>> Kwame Mbalia: Hi my name is Kwame
Mbalia, author of the Tristan Strong series,
coming to you live slightly, with a little
bit of a delay from Raleigh North Carolina
in my wonderful, slightly messy home office.
Yes you too can create if
you're a little bit messy.
So today I am going to talk a little bit
about Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky
with a sneak peek of Tristan
Strong Destroys the World.
And I wanted to read a section of this
book that is very near and dear to my heart
because it is the very first scene that I ever
wrote for this book, even though it happens
in the third chapter, this is the very first
200-300 words that I wrote for this book.
I knew I needed this in this book.
Tristan Strong is an African American
boy who is dealing with grief and sorrow.
And so he has been sent by his parents
down to his grandparent's farm.
It's a new place.
It's scary.
There's no Wi-Fi, things are terrible.
And then he meets someone very
intriguing whose name is Gum Baby.
In the Anansi Tails Gum Baby
was a doll Anansi used
to trap an African fairy
while he was on a quest?
But in the story the doll remained
silent and wore leaves for clothes.
This one on the other hand,
had on a black turtle neck.
And black pants, but her tiny feet were bare.
And what were those stains she
was tracking across the floor?
"Hey Gum Baby is talking to you big boy."
The doll marched across the floor, the
serious expression on her face ruined
by the plopping sound each
of her footsteps made.
"Don't make Gum Baby climb
up there" plop, plop, plop.
"Is Gum Baby talking to a brick wall?"
Plop, plop, plop.
"Oh you're asking for it now."
Plop, plop, plop.
She was up the side of the bed and
leaving dark stains on the blankets
by the time I finally shook myself out of the
daze and extended the flashlight like a weapon.
"Who, who are you", I whispered.
The 10 inch doll glared at me, climbed
atop my foot and struck a pose.
Both chubby arms spread wide.
One foot planted on my big toe,
she laughed in her tiny voice.
"Ha ha ha ha ha.
You want to know who Gum Baby is?
Gum Baby is the reason you
sleep with the door locked.
Gum Baby is the reason the
sun runs away across the sky.
Gum Baby is your nightmare.
People whisper her name and
tremble around the world.
Ha ha ha ha ha."
"Sh" I said, waving both arms in warning.
"You're going to wake up my grandparents."
Gum Baby cocked her head and looked
at me like I had just slapped her.
"Did you" she began, "Did
you just shush Gum Baby?
Didn't you hear the introduction
being a nightmare and all that?
And you locking your door?
Did - did that not make sense?"
"No it made sense.
It's just", "Should Gum Baby clarify?"
"No, no, no it's fine.
I just don't want" - "Oh good.
Good, good.
In that case Gum Baby will go upside your head
if you ever think about shushing her again."
Gum Baby scrambled across my lap and
flailed at my chest with both sticky hands.
"Let another shush come out
of that mouth, let it.
It would be the last shush you shush maker.
Whatever shushified."
And that is Gum Baby.
I wanted to write Tristan Strong Punches
a Hole in the Sky for a couple of reasons.
The first and foremost I grew up listening to
African American folk tales, African folk tales.
I was a - one of four who we shared a bedroom.
And you know, four kids in one room trying
to get them to go to bed at night was wild
and tough, so my parents would
play stories on a cassette player.
They would play the Anansi Tales.
And we would listen to them and you know I would
dream about Anansi and all his trickster games
and all of the different
shenanigans that he would get into.
So I wanted to write a story that involved
those characters but to bring it forward
for you know readers today, my children,
you know students, young adults,
the readers who are reading it right now.
But the other reason that I wanted to write this
book was because Tristan is dealing with grief.
He has lost someone close to him, someone who
he loves and cherishes and who meant the world
to him, that was his best friend.
About six months before I started
writing this book my father died.
And so writing about how Tristan dealt with his
grief throughout the book helped me help myself
and also help my daughters go through
the grief of losing their grandfather.
So it's a - it's a two part answer.
And it's - I love this answer because
it involves both dealing with grief,
and also dealing with wonder and joy,
two sides of a coin and something
that I think we should present to readers
like you as much as we can to show you
that the world is not always high,
and the world is not always low.
But how we deal with the changes between both.
The theme of this year's festival,
American Ingenuity is something
that I think is incredibly relative,
because at first glance when we think
of ingenuity we're thinking about inventions,
creativity and finding new ways to do things,
working with what we have instead
of what we want to be using.
Currently you know in this pandemic holding a
virtual festival rather than gathering together
because we want to be safe, but also
still bring you the joy of reading,
you know is using our ingenuity and
to find ways to share what we love,
what we've created with fans of it.
Specifically within the book Tristan
Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky,
I find that Tristan uses ingenuity
to battle - and I use that in quotes.
He finds ways to overcome these challenges
in creative - creative using creative means.
For example Tristan is a story teller, right?
Tristan uses the power of stories
and he - and he uses the elements
of stories in order to overcome obstacles.
And if that's not you know,
ingenuity then I don't know what is.
My favorite folk tale I think has to be the one
- the stories involving High John the Conqueror.
And the reason for that is because there's
- there are what are called John Tales.
You know the figure of John, this - this person
who kind of outsmarts at some point he's a slave
and he outsmarts his slave master.
In other parts he's a free man,
you know with super powers.
He's John Tales, High John the Conqueror
is such a fascinating character to me
because he bridges these
two different worlds, right?
He bridges existing and freedom soaring
above the sky in Africa and Africa Tales
and he also is a part of African
American history as a slave.
You read different parts of his
story from different story tellers.
And so combining and - and juxtaposing those
different character traits I think makes
for a really interesting character.
And so there's always - there's the story of
High John the Conqueror and how he using his -
using his shadow crow - this crow
that can - is giant, can carry people.
He lifts up enslaved people, takes them outside
of time and allows them to escape briefly
from this torment that they're being
- that is being inflicted upon them.
And so you see his shadow
Crow in Tristan Strong.
And you see how he's able
to step outside of time.
But you also see the conflict within High
John and these two worlds of being free
and being enslaved and what he
wants to do in order to free himself
and others like him from that position.
So I had to do a lot of research
for Tristan Strong.
But you would be surprised in that a lot of
that research was me sitting down with a pen
and paper and trying to recall
you know the folk tales
and the mythology that I
heard as a child, right?
It's like okay I remember the Anansi
Tales, which one stuck out to me?
Which one - which was scary, you know?
Which was interesting?
Which was funny?
And I made a list of those.
And then it was like all right, try
to track down folk tales are very hard
because folk tales you know, they change.
When I'm speaking to students as
I'm - when I would do school visits.
I would tell them that folk
tales change depending
on who tells them and when they tell them.
And so finally the exact folk tale
that you might have heard 20 years ago,
10 years ago or yesterday can be difficult.
The point of the folk tale it's - it's a
story and it's meant to be shared and stories
when you pass them along - we've ever
played that old favorite telephone game,
stories can change depending on as person and
person and person adds and subtracts from them.
So a lot of my research was
remembering what I had heard.
And then trying to find other story tellers.
Now there are story tellers with
professional titles called oral historians.
Some of them like Zora Neale Hurston
wrote the High John the Conqueror Tale
that I told you before about.
Others like Henry Louis Gates Jr.
goes around and collected folk tales.
And so I did a lot of the research of reading
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Virginia Hamilton,
Zora Neale Hurston trying to find those stories.
And then a lot of research was just me
finding out how to tell a good story and that
when you're reading a story, it's completely
different from when you're listening to a story.
You might hear voices.
Someone might do voices, the cadence,
the rhythm, the melody might change.
And so a lot of my research was
not necessarily what stories
to tell, but how to tell that story.
Transferring or translating an oral story to
a written story does present some challenges.
And the way that I find that I overcome them is
to read the story aloud, to hear how it sounds.
I might find that a sentence is
written beautifully on the page.
But when I read it out loud its long, it's
cumbersome, there's no commas or space
for the reader to breathe, you know?
In order to gather a breath and continue.
And so I would go back to the drawing
board, I would scratch it out.
I would find new words, insert periods, insert
commas or semi-colons to try and break it up.
To try and - it's almost like writing poetry.
Like you want to find the right form and the
right structure for that story, so that it is -
it sounds wonderful when being read aloud.
But it reads well as well.
Writing your own version of a myth or a legend,
I mean it can sound intimidating, you know?
You'll have a lot of detractors,
a lot of people who say
"That's not what John Henry's
hammer was supposed to look like"
or "That's not what Anansi
was supposed to sound like."
And what you have to realize is that you have
to write the version of the story that you find
that attracts you, that sparks wonder in you.
For me, it was writing Anansi you
know, he's a trickster character.
But what is - what is a trickster character?
Is he always playing jokes?
You know does he have puns?
Or does he just always have like a sly
smile and so you're never quite sure
if he's telling the truth or if
you need to get a second opinion.
Write the version of the
story that speaks to you.
The one that's inside of you, because at the
end of the day you're the one who is going
to enjoy it, whether someone else wants
to read it, whether someone else wants
to read it aloud it doesn't matter.
Write the story that matters to you.
In Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky
you got to meet some incredible characters.
But when I was writing them I realized
that a lot of the characters that you-
that Tristan was meeting,
a lot of the folk heroes,
a lot of the mythological
Gods they were all men.
And so in Tristan Strong
Destroys the World you're going
to meet even more incredible characters.
You will meet folk heroines and you will meet
goddesses that are just as thrilling and just
as tricky just as loud and
rambunctious as you met in book one.
But there will still be Gum Baby, don't worry.
Tristan will still be fighting
to save the world, don't' worry.
But it's called destroys the world for a reason.
So I'm sorry.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for reading and supporting my books.
Thank you for reading and supporting
your libraries, your local libraries
and whether it's the Library of Congress.
Thank you for being readers.
Thank you for enjoying stories.
And hopefully I'll get to read
one of yours in the near future.