's giving people the joy.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:47 / #
Yeah.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:48 / #
That writing gives Nora Roberts.
Jennifer Prokop 1:14:51 / #
Right.
Sarah MacLean 1:14:52 / #
Right. That's what I really took away. I'm not sure that's what she was aiming for us to take away, but my takeaway really was if there's no joy in it, then is it even worth it? And I really think that's so important. And last season we talked so much about joy and romance and the work of romance being about joy. And I don't know. Choose joy. Choose joy and maybe you'll end up like Nora Roberts, which wouldn't be so bad.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:22 / #
And that is all pretty great.
Sarah MacLean 1:17:25 / #
You are listening to Fated Mates. This is the Trailblazers Series. You can go to trailblazers.fatedmates.net to listen to all of the incredible interviews that we have done with other writers who built the house in many many ways. And you can find us on fatedmates.net or on Twitter @FatedMates or on Instagram @fatedmatespod.
Jennifer Prokop 1:22:28 / #
Thanks to this week's sponsors and we'll see you next time.
S04.39: Superhero Romance with Barry Lyga
This week, we’re talking Superheroes! Why is it so rare to see a great romance in a superhero story? Is there really no room for love and capes? Do heroes eat? (spoiler: obviously) — We’re joined by author Barry Lyga, a comics and superhero expert, to discuss all this and more…and to chat about the new YA Superhero anthology, Generation Wonder, in which Sarah has a short story (it’s a romance). We also recommend some great superhero romances and comics, because of course we do.
Do yourself a favor — be sure to check out show notes this week. The visuals are a delight.
Fated Mates Live, in person, is happening!!! We’ll be in Alexandria, VA on July 30th — join us there! We’ll be joined by a ton of our favorites…find more information about the event and get tickets through Old Town Books!
Thanks to Penguin Random House, publisher of Andie J. Christopher’s Thank You, Next, for sponsoring the episode. Thanks, also, to Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies. Visit microdose.com and use code FATEDMATES to get free shipping & 30% off your first order.
Show Notes
Thanks to Old Town Books, we are going to have a real Fated Mates Live event at Apollycon at the end of July. It will be Saturday evening July 30th in Alexandria. Stay tuned for details.
Welcome Barry Lyga, comics author and editor of the YA superhero anthology Generation Wonder. Sarah has a story in the anthology, and we’ll hope you’ll buy one for the young reader in your life.
There was no kissing in Doctor Strange, but we’ve been promised there will be in Thor: Love and Thunder. In fact, Taika Waititi said Mills & Boon, so...that's official.
Back in the day, romance comics were just as popular as superhero comics. Check out the site Sequential Crush to see the history of romance comics. If after this episode you think you might want to check out more comics, Suzanne’s site Love in Panels is the best place to start.
Comics writer Mark Waid wrote about manhood and comics in an essay that is no longer available online, but Mark is also the author of Irredeemable, a comic about Superman turning villainous. Another essay about how modern superhero movies are romance and sex-free is called Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny.
If you have little kids, check out the Mia Mayhem series of graphic novels.
Jen was on Heaving Bosoms to discuss Cinnamon Blade.
The TV Show about the superheroes going to work is called The Boys.
Exactly one year ago (well, one year ago yesterday), Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker, co-creators of the DC Entertainment-HBO Max adult animated series “Harley Quinn,” told Variety that DC Comics removed a scene from the show of Batman "dining feline" (h/t bleedingcool for this delightful euphemism), saying "Heroes don't do that." As is right and just, the internet disagreed and #HeroesWhoEat and #BatmanGoesDown were born. It was a great day.
For what it's worth, it wasn't just the internet that disagreed. Zach Snyder confirmed that Batman in fact does eat, with one of the greatest tweets of all time. At least, we think so. DC apparently did not care for it. While we like Snyder's version very much, here are some other NSFW images we like almost as much (eye headphones in): From artist @Mrs_Van_Damn; commentary from @realAgdtwinkie; from artist (with excellent commentary) @ArtKhobra; and this one, from artist @rpace, with special love for the pegging crew.
Books Mentioned this Episode
Sponsors
This week’s episode of Fated Mates is sponsored by:
Penguin Random House, publisher of Andie J. Christopher’s Thank You, Next, available in print, e and audio at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, your local indie, or wherever books are sold.
and
Lumi Labs, creators of Microdose Gummies
Visit microdose.com and use the code FATEDMATES
for 30% off and free shipping on your order
