>> Derrick Young:
Welcome, everybody, to the
Altered Americas
Panel here at the National Book
Festival.
I'm excited to be here with
Ms.
Lucinda Roy and
Miss Brook. How are you guys
doing today?
>> B.L. Blanchard:
We're doing well, thank you.
>> Derrick Young:
Awesome, awesome. So we want to
get into it
just quickly. My name is Derrick
Young.
I'm the moderator. I am owner,
co-founder
of Mahogany Books here in D.C.,
along with my
partner and wife.
And I get to be a book nerd
today
with front, front row seats
with these ladies right
here talking about these
incredible books.
So I'm going to do a quick bio.
Then we'll get into our
discussion. So Miss
Lucinda Roy is an award-winning
novelist,
poet and memoirist. Recognized
for a
keynote on race and gender,
creative writing and
education.
She is a distinguished
professor at Virginia Tech,
where she teaches in the MFA
program, where
awards include an honorary
doctorate from the University of
Richmond, a Barnes and Noble
Discover Great New
Writer selection, and the Eighth
Mountain Poetry
Prize "Flying the Coop".
Her eighth book and the second
novel In The Dream Bird
Chronicle speculative trilogy,
was published in
July by Toure Macmillan. In the
"Freedom Race" and
"Fly on the Coop". She depicts
what could happen
if after a second civil
war,
the fissures in American
society continue to grow.
And she explores what happens
when the magical legacy of
flying Africans become much
more than a dream
deferred. When she's not
writing, teaching or
making presentations, Lucinda
is working on a
series of oil paintings
inspired by the Middle Passage.
Welcome.
>> Lucinda Roy:
Thank you.
(applause)
>> Derrick Young:
And here is Miss. Brooke Blanchard,
who writes as B.L. Blanchard
is a graduate of the UC
Davis Creative Writing Honors
Program, and was a writing
fellow at Boston University
School of Law.
She's a lawyer and enrolled
member of the.
>> B.L. Blanchard:
Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa.
>> Derrick Young:
Yes. (laughs) She is
originally from the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan, but has
lived in San Diego for a long
time.
So long as she cannot
remember
cold weather, fist bump.
I'm with you on that there.
(Brooke laughs)
"The Peacekeeper" a debut
novel.
"The Peacekeeper" is set in an
alternate history in which North
America was never colonized and
the
independent Ojibwa
nation surrounds the Great
Lakes.
Against this backdrop, a broken
detective embarks on an
emotional and twisting journey
toward solving
two murders, rediscovering
family and finding
himself. Welcome, Brooke.
>> B.L. Blanchard:
Thank you.
(applause)
Awesome. So let's do what we
came here to do.
We had an earlier conversation.
We met and had a great
dialogue.
And one of the first things
that kind of came up in our
discussion was the
similarities,
these books being the two
sides of the same mirror,
talking about the book
commonalities and the
differences between the guys who
work. I want to have you guys, get
into that conversation here.
>> Lucinda Roy:
Do you want to go first, Brooke?
>> B.L. Blanchard:
Sure. So, Lucinda's book
and mine are both ways
America could be.
Hers is set from where it could
go from
here. And mine is what it could
have been
had things gone differently
about 500 years
ago. And what I thought was so
interesting
about Lucinda's book is that
it's so
drawn from familiar events.
If you watched the January 6th
riot,
you could easily see where her
book
is going from there.
Mine imagine is frankly very
aspirational.
It imagines a never colonized
America.
It imagines an independent
Ojibwa nation
around the Great Lakes.
It imagines a society
with what I think had some
different values,
and it ends up in a very
different place
from where we are now.
And so what's interesting is
you had
one that kind of veers towards
the aspirational what we
hope and believe the world
could be like.
And we have one that's rather
dystopian.
And that's, I think, an
interesting place where writing
in the same year and in the
same place in
America, we kind of diverged
into two different
visions for it. One that is
very
optimistic. One that is
optimistic, but
you have to go through some
more negative
things to get there.
>> Lucinda Roy:
Yeah. And I think that
that's because...
and you can probably
tell, by the way, I'm British.
Could you tell that from what?
(all laugh)
I have a slight Arkansan
accent, but that's because I
lived in Arkansas for a while.
So I've got that wonderful
twang.
And in many ways, I do
think that our books are kind
of similar, Derrick,
that Brooke and I are doing
much
the same thing in terms of what
we've decided the
imagination can do, that
history can be
anything that we want it to be.
I know my agent's here,
Jennifer Wells is here. And
years ago, I mean,
this novel, this trilogy has
been like
10, 15 years in the making.
And when I first conceived of
it and realized
that, I thought there could
well be a second civil
war. Lots of people were not
thinking that
way. It didn't really seem as
though that was likely.
But where I lived in kind
of rural
Southwest Virginia, that actually
seemed quite possible.
And so in my trilogy, in the
middle
of the country that it's called
"The Disunited States" now,
and in the middle
of the country,
it's secessionist and it's
controlled by
the Homestead Territories.
And they have a kind of
plantation system.
And they have decided that the
imported
labor that they bring over from
the cradle, which is
actually Africa has to be
reclassified
because they know that they
need to have kind of
an enslavement process.
So they reclassified those
people as
botanicals or seeds, and that
means
they have no rights at all
legally.
It's quite brilliant and
horrible.
And so the people in the
Homestead
territories are not free.
But inside the Homestead
Territories there
are all these liberty,
independence, these
wonderful city-states like
Atlanta
and all the naughty states,
naughty towns, you know who
they are. (audience laugh)
D.C. too, is a
liberty independent, and in
fact, most of the book as you
can tell from the front takes
place in
D.C. in the Capital, and there is
a
storming of the Capital and all
this was written a long time
before January the 6th.
So it's been really quite
creepy
to see what is happening now.
And more and more, what seemed
to
be in the distant future is
becoming the
near future.
And the kind of racial and
cultural
conflicts that tear this nation
apart
are depicted in the trilogy.
But I don't think of it as a
dystopian
trilogy because at the heart of
this
is the whole notion of flying
Africans.
And what it means,
after one young girl
transforms into something
very different. And that
starts a whole ball rolling
where the
Homestead Territories see that
she is an
existential threat to them. And
trying
to make sure that they do away
with her
altogether is what they try to
do during the
course of these novels.
>> Derrick Young:
That's awesome. So, I mean,
what's interesting here is
that... And this leads into my
second question
is that we're talking
about something that is both
familiar,
something that is rooted in,
something that we understand.
But then you're also trying to
now create,
or provide details on what is
now
different, what it possibly
could be.
You're now speculating on what
these changes are.
I guess what my question is,
when you're writing a
story,
how do you want to identify
those things that should stay
familiar? But then as you're
creating your
characters, how do you then
create
those small, minor details that
drive the actions?
>> B.L. Blanchard:
Well, okay. I'll start
(laughs).
So I wanted to kind
of go back in time and say,
okay, we call it a hinge point,
an alternate history.
The point at
which the real history and the
alternate
history diverge from each
other.
And I'm going back about 500
years in
my novel to the present.
Now we pick up. It starts in the
year 2020, a very
different 2020 than we all
experienced, by the
way. And I wrote it in 2019.
I didn't know how much I'd be
diverging,
but what I wanted to go with is
okay.
I want to show two real cities
in our
world. One is what we know is
the
cities of Sault Ste. Marie,
Michigan, which is
where I used to live.
There's also a Sault Ste. Marie,
Ontario, right on
the other side of the river.
What if that were one city in
one nation?
Right now it's split between
two.
And then I thought I wanted...
And it's a very small city now.
I kept it as a small city in
the novel.
It was important for me to set
it there for a couple of
reasons. One, it's where I've
lived,
and there's very little of the
Upper Peninsula in
fiction, and it's a beautiful,
beautiful place
everyone should visit.
The other reason is it's the
ancestral home of the
Anishinaabe, which is my
people, my tribe, my ancestry.
And so it was important to me
to show
an alternate version of that.
And then in what we know as
Chicago in this
world is the City of Chicacua.
And I thought, I'm going to tear
down Chicago
and I'm going to build Chicacua.
But so to me, it was important
to have them in those two
places where there's a real
large
city and a real small city now,
just to
help us orientate ourselves.
But I also wanted to build a
whole new city.
What was important to me was
what does a modern
21st Century indigenous
industrialized
society look like?
And yes, it would exist.
And so I thought what values
would
drive it? And it was important
to me to have a city that didn't
pave over the land, but rather
is built
into it and incorporates it as
sort of a natural
outcropping of it.
So it has living skyscrapers,
which I actually did not
invent. There's a lot of
architecture that
builds it in, but it's sort of
a vertical forest.
The walls have plants on them.
People's balconies extend out
and have trees
on them. There are on the
rooftops. There's places for
migrating birds,
watering holes for them.
There's places for communal
fires in the middle.
And I actually chatted
with an architect and said,
"If I put a large bonfire in a
skyscraper,
am I going to burn the place
down?"
He said, "Not if you do it
right." So (audience laugh).
So they do it right.
Don't ask me how, but
apparently, it can be done.
So just kind of taking the
familiar of
large city on the Great Lakes,
major
city and international city.
But what would be
different about it? So there's
the physical of it, which is it
looks very different.
The streets are very narrow.
There's really no gas powered
cars.
It's built for walking.
It's built for mass
transportation in a way that
Chicago isn't at the moment.
Chicago has a lot of mass
transit.
This kicks it up a few notches.
But what I thought, in addition
to the
physical, what was important to
me is sort of
the values of the society.
And I thought sustainability,
responsibility and
community would be sort of the
three pillars on
which this city was built.
And so I think how is that
expressed?
It's respectful of the land.
It's made out of sustainable
materials,
architecture, all of that.
So that to me was important to
show.
You know, it should feel a
bit familiar,
but also feel very different
and in a way
that you see, oh, with a few
changed
decisions and some different
values, what we know
as Chicago could look very
different, but
it's a little hard to do that
because at no point do any two
characters turn to each other,
and
say, "Oh boy, didn't we dodge a
bullet? (audience laugh)
What if, you know, and go from
there.
It's just it's a world that
overseas
colonization never happened.
I do think people will
always fight with their
neighbors, but the way it
happened in our
world didn't. So I guess that
was a very long-winded answer.
But that's that.
>> Lucinda Roy:
That was great.
And I think my
world is actually fairly
familiar in
lots of ways.
So lots of this novel, "Flying
the Coop",
the second novel in the trilogy
takes place in this city, which
is why it's so wonderful to be
here.
And one of the reasons that I
wrote some of
the scenes in the book is
because I read at the
Smithsonian a few years ago. And
I read in the
Oprah Winfrey Theater those of
you who've been to
the National African American
Museum of
History and Culture, just the
most amazing,
amazing place.
And I realized that I wanted
something to happen
in that museum.
And so in the middle of the
book, well, fairly early
in the book, there is a kind of
storming of the
museum by secessionists,
who are coming in armed.
And everyone has gone to the
museum thinking it's
a safe space.
They're living in a Liberty
City and they think that
they're safe. And all of a
sudden they look
out and they see this horde of
people
coming to they think,
attack them.
I won't tell you what actually
happens, but in many
ways D.C. is very familiar and
very
strange in the book.
So for example, The Washington
Monument, because of flooding,
has been moved. And it's been
moved to a place
called Founding Fathers Hill.
And Martin Luther King has been
moved to what's
called the Dream Revival
District,
because one of the kind of
mottos of the
book is "Dreams are Promises
The Imagination Makes to
Itself".
And I think that's so true that
they're the
promises that we make to
ourselves.
Those are the dreams that we
follow.
And so again and again, you see
that
manifested in the city
itself of
D.C. and the refugees who have
come from the
Homestead Territories flood to
D.C.
So my surmise is so much
full of conflict.
It was funny when I was reading
your book because it is
beautifully idyllic in many
ways, and it really
is the kind of place that I
know lots of my
characters would love to live.
Unfortunately, because of the
way
society has progressed
in the vision that I have
for this
trilogy, that kind of
idyllic situation just is not
possible.
But it's still something that
they strive for and they
want. And so there's that sense
of
taking the familiar and making
it somewhat
unfamiliar, because in many
ways the future is
the familiar, made strange.
Always that's just the way
the future works.
And I think that there's
something wonderful about being
able to use the imagination to
do that.
One of the things I always tell
my students, my
graduate students and
undergraduates, is
imagination is the greatest
antidote
we have against despair.
And I really do believe that
that for those of us who've
been through trauma, I went
through the mass shootings at
Virginia Tech, and there's all
kinds of things that you
understand after that.
And I lived in Sierra Leone
when there was a coup,
and I grew up very, very poor.
And I think we have a
lot in common that way.
And so there were just things
that I understood about
struggle. And so there has to
be struggle at the
center of wonder.
So there's that kind of balance
between suffering
and wonder.
And when the two come together,
there is a way
to get through to the next
place. And
you get through with a kind of
incredibly
deep celebration.
And that's, I have to say, one
reason why I love this
festival so much, because I do
think
that librarians and bookstore
owners
like you, Derrick, Mahogany Books,
if you haven't gone
to Mahogany Books, you have to
go.
They are the courageous
custodians
of culture. They really are the
courageous
custodians of culture.
And it has become very
dangerous
to try to make sure that we
hear
ideas in this country and we
must do
it. And that's why I'm so
fascinated by what you've
written, Brooke, because I feel
as though it makes
us think about things anew.
It makes us see the world anew
and say, "Oh, maybe
that was possible.
Maybe that could actually
happen."
And I think that it's that
imagination that
allows us to leap off into
something
wondrous that is going to
ultimately save
us, because it's always ideas
that rule the world.
It's nothing else. It's always
ideas.
And so if we can somehow remind
people
that the idea of who we are is
far
greater than the fact of who we
are, we can be
much more aspirational and we
can go towards
something kind of wondrous, I
think.
>> B.L. Blanchard:
Absolutely. And one thing I do
want to add is even
though our books are set in
worlds that
don't presently exist, people
are still
people. Humans are still
humans.
You know, the world of "The
Peacekeeper" is very
aspirational. Spoiler.
It opens with a murder and
there's another one later on.
People still and there's a
system of justice that's very
different from what we know and
are familiar
with. But it fails.
We see it fail a couple of
times in the book.
You know, in Lucinda's book,
you know, it's a very
different world than what we
live in now.
But the struggle, the desire
for freedom, the desire to
connect, wanting to be able to
trust people. You
know, pursuing a dream and
focusing on it.
That's so universal.
And that's what I think makes
it so wonderful about
speculative fiction.
You know, you can set the human
experience in whatever
world you want, but it's still
the
human experience.
And that's what makes, I think,
at least me
come back over and over to this
genre, and I think others too.
>> Lucinda Roy:
I think that's absolutely true.
And you have a character in
Peacekeeper that's very much
like, I think the character of
Man Cry Day that
I have in my trilogy.
The healer character
that you've got.
And I have a kind of healing
character
called Man Cry Day.
She's also known as The
Gardener of Tears, and
she tends a wood of these
hybrid
trees, and it's called a
lynching word, but not
because lynching takes place
there.
It's where she remembers the
lynched.
And so she makes sure that she
honors them.
It's a kind of memorial wood.
But she is also a very
brilliant
person and very eccentric.
And I often feel as though
those of us who are older women
are often called eccentric.
>> B.L. Blanchard:
When we're just kind of...
We're just normal.
(all laugh) We just say
what's on our minds.
And so that's why people think
that we're eccentric.
I would be eccentric any day.
That's fine. Besides which,
being British, then you're
always a bit eccentric.
But Man Cry Day who of
course
is kind of a riff off of
Man Friday
is trying to make sure
that the world that she sees is
not the world that she
has to leave to the young.
So she really feels that
it is her responsibility to
pass
something on to the young.
And I didn't realize till I
really began writing this
trilogy that in many ways
that's at the core of
who I am as a teacher,
and who I am as a writer.
It is the idea of legacy.
What do we hand on to the
young?
I want black children
to feel like they can possess
the
world that it belongs to them
too.
I was mocked for my hair when I
was growing up.
For example, I was mocked for
my nose.
I was mocked for all kinds of
things because there were so few
biracial children.
I was stoned once just with
pebbles.
It wasn't that bad, but that
kind
of thing happens.
Happened a lot growing up and
you begin to
understand what it's like to be
an outcast. And
to come back to what Brooke was
talking about when
she talked about that kind of
psychological
realism. The idea that you want
to have
characters who seem as though
they could actually
exist. So I've got a character
in the trilogy
called Afarra, and she is an
outcast
and she's not allowed to use
her name.
She lives in the secessionist
territories and she can
only go by cloth 33H/437
because she was raised
on planting 437.
She is the most joyous
character
in the book. And I really do
feel as though if
we find a way to take
joy, find joy in the
small, ordinary things, there
is a
way for us to get through
terrible suffering, which is
what she does. And I see your
characters doing the same
kind of thing, especially the
main character
who has so much to deal with
and
and is so torn and sad.
And yet there is that
desire to
help and to heal that allows
him to keep
going and to do some incredibly
brave things, I think.
Yeah, Afarra was my favorite
character in your
books. She is so joyful, but
also, she sees everyone.
She sees past everyone's
shields,
past everyone's defenses.
And you know, that I thought
was so
powerful because there's
nothing that makes you more
vulnerable than someone who
sees you.
And to have that come from
such
a small young girl is very,
very
powerful. And I have a seven
year old who
sees through everyone, too.
(Lucinda and Brooke laugh)
And so I found that very
relatable.
>> Derrick Young:
Awesome, fantastic. I do want to
remind everyone that if you
want to ask a question, please
put
your hands up. Ask for the
index cards.
We will be taking questions at
the end, but they have to be
written on the index card.
One of these people on the left
and right will help you out with
that. So I'm ready to
throw my questions away because
this has
been a great conversation. I'm
really eager.
I know you guys have some
questions for each other.
We've kind of started going
down that road there, but I
found it very interesting when
you
talk about bringing that
personal into your
books and how it informs your
characters.
And what you're trying to push
or
inform people of through your
stories.
Do you want to share your
questions with
each other?
>> Lucinda Roy:
Let me. I'm desperate to ask
Brooke
about ethnicity and background,
and
how that came into play in The
Peacekeeper?
And what you drew upon.
Often, I think one
of the first questions
I'm asked is
what is autobiographical in the
book?
And I don't want to be a
kind of
typical questioner, but I must
ask you,
what is autobiographical
in the book? (all laugh)
>> B.L. Blanchard:
Didn't realize this was going to
be an expose (laughs).
Well, I'm a member of the
Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of
Chippewa and Anishinaabe, and
it was
important to me to write about
that.
But what was very important to
me was to write about the
Anishinaabe in the Upper
Peninsula.
It's a part that is left out of
a lot of maps.
A lot of times you'll see maps
without the Great Lakes, which
means the Upper Peninsula,
which is right in between Lake
Superior and Lake Michigan, you
just don't see.
It's a very magical part of the
world to me.
I was actually just there last
week for the first time since
the pandemic, and went
to where my father lives.
And he's here today in Gould
City, which is
on Lake Michigan.
And it's a place where my
family has lived
as far back as we can count,
there's even an Ojibwa
burial ground cemetery that's
at least 5000
years old. And so it's always
so wonderful to
go back there. But it is a
place that has changed
so much. It's a town now that
has
maybe 100 people.
At one time it was a collection
of multiple cities
that had close to 3000.
You would never guess that if
you went there today.
It's, you know, the things have
been
taken down or burned down or
have been lost to the
woods. There's trees
everywhere.
But that history of things
that, you know, disappear and
come back, I thought was kind
of appropriate.
So that was very
autobiographical, very important
to set part of the book there.
I did not meet that side of
the
family until I was almost 20,
so I really sort of
discovered it as an adult for a
variety
of reasons I won't go into.
And so that discovery and
learning
more about that side of my
history was very important to
me, and I wanted to put that in
a book,
sort of this
wonderful, wonderful background
that
that I had, but
I wasn't familiar with
as a child until I got quite
older.
I grew up knowing I was
Chippewa, but I didn't
really have a full
understanding of what that was
until I was about 19 years old.
My background is in the law.
I'm a lawyer by trade, so
putting
a justice system into the book
was
important to me, but one that
is different.
It's a system of restorative
justice, which is
how most indigenous societies,
including the
Chippewa have handled. And when
they
have their own jurisdiction,
continue to handle disputes.
So instead of a system where
you have the
judge sitting up top, you got
the plaintiff, one side,
the defendant, the other side.
If you were to put a spotlight
on who's sort of the star of a
trial, it's the defendant.
And it's focusing on that
person, their wrongdoing.
And even though we talk about
rehabilitation, really, we're
there to punish people. The
system
that's in The Peacekeeper.
And again, this is not my
invention.
This is a system of justice
that was
used, is used, should continue
to be used, in my
opinion. We redirect that
spotlight
from the defendant to the
victim.
What makes the victim whole?
Now, you can't unring the bell.
And like I say in the book,
this is not a perfect
system. It wouldn't be.
No system is.
But what if we were focusing on
what would restore that person
to where they were before the
crime
happened? What would help heal
them and make them whole?
And this is actually how we
resolve most civil disputes
in the US.
Most cases don't go to trial.
Most go to a system called
mediation, where everyone gets
in a room. And we figure out how
are we going to resolve this
without going to trial?
And so it was very important to
me to show that
because first off, I think, you
know,
a lot of us have been touched
by the criminal justice
system. In my family,
we have had family members who
went through the system.
And that had a deep impact on
me growing up.
It happened to one of my
parents. And there's a
scene in the book where Chibenashi
our Hero, recalls after his
father
was taken away for killing his
mother,
he and his sister went to a
sort
of the equivalent of Child
Protective Services for a brief
period. Just replace
Chibenashi's name with
mine. That's what I went
through, except I
was quite a bit younger than
him. He's 17 when it happens.
I was six.
And so there's still trauma in
an
idyllic, aspirational world,
but it's not
perfect and showing the impact
of the criminal
justice system on people, I
always kind of say,
well, there's another
group of people.
There's obviously the victim of
a crime.
There's the perpetrator,
there's the lawyers, there's
the police officers.
No one thinks about the family
of the person who's
going through the system, and
we're
rather an afterthought.
And I'm certainly not trying to
center my experience.
But there is another group of
people who
are sort of victims of that
system, too.
And it was important for me to
show through the eyes of
someone who is not themselves
the
perpetrator, but rather is the
family member of someone
who is. The ostracization that
they
feel. The guilt that they feel.
You know, all of that. That goes
into it.
And they carry that weight with
them, too.
I could go on and on
about like I put a reference to
one
of my favorite restaurants is
in the book.
My family all caught it.
But those are, I think, the big
autobiographical
parts of it. And I have my
question for you, but Lucinda,
I'm going to throw this one
back at you.
And please, do you tell what is
autobiographical
in "Flying the Coop"?
>> Lucinda Roy:
And I want to make sure we've
got time for Q&A.
So I'll make this brief.
There's a lot that's
autobiographical in "Flying the
Coop". The main thing is the
main character,
Jellybean Ji-ji, Lottermule.
And she's called Lottermule
because she's classified as a
Muleseed, a mulatto seed.
And by the way, that term
mulatto is so
awful, especially when you
understand something about
the root of the word and so on.
And so she is a Muleseed.
And she goes through
the same thing
that I went through growing up
in many ways.
What does it mean?
What is your identity then?
And she is embraced by black
culture,
but shunned by most white
culture,
unfortunately, because of the
fact
that she is living on a
planting, living on a
plantation. One of the other,
just small
things that I wanted to make
sure I did in the
book. I've taught a lot of
college athletes.
And there is a terrible kind of
exploitation
and ownership that goes on with
black athletes.
And I wanted to make sure that
in the book
there was a game that those
"botanicals" played a game
that would assert
their abilities. And say
something
about their yearning for
freedom.
So they play this game in a
football
sized arena, and inside the
arena
is a massive birdcage.
And inside the birdcage is all
kinds
of equipment. From Obama's
drama
trampolines, to trapeze, to
Rosa Parks perches, and the
seeds.
The botanicals fly inside
what's
called the coop, the cage.
And they battle each other like
gladiators.
And in many ways, I had to try
to think of what kind of
game could I invent that
people would risk everything
for and would be
determined to try to win. But
would also
say so much about yearning, and
so much about
freedom. That again and again
is in the book.
And now we should take some
questions. I think.
>> Derrick Young:
So we still have a little more
time before we get there.
So I do want to ask...
And so again, remember,
guys, if you have any
questions, please
ask for an index card.
We will be going to questions
in like the next 10
minutes. So one of the things
I did want to ask you guys and
it
came up in our conversation
earlier, was again the
worldbuilding aspect of it.
So from the personal thinking
about
the new justice system.
You guys talked about maps
and
like the importance of maps.
And even designing and drawing
your own maps and
things like that. So I want to
have you guys talk about that.
>> Lucinda Roy:
Yeah, well, and in many ways, I
think
maps are just so important when
you're building a
world. And even though my world
is familiar, I'm
an artist. And where I'm
actually
working on illustrating a
children's book. And
I used to do portrait painting,
but I did it too accurately,
and people didn't
like it very much, so I
(audience laugh)
was never very successful.
But for this trilogy, I
wanted to
do the maps. And so
I tried to do the map as the
main
character, Ji-ji Jellybean,
Lottermule.
So I tried to imagine how she
would see the
world. And you'll see that the
first map in
the book is her picture of a
planting,
a plantation.
It is illegal to
image a planting.
You are not allowed to draw a
map of
a planting. She does it knowing
that she
risks her life doing it.
But she does it because she
suddenly understands, as
she's drawing, that she has
confined
this terrible oppression to a
little
page. And the fact that she has
been
able to do that, that she has
made it so
small, allows her to believe
that at
some point, she will be able to
enter
the Freedom Race. And there is
a literal freedom race
in book one that you can race.
And if you get to the end, it is
possible you
can secure your liberation in
the
Liberty City of D.C., which is
known to
seeds as Dream City.
And every time I come here, I
think Dream City.
And I go straight to Martin
Luther King
statue. And in the book,
Afarra looks at the statue,
when she gets here
in "Flying the Coop".
And she can't believe that
Reverend Martin Luther King
is white (audience laugh).
She is so surprised.
Like she had no idea.
So she decides he's an albino.
And she thinks that that's
wonderful because her best
friends in the whole world are
albinos back
on the plantation.
And so there's so many things
that she
understands. And that she sees
in a world that
is completely new.
But drawing those maps was the
most incredible
thing to be able to do, because
suddenly
I saw them and I realized that
the planting was going
to be a kind of wagon wheel and
everything
was going to go towards the
hub.
And in the hub was the penal
tree.
And that was the place where
you could be
lynched, if you made some
transgression,
like imaging the planting or
some other
thing that was not allowed for
you to do.
Think about apartheid,
how carefully they had to craft
that.
And in many ways, it's the same
kind of
care that oppression takes.
We have to be so careful about
that, especially today.
Especially today.
It seems to me there's no more
important time to
be talking about these ideas
that are in
books, because very soon, if
we're not
careful, we will not be able to
speak.
And having experienced a coup
in Sierra Leone
that took place overnight,
things can change very, very
rapidly,
especially if people become
complacent.
So we must always look to see
what's
coming down the corridor,
what's coming down
the track towards us, and
make sure that
we're as prepared as we can
possibly be.
Because it seems to me and this
is something that
Ji-ji understands. We are
the
freedom race. We are the
freedom race, all of us.
We are the freedom race.
We're the people who are still
allowed to
speak truth to power.
We are allowed to do it.
That's what D.C. is all about,
speaking truth to power.
And if we ever forget that,
then we're in all kinds of
trouble.
>> B.L. Blanchard:
Absolutely.
(applause)
To take it back to maps,
I think what you said is very
powerful, how you're telling a
story on one page and in real
maps
and maps we designed for books.
I did not draw my own.
I am not an artist like
Lucinda, but
in the map you can see a
history of people.
In mine, that's the 500 years
of backstory right
there. It's a map of North
America, but
it's turned. That's oriented
toward the east, not
toward the north.
That's traditional in
Anishinaabe tradition.
But what is I think also
interesting is I
learned that is how most maps
were
oriented until about the 14th,
15th centuries.
It's maps do not have to
be oriented toward the north.
That is by custom.
It is not by anything else.
You can orient them south,
east, however you want.
And when you do, your
perspective literally changes.
But what's interesting, so
you're seeing a familiar
world in an unfamiliar way,
just through a change in
perspective. So what's that
telling you before you've even
read a word of the novel?
You realize this is going to be
America through a different
lens. And then you're going to
see in
there there's a little inlet
for inset, sorry for
the Great Lakes. A lot of
cities
with Ojibwa names in places
where we have cities today.
I did not invent those.
They were there first.
Same with you look at the
entire United States.
You see Central America,
you see a bit of North
America. These were all real
cities,
pre-Columbian cities.
And, you know, this shows you
about the
history, about where things
were, where they are now.
There are no borders in this
world.
Borders are a construct.
There's even a part of the
book where someone is
watching a documentary on TV
and yes, there is TV, I
do believe we as a species, we
would have gotten that no matter
how history went. It's too
great of an invention not to
have. (audience laugh)
And he's watching TV
and he's looking at Europe.
And he's looking at
how they have borders.
And he's like,
"You can't draw a (laughs)
circle around the land.
What are you talking about?"
And changes the channel.
Like, "That's just absurd.
You can't own that one."
So, you know, just having these
differences, the
map shows the people, the
people,
the nations who live there.
One of my majors, I was a
creative writing major, but I
also did international
relations.
We learned about nation-states.
The nation is the people,
and that comes first.
And so this is a map of
peoples, not of
artificial borders or things
like that.
So that's I think, you know,
I can stare at maps all day and I
think obviously.
But that's something
to think about.
The next time you look at a
map, what's on there, what's not
on there, and what story is it
telling?
Because there's a story in
every map, fictional or
non-fictional.
>> Derrick Young:
Fantastic. Fantastic.
Okay. So I do want to get to
some of these questions here.
The first question I have is,
do you think that the technology
in your books drives the story?
Or does the story drive the technology?
This is for both of you guys.
>> Lucinda Roy:
The story drives the technology
to some
extent. And until we
get to book three in my book,
in
my series, we don't really get
to the really, truly futuristic
side of things. Because
in my world, in the world that
I'm depicting,
there have been pandemics.
There have been climate
change. There's been all kinds
of things that have
impacted the US.
And so in many ways, science was
put on
hold for the middle part of the
country, for the
Homestead Territories. For the
Eastern
Super State and the Western
super state.
That's a different story and
they are moving
forward in some really
interesting ways.
And I guess one of the
conflicts, therefore,
that has erupted is
what do the
eastern and western super
states that are liberty
states, how do they react
to this, what they call this
kind of cancer in the center
of the country?
Do they try to help the people
or do
they trade with the Homestead
Territories?
And for the most part, they
trade.
And it really seems to me as
though that's exactly what
would happen, that if you think
about what we're
doing now, how many times do we
trade
with countries and other
places and not worry
about human rights at all?
And of course, we say we've got
to because there's all
kinds of things that we need.
And that's the kind of
reasoning behind
the fact that the Eastern and
Western super states do that
same thing. But I do think that
one
of the wonderful things about
getting to the "Bird Tribe",
which is the third book,
is that it allows me
to think about how social media
is being
handled. For example, in New
England,
which is where the book begins
in the
Berkshires. And what kinds of
things will be
prohibited after the lessons
that people have learned
about the dangers
of social media.
And so there are
some really interesting things
I hope that I'll be exploring in
book three when they move
towards the future.
And go to the Eastern
Super State.
>> B.L. Blanchard:
Yeah, my book, we are pretty
much
technologically where we are
now. And that was very
deliberate. An early reader of
the book said,
"I love how the Chippewa
have cell phones."
And I was like, "I'm a Chippewa
with a cell phone."
(all laugh)
You know,
but that was the point.
I wanted to show this.
It would have developed to that
point.
Regardless of colonization,
there is very much a
stereotype that Native
Americans are less
civilized, for lack of a better
term.
And I wanted to show that's not
what would have happened.
Absolutely not.
It would have arrived at the
same space.
I'm currently finishing up the
second book and it takes place
in England,
in a Europe that never had
colonies.
And it shows sort of the flip
side. In that book,
technology is treated very
differently.
It's a much more restrictive
society, and
access to technology is very
limited because they're
trying to keep people in
line in a way that just isn't
an issue
in "The Peacekeeper".
So I wouldn't say it really
drove anything.
I just thought, well, I've
decided
any tool that I have available
today technologywise
is also going to be available.
But for example, you see a lot
of traditional medicine
used alongside modern
medicine, what we would call
modern medicine.
I guess that's the only one I
sort of consciously put in
there. But by and large, it
didn't really drive it one way
or the other.
>> Derrick Young:
Awesome. So this question is for
you, Brooke.
And kind of touched on
this a moment ago there.
Can you talk about your
transition from lawyering
to creative writing?
How did you balance that
career shift along with
mothering,
all of these lawyers?
I'm not getting the rest of
this. I'm so sorry.
Yeah. So let's start there.
Can you talk about your career
transition, balancing
creative writing with being a
lawyer?
>> B.L. Blanchard:
Just because I did
it doesn't mean
I know how (audience laugh).
Well, I'm still a practicing
lawyer and I still have
my kids (all laugh).
In fact, I wrote the first
draft of "The Peacekeeper" while I
was on maternity leave with my
second.
Credit to my law firm, truly
for its progressive
maternity policies.
I had a six-month maternity leave.
And I spent three months with a
colicky baby who I could never
set down, never put to sleep.
And I decided, you
know, I'd spend the
next three working on this book
that wouldn't leave me alone.
This idea. I hate the
advice, write every day.
I think it's the worst advice
anyone can give.
It comes from a great place.
But when you have kids, when
you have a job. You can't
write every day. It's not
realistic.
You'll go insane. Don't ask me
how I know.
(audience laugh)
So take whatever
time you can carve out to do
it. Do it.
But you have to make
sacrifices. When I
was writing, I kind of
reduced
my hours at my job, which came
with a commensurate pay
cut, meant I kicked the can
down the road a few years for
advancement. I did it clear-eyed
wanting to because
this was very important to me.
You have your second child in
your late thirties.
You decide, huh?
Well, I'm not
getting any younger.
I've got to make this happen.
So but having a support system
is crucial.
My law firm knows I write.
They're very supportive of it.
My family knows. My husband is
phenomenal.
He takes more than his
share of parenting duties, and
I couldn't
do it without him.
He's just been a phenomenal
source of support.
And, you know, other people
who've
watched my kids or who have
helped me with work so that I
can pursue these things.
So you can't do it as an island.
And you do have to
make some trade-offs.
I wouldn't have done
it any differently.
But it does mean you've
sacrificed a lot of sleep.
And I also haven't kept up with
TV in about six years.
That's another way to do it
too.
So no one spoil like "Better
Call Saul" for me because I'm
still on season one.
(audience laugh)
>> Derrick Young:
How about for you as well,
Lucinda? I mean, because
you're an educator
as well. How do you balance a
career
and writing these three books?
>> Lucinda Roy:
You know, it's so
difficult.
And I like to teach with
everything
that I've got. I think I mean,
I do think I have a
vocation for teaching.
And that's why I went into it.
And I think
things were going along pretty
well.
But when we had the mass
shootings at Virginia Tech,
I worked very closely with the
shooter to
try to get help for him before
this happened.
And
unfortunately, because at the
time
it was 2007, and people
didn't really want
to think about the fact that it
was happening.
It was rather like what we're
going through now. Where
people could see lots of signs
but didn't
necessarily want to do things
about it.
And so I think I'm an even more
conscientious
teacher now.
I wrote a book about it called
"No Right to Remain Silent".
And in the book, I tried to talk
about what it was like to be a
teacher. And what it's like to
be a student now.
And how there's tremendous
pressure being put on teachers,
who need to be able to
diagnose students.
And I get calls still all the
time
from people who are saying, "I
have students in my
class and I'm really worried
because I don't know what's
going to happen. What should I
do?
Where should I go?"
And so I feel as though I still
have
that very important role to
play
in terms of talking to
teachers.
So I'll go round to schools
and
universities and talk about
this kind of thing.
And so I think it takes up a
lot
of time. So I find myself
writing
very, very late at night.
So maybe till 1:00 or 2:00
sometimes and then getting up at
like 6:00 or 7:00 to try to
make sure that I can
keep up with the teaching, and
not miss things that I
need to be aware of.
I do want to say to anyone in
the audience who
who feels a kind of sense of
despair
or hopelessness that
it really is the most amazing
thing to
be able to refind,
recapture, rediscover, wonder,
and
that we can make ourselves do
it.
That always despair is also an
idea.
In many ways it's an idea we
decide to live
with or an idea we decide not
to.
And I really do feel that after
those things happened.
It put a lot of things
in perspective for me.
And it made me realize that
there are some
things that matter greatly. And
there are some things
that really don't matter at
all. And that we
better start speaking honestly
to each other, which we
still don't do again and again.
We don't do it, I think.
And I love the fact that one of
the
reasons why it's so wonderful
to be a writer is you can have
your characters to say anything
they want to each
other. And I'm kind of shocked
by what some of the characters
say in these books. I say, "My
goodness, you can't
say that, that's terrible."
(audience laugh)
And they still say it.
And what can I do?
Because I'm listening.
And in many ways, you're kind
of a medium, aren't you?
When you're a novelist, you're
very strange, not you.
>> B.L. Blanchard:
I just know I am (laughs).
>> Lucinda Roy:
Novelists are always strange.
And you listen to these
characters telling you things
and you think, what a world to
be in.
Those of you who are writers
know what I'm talking about.
What a thrilling world to live
inside
where you're characters.
You've got all these voices in
your head.
So you go to Kroger and it
seems as though you're shopping,
but really you're in some kind
of life and
death fight in your head
between these two
characters. And it's such a
wonderful
refuge. What a great place to
be able to go to.
I think so. I feel very lucky
that way.
>> Derrick Young:
All right. So the lesson here is
if you have voices in your head,
write. (all laugh)
>> Lucinda Roy:
Thank you, Derrick.
>> Derrick Young:
So next question I want to get
to is
the concept of "Flying Africans".
Can you talk about that?
>> Lucinda Roy:
Yeah, "Flying Africans".
And I don't want to give
anything away.
All I'm going to say is that
the main
character changes, that
her body changes in a
profound way that
reverberates through the
culture.
I wanted to write a book, you
know, Tolkien
talked about this when he was
writing "Lord of the Rings".
That he wanted to reclaim
British
legend. He said, we didn't
really have any myths and we
don't. In Britain we had
fairies and stuff,
so my grandmother would always
go out to look for the fairies,
never found any.
(audience laugh)
And they had some elves, a few,
you know,
these kinds of legends.
But the whole idea of myth, the
idea that
myth is what makes us it makes
us know
who we are. And I think as
people of color,
and in my family, we can trace
our heritage
back through to Africa.
What that meant, how
important it is to understand
something about
I think the greatest
metaphor,
what we call a conceit, an
elaborate metaphor that
guides us, is the whole idea of
rising
up. We will rise and we will
rise
literally, and we will rise
figuratively.
And there is something so
amazing about the
idea that you can just
spontaneously
do that. And that was what
"Flying Africans" did
when they were on the planting.
All of a sudden they were
spontaneous then.
Now, that sounded like thunder,
didn't it?
But I don't think it was.
I think it was just a car.
They would just spontaneously
rise up and fly
away from the plantation.
And I'd written about that in
poetry, but so
wonderful to be able to reclaim
it in a novel.
Because I feel as though there
is no greater
metaphor that brings all of us
together, black and white.
Because isn't religion
and
isn't the whole notion of
salvation all
about rising up?
And doesn't that make us so
similar to each
other rather than being so
different?
And so it's those commonalities
that I feel as
though we have an ethical
responsibility
to explore.
And "Flying Africans" seem to me
to be one of the
best ways to do it.
>> Derrick Young:
That's fantastic. That's
awesome. Brooke, is there
anything cultural legends,
cultural
myths that you bring from the
Chippewa Tribe into your book?
>> B.L. Blanchard:
We've touched on it very, very
briefly, but the book is
sort of deliberately secular.
And I did that because I myself
am very secular.
But I think that really,
instead of a particular myth,
it's a perspective and it's a
value system.
So, you know, again, you see it
expressed through the legal
system. You see it expressed
through the way strangers
interact with each other.
You see it expressed in the way
that, you know,
entire cities are built.
You have that different value
system.
It's built around community.
They always say you never feel
more isolated or alone than when
you're in a city. That's not
true in Chicacua.
You're never... You know, people
do experience and
feel that isolation, but not in
the way that we would, you know,
some of us might feel or have
experienced ourselves.
One of the opening scenes in
the book is the Menominee Festival,
which is a real thing.
And the late summer wild rice
Menominee, which
is the only indigenous grain to
the Americas,
is harvested, and they go out
in canoes.
Families do, and they harvest
it, and we still do it
today as it has been done.
You get together as a community
and you dance the rice.
And what that means is you get
it.
It's still in its husks.
You dig a little hole,
you put...
In modern days,
we usually use a tarp,
but you put something down.
Someone gets very soft
moccasins.
They hold on to two logs and
they
start twisting their ankles
over it and
dancing it. And that's how you
separate it.
Now, that's something we would
probably do mechanically,
probably is how it's done now,
but in
the Anishinaabe you dance on
it.
And I wanted to show where
we're dancing
on rice. It's shifting.
It's ever-changing.
You have to keep your balance.
But to have that be, it's a
huge
phenomenon in the book where
people travel back to their
homes. It's the biggest holiday
of the year.
And what are you doing? You're
harvesting some rice.
It sounds very small, but to
have that be a big
source of community, a big
source of returning home,
I wanted that to kind of be the
opening and show kind of
what I thought. That was a
perfect way to encapsulate
what this culture is
about.
>> Derrick Young:
That's awesome. So we're coming
here
to the end. So we got like
the last five questions.
What I want... 5 minutes.
What I want to ask each of you
is about the
takeaways we talked about. What
you ladies talked
about, the personal and bring
that into your
stories. What was it for you
that
you wanted to get out from...
Get out to people, through your
characters
and through your stories,
through the voices in
your heads.
>> Lucinda Roy:
I suppose.
I suppose for me it was that
there is
such a kind of multiplicity of
voices.
There are so many voices.
I didn't realize that I had 200
and something
characters in book one, until
the publishers
indexed this.
And said, "Who are all
these people?" (laughs)
I wanted it to be a kind of
chorus that
there are so many different and
differing
characters who contrast with
each other, but yet
they find a way to bridge
those
differences often.
And so there's a character in
it called Lucky Dice, who
is British and very
sarcastic, you know, the way
Brits are,
terrible. And in many ways I
think
that more than anything else, I
think
I wanted to say the future that
we seem to be barreling towards
is
not inevitable. And that there
is a
way to deviate from it.
If we listen to each other and
finding ways
to do that, active ways to do
that is the most
important thing we can do,
I think.
>> B.L. Blanchard:
For me,
it's something that's not in
the book and it's not in the
book very deliberately.
But I get asked is, well, how
did colonization never happen?
What was different?
And I bet if I were to ask ten
different people in this room,
well, how do you think
colonization could have been
avoided? I'd probably get ten
different answers.
That's the point.
It's kind of choose your own
adventure, whatever head
cannon you have about how
colonization could have been
avoided. I think it's correct.
I have my theory, but the idea
is
that it didn't have to be this
way.
And if ten different people can
come up with ten different
ways that it didn't happen,
that shows you how
avoidable it probably was.
I've said this before, but I
used to
watch this documentary series
called "Seconds from Disaster",
and it was on, I think,
Discovery. And it would go over
major disasters like The
Challenge
or The Titanic, things like
that.
And they talk about how it's
never just
one thing, it's a chain of
events that happen. And all of
those things have to happen for
this disaster.
If one of them doesn't happen,
that disaster is avoided.
And I thought, well,
colonization is
absolutely no different.
There was a whole host of
things that all had
to happen at the same time so
that an
entire continent of people
were subject to genocide
and
there were attempts of erasing
them. That still, in a lot of
cases, continue.
So I guess the big takeaway is,
you know, kind of
sit with it and think about,
well, how do you think
the world might have
looked different?
Why would it look different?
What would have happened
differently? At what point would
it have been different?
And I think that for me,
it was a, you know,
something that took you know, I
focused on for
years just thinking about all
the different ways it could have
gone. And I think if you're
reading
the book or if you're not. But
you still want to think about
this, I think it's a good
exercise to see how these
great tragedies really can be
avoided with a few small
differences and a few small
changes.
>> Derrick Young:
Well, this has been incredible.
Thank you, ladies.
>> Lucinda Roy:
Thank you very much, Derrick.
(applause)
Lucinda and Brooke,
a round of applause.
Thank you so much.
These young ladies will
actually, be signing today
in Hall C lower level from 6
p.m. to 7:00 pm.
We do want to thank you all for
attending the Library of
Congress National Book
Festival. If you didn't get a
chance to attend everything you
wanted to see,
please just go to loc.gov
this
month to watch the events you
missed and
we'll see you all next year.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much.
(applause)
(instrumental music)