[Music] thank you foreign foreign I'm Heather Marie montia and you are watching PBS books thank you for joining us PBS books and collaboration with Georgia public broadcast is pleased to host a conversation with award-winning author Tanana Reeve do author of the wishing pool and Other Stories PBS books is a proud partner with the Library of Congress to promote their 2023 National Book Festival let's take a moment to hear from the librarian of Congress Dr Carla Hayden I'm Carla Hayden Library of Congress and I want to give a thank you to PBS folks for supporting the national Book Festival hope you can join us in Washington and online for this year's Festival on Saturday August the 12th well thank you Dr Hayden if you live in traveling distance to Washington DC even if you live in Georgia don't miss the 2023 Library of Congress National Book Festival on Saturday August 12th from 9 A.M to 8 00 p.m I really encourage everyone to consider this incredible trip the festival is free and open to everyone the complete schedule for the various talks and events can be found at loc.gov bookfest but if you can't be there in person you can stream it live that day and curate your own experience from the comfort of your home well now through August 31st PBS books and PBS stations across the country will host a series of 10 virtual events with 11 outstanding authors they will be available on demand on PBS books and the national Book Festival website at Loc well here's a quick word from our station partner welcome I'm Emily hackshaw the vice president for Community engagement at Georgia public broadcasting and I am thrilled to be here to introduce this evening's event with award-winning author Tanana Reeve do in celebration of the Library of Congress National Book Festival I'm proud that GPB is committed to sharing the stories of contemporary authors there is no question that books have the power to amplify people's stories just like the Library of Congress National Book Festival theme everyone has a story for over two decades the Library of Congress National Book Festival has brought huge crowds of people to DC and we are delighted to support the library of congress's important work we hope that you'll join us on a journey tonight and learn more about Tanana Reeve do and her latest book the wishing pool and other short stories Tanana Reeve uses horror to probe history the shocking present and the imagined future GPB is also thrilled to partner with libraries and PBS books we hope that you will enjoy tonight's conversation thank you so much well thanks Emily we are so happy to partner with GPB on this extraordinarily exciting event tonight today's conversation features Tanana Reeve do to discuss her work and her involvement in the festival we'll be discussing her latest book the wishing pool and Other Stories which is her second collection of stories which include horror science fiction and suspense all genres that she wields masterfully from mysterious to magical town of Grace town to the aftermath of the pandemic she reaches far into the future do stories all share a sense of dread and fear balanced with heart and hope well let's meet Tanana Reeve do Tanana Reeve do is an award-winning author who teaches black horror and afro futurism at the University of California Los Angeles a leading voice in Black speculative fiction for many years do has received an American book award an NAACP image award and a British fantasy award and her writing has been included in best of the Year anthologies her stories have been featured on the LeVar Burton reads podcast and by the realm audio entertainment company do and her husband collaborator Stephen Barnes wrote for Jordan peels The Twilight Zone and the shutters anthology horror Noir a history of black horror they also co-wrote the black horographic novel The Keeper illustrated by Marco Finnegan Dewan Barnes co-host a podcast life writing write for your life her latest work which we'll be discussing today will be featured at the 2023 National Book Festival welcome to Nana Reeve oh thank you so happy to be here oh we are so excited to have you here thank you so much for coming you know I always like to start these conversations to ask the author to discuss the premise of their book in their own words if you can give a summary of your book for the audience well as you put it so well these are basically afrofuturism stories which I teach at UCLA is the fiction of black speculation the fantasy horror magical realism of the black diaspora and horror is where my heart lives but all of these stories are basically about characters who are dealing with The Uncanny most of them for the first time you know like it's like oh the world isn't exactly what I thought and having to Pivot and grow and change and confront whatever it is sometimes menacing sometimes just magical uh stories censoring black characters so there are 14 short stories within within your book um I know you started writing some of these stories a long time ago and so could you talk a little bit about what inspired you to go back to these stories and and really why now why is this book being published now at this moment that's actually a great question and it's it's almost an accident in the sense that over the past I'd say 10 years in particular I was working on a novel that's coming out later this year the Reformatory and I was trying to create a career for myself in screenwriting I wrote an episode of The Twilight Zone with my husband Steve and wrote some episodes of a black anthology series called horror Noir but in between that editors would reach out to me and say hey we're doing a themed Anthology could you write a story about X um one of the stories in this collection is is told from the point of view of a monstrous character um some of them are futuristic often I didn't get a lot of Direction and it's interesting that I did gravitate toward pandemic stories although with the exception of the very last story The biographer all of my pandemic stories were written before covid and that that's an interesting coincidence but the horror writer in me I guess has always been a little bit afraid of pandemics and what I would do is if I didn't have an idea ready which I often didn't I would just look at what's scaring you right now like even something as simple as a fungus growing in the shower which was really the Nugget of a story one of my favorite stories in this collection called rumpus room is like what does this fungus mean and it's gross but it's not just that it's gross how can you create a story around something that scares you or intrigues you well you know it's it's funny because I um read all the books that um when when we discuss you know who who we're going to feature in this show and I will say I was at first I I get really I get scared very easily and so I was nervous to jump into your book because I was like oh my gosh what if I have nightmares um but I was okay and it took me on this journey the pandemic ones did a little bit make me nervous just because you know because of who I am and also how I grew up so but um I think that you've done an outstanding job really putting this collection together and having and having this balance um okay so you say most of the stories are a different version of you in your intro and you also talk about how they conjure answers to questions that you can only confront through these stories what do you mean by this I think a great example of that would be the titular Story the wishing pool because I was asked to submit a short story yet again I did not have a story in mind the deadline was approaching and I was like well what's scaring you right now and this was a couple years into covet maybe a year and a half into covet and I had not seen my aging father throughout the pandemic and I had a visit scheduled to see him for the first time so this story was a way of projecting my fears forward like what if my father has changed a lot what if you know the worst happens and maybe he doesn't know you anymore all these kinds of things go through your mind when you're confronting an aging relative especially when you're far away and I put all of that into that story the wishing pool as a way both of visualizing those fears but also to contextualize those fears because I don't want to give away the story it is one of this I mean some readers find it one of the scariest stories especially if they're dealing with an aging parent I don't think it's a great ending for the protagonist but I I think it's an okay ending for the father yeah I I wanted to ask if there was actually a pool in your when you were growing up well really where is it no but my parents moved to rural Florida which is where a lot of my grace Town stories come from my mother was born in Quincy Florida Patricia Stevens do was born in Quincy Florida and after they moved to this five-acre track that was bordering the woods one of the grandchildren asked why did grandma and grandpa live in the woods so I grew up in the suburbs I had never lived in a wooded environment so those visits to my parents were very fruitful for me in terms of imagining what if you had grown up here and looking out in sort of the spooky Wilds of the Untamed Woods just beyond their fence and all kinds of animals would wander onto their property so as a writer I was all over that and it was very easy to imagine that there could have been a wishing pool and a friend I had made in this sort of remote location it's a great story and there is a I always like the twist you put at the end um but I will say as someone who has parents who are getting older yeah it's it's it struck home and it made me think right and also appreciate where I am at the moment and I think that's the other thing um that your stories do is they really help the reader to look inside themselves and look at their experiences and you do a really good job because your character development you do such like Joya is such a is developed so well and you you get into her head and and it's short and that's the other thing I love about this is that for people like me who are I have three kids I'm super busy your stories are bite-sized gems and you can read that and then you like on to the next thing but then you can read what right like and it's for me that's it's a real gift I don't know if I should say this but when I when I gift copies of the wishing pool to people I know I say just stick it in your bathroom you know read it a little bit at a time one sitting at a time that is very funny um so your book is divided into four parts can you discuss those four categories I mean it's the wishes Grace town the um is it Naima story yeah they well I have to refer to the tablets myself because you know I did not write the book thinking I had a sense of organization so it's wishes it's the grace Town stories it's the Naima stories you're absolutely right and Future Shock and because this was unplanned there was just one day I realized oh I have enough news stories for a collection I I published a previous collection go summer in 2015 which is when I first introduced my magical town of Grace town in in my fiction I first introduced the Naima character in my first collection so some of them were continuing characters and continuing settings but as I looked at all the stories and there were some contemporary realism stories that did not make it into the collection although I might have alluded to them in my my notes um so wishes is really more just um sort of the magical horror stories um uh Grace Town stories are specifically set in the fictitious town that I came up with after visiting my parents when they moved to rural Florida you know when I was in college I read a lot of Faulkner and a lot of his stories took place in this fictitious County patapha County and uh some reviewers think it's my my Dairy which is Stephen King and I will receive that or my or you know uh one of Stephen King's fictitious towns but really it was Faulkner who inspired me to sort of look at what would it be like if you had this sort of fictitious town where magical things happen sometimes bad magical things and where children see ghosts or children are more likely to see ghosts children are more likely to interact with these Magical elements and it's this kind of thing where as you get older you sort of outgrow it so the Graystone stories um my only real racism as the monster story is in that Grace Town section it's called last stop on Route nine and the rest of them are just various versions of weird things that happen in this town of Grace town the Naima stories are specifically My Plague stories but unlike when she first appeared in my first collection ago summer that was sort of leading up to the pandemic and like right as it's hitting these stories take place after the pandemic in some cases long after uh attachment disorder she's a much older woman and in the first name a story which is also one of my favorites which is about this question of just because we're living right after a pandemic and the entire road is blocked With Cars full of corpses and we're afraid to interact with each other doesn't mean I can't throw a stand-up comedy show and and to me that kind of mirrored my journey through covid because my two coping mechanisms are horror and comedy and I mean almost on a daily basis I love to watch either a horror series or a horror movie and I love to listen to stand-up comedy I I did an open mic night in stand up when I was in my 20s at coconuts comedy club in Miami and I just did not pursue that path because I wanted to put everything into being a writer and I was almost superstitious I love music too but it's like no it's all going to be fiction I'm not going to distract myself with anything else but deep down a part of me always did want to do stand up so I thought wouldn't it be great to give this character Naima who has been through so much who has been through so much give her one day one day only when she can do something she's always wanted to do draw out these survivors in a way that they've never gathered before because they're so avoiding each other and return to like something that feels like normalcy and I heard some podcasters yesterday talking about how that story reminded them of what it felt like after covid to go back out and be around people you know it's something that that we miss well and I appreciate that as well because I think um that transition was hard and it still continues to be hard I mean I I am I spoke to someone recently um and they said you know I haven't been out since covet and I I just thought wow right and they were an older person and but everyone isn't re-entering the the world at their own time at their own moment and it certainly has been hard on the elderly um and and so those conversations always remind me of that but yes I think um your stories also help help to bring that to the Forefront as well um so one of the stories that I I enjoyed um I was thinking actually in seventh grade I remember watching an Alfred Hitchcock at the Twilight Zone in nearly every English class now memory and perception are two different things as your stories also explore um so it maybe wasn't every English class but it seemed that way you know um I felt like the last stop on on route nine it you know it seemed like Twilight story to me very much and I wanted to know kind of you know how did you come up with with the premise and and Charlotte um and uh just if you could talk a little bit about it because it really to me it felt like even the fog you know all of it well it's funny you like that one that's one of the scariest stories in the collection it might you know um so I'm glad that it didn't scare you too much and I I love talking about this story for a couple different reasons first of all just quick background I published a short story called last stop on Route nine when I was in college it might have been my first short story in in a literary magazine but that was during a time when because of my exposure to Canon and the reading I was doing and the training I was getting I had grown away from writing black protagonists little black girl protagonist that I started writing in elementary school and by the time I graduated from college I was writing white male protagonists not by conscious even choice not even thinking oh my work will sell better if I do this I would almost feel more at ease with that decision it was really just because to me that was what a story felt like a story a short story was a story about a white man or occasionally a white woman having a moment of epiphany was the training I had these MFA Style English workshops and horror had also been rung out of me by that time too not anyone saying don't do it but again just because that was what we were exposed to that was what we were reading those were the successful authors so that first story that I wrote in my uh maybe like 19 20 21 was about a white man on a road trip who stops at a gas station and we realize he's sick and that was the whole story like he's dying that's the whole point and last stop on Route nine has that double meaning like it's not just the gas station get it he's dying so as I again was facing a deadline for an anthology I thought you know what I want to revisit and reclaim that story and I'm going to be in conversation with that younger writer I was and show her how I can express myself through fiction in a way that includes both me as a black woman and my love for horror and I'm gonna go all out in a racism is the monster story and unfortunately part of it is based on a true incident just a small part when my husband and I were on our way from my mother's my late mother's funeral to a house in rural Florida we got lost on one of these little two-lane roads where there's nothing but fields on one side and you know just Shacks on the other just in the middle of nowhere the GPS is like good luck you know there's nothing out there you lose a cell phone you lose the GPS and we finally saw a driveway and we said hey we're going to stop and ask for directions but as we were ready to pull into the driveway and it was a compound there were several buildings so it's like oh thank goodness civilization well not so fast because we noticed a giant flagpole flying a huge confederate confederate flag and so our impulse then was like and to go into reverse and not ask for directions so that stuck with me I was like okay take that incident dial it up to 11 and what does that feel like when you're lost and You're vulnerable and unfortunately there have been several stories in the news lately about black people even a black child knocking on a door lost or knocking on a neighbor's door for whatever reason and they get shot and killed so the horror is real the horror is a lived experience and a fear that even I would have to this day if I were in an unfamiliar neighborhood especially a very rural setting where there are no other people around of course I would hesitate to knock on a stranger's door not knowing how they would perceive me or how they would greet me um but I I made it and I think maybe if there's a Twilight Zone feel it's because so much of that series is about sort of peeling back the layers of our world to show something that is just on the other side of realism something that's just a little bit out of sync so when they pass through this fog Bank in the story they're passing from our world into this nether region in Grace Town history where anger is still boiling over and will attack them and I threw in everything that scared me in that story Knocking On A stranger's door dogs chasing you because I have a grand dog now so I've become a dog lover late late in life but my first experiences with dogs were not pleasant and dogs in civil rights history were weaponized against protesters like my parents especially German Shepherds which to a degree I'm still a little afraid of to be honest just because of that Association um but but yeah I threw everything I was afraid of into that story well and you also even in terms of the difference between Charlotte and Kai who you know she has him hide he's he's 12 right but he looks like a man already in some ways and I and I think those um as I was reading it I I did feel the the reality that realism of of that situation and also the recognition of of the thoughtfulness be and Charlotte is Young she's what 21 years old she's like 21 or 22. she's not quite old enough to be a parent but she's now finding herself in charge of her young cousin at a time when they have unexpectedly now come across danger and that's one of the the things that's also very frightening in life when when you're just you're on a vacation you're just minding your business and it just takes one small thing to fall out of place like you've run out of gas or you don't have cell service and all of a sudden something that seems so innocuous takes on this menacing turn and she's responsible for this child who by the way like a lot of children and horror is very attuned to everything that's wrong and tries to tell her at every step why are you doing that no don't do that and um you know I feel so sorry for children in horror movies because I will tell you I don't care how young my son was if he told me there was like something moving around and he heard a noise in his closet I would take that seriously I would investigate that and and I wanted to write a story where she would figure out oh this kid actually knows what he's talking about I mean even I will say and it's probably my own personal issues but but you have her concerned about dents she's putting on her rental car right like that's me like I'm like oh my gosh did someone like knock into my you know or did I Dent this or like just like a little scratch like and she's worried about that meanwhile her life is like you know things are crumbling around her she's like wait is there like a little Nick on my you know my hubcap exactly you didn't want to get fined or charged for that um you know and and just even their solution to that I don't want to spoil it I don't want to and no no spoilers here but um I I just thought it was so craftily done because it did bring in so many of these important issues of race identity loss right because they're they're um supposed to be gathering and they've just experienced a funeral of their grandfather and are supposed to be gathering together as a family and they're they got lost on the way and so I also think even that because the I feel like the Gathering after funerals is often a space for healing too so you kind of you really layered it in there you're isolated from that and I'm glad you honed in on the grief piece because in in horror in general the entry points to whatever the Monstrous or The Uncanny is usually comes from either trauma or or you've done something you shouldn't have done you've you've yeah you've crossed some kind of line and you saw that all the time in like 80s slasher films if anyone who smokes a cigarette or has sex is going to get murdered by the serial killer but in this story it is grief that kind of opens that doorway not I mean there's a transgression I won't go into it it's an accidental transgression but mostly it's grief and I think grief is so effective in horror because for so many of us grief is the first horror we experience it is the loss of someone a grandparent even a great grandparent I had a relationship with my great-grandmother we wrote letters she told me family history so when someone is there and then they're not on some level we can't wrap our minds around that and it's such a horrible feeling in our bodies it's a physical stomach achy migraine horrible horrible feeling we have it over the loss of a pet or the loss of a loved human it's the same emotion just in degrees so the way the world rips apart when we experience a loss is is part of also what I wanted to express in that story last stop around nine well I want to just remind the audience if you are just joining us you were watching PBS books I'm Heather Marie montia and I am fortunate to be here today with Tanana Reeve do and we are discussing her latest book the wishing pool and Other Stories back to the conversation so um can we discuss another story hunt in the window um and it's paint in the window sorry um if we could discuss what inspired that story because there was also a lot in that story um and if you could maybe talk a little bit about the story and the inspiration I would I would love to talk about that story um because it's it's actually very special to me it was part of uh an anthology called um South Central Noir edited by Gary Phillips and I don't live in South Central L.A but I do live in Southern California and I used to go very regularly to a bookstore called S01 books in Leimert Park which was one of The Inspirations for that story I was also thinking about Marcus Bookstore in Oakland which was very supportive of me especially very early in my career and these booksellers who are just pillars in their Community you walk in off the street they recommend personally that you should read this or you should read that it's called hand sewing and book selling and it's so so important to my development especially again as a young writer and you know so one books is closed now and I think at the time I wrote the story I'd heard they were closing or maybe I just sort of sensed it in the wind I think if I had known for sure they were closing I would have specifically dedicated the story to that store but anyone who knows La probably knows what store I was talking about and part of what's happening in that area and a lot of other um urban areas is that you have gentrification which is you know wealthier people often who are who are white or don't look like the other residents in the neighborhood although not always but often and all of a sudden the landlords who couldn't make repairs are fixing up their buildings and raising their rents and the little uh community-oriented stores start to shut down and bigger chains move in and there's a Whole Foods or whatever and what happens is the black residents become othered in their own Community I remember hearing about someone who was shot at like a mall you know in Baldwin Hills and I'm thinking what uh by by a security guard or a police officer which to me speaks to that sort of uneasy relationship that new people have when they encounter the old residents because you know a lot of our cultural imprinting has been that dark skin is something to fear it's a message that we hear found it again and again during political Seasons from the right the brown people are going to hurt you the black people are going to rob you you know just playing on fears is it never loses it's it's a good strategy and it's something that a lot of people feel you know even Barack Obama and in one of his books wrote about watching his own grandmother move away from a black man who walked into the elevator it's just so deeply ingrained of course you know is she racist was she racist according to the way we would would call racism now no not nash I mean she loved I would imagine not but it's just such a deeply ingrained fear of the other that has been perpetuated in the media so this story takes a terrible turn because this Bookseller who's been in this community for years since he was in high school volunteering and his work his way up now to manager um is experiencing the change right in front of him not just in terms of what his customers want to buy but in terms of how he's treated by the security guards at his own store and it's throughout this story right he he changes himself but he has similar to the to the story we were speaking about a moment ago there he had this real feeling in him about so the security guard right and I think that but yet your story takes us on really I want to say like a self-exploration or finding a self-discovery um of Daryl in a lot of movies do you yeah he's experiencing The Haunting of or the haints you know that's sort of an old-timey uh way to describe a ghost would be a hint but he's experiencing this haunting and he's trying to confront it but like as you say he's learning about himself and the process of trying to figure out who's haunting his store and I won't spoil who is actually haunting his store in the end but um it's one of those twist endings it certainly is is there another story that you'd like to share a little bit about sure my longest story in here is a novelette actually uh when when I when I when I sold this book my editor asked me to write three news stories and that was probably the hardest part so one of them was the biographer which again was reclaiming an idea I had when I was a younger writer and never could figure out what to do with it I think I was too young I needed to be able to look back on my life a little bit to to really understand that story but the other one was rumpus room which turned out to be way longer and it was so long that I didn't have to write three I only had to write two and it was maybe the toughest story because it was swirling around in my head for the longest time I did find this disgusting looking fungus and I wear glasses typically so when I was in the shower and I have very bad Vision I just saw this this dark spot kind of in the corner I thought maybe a washcloth had fallen so I nudged it with my foot but it was hard and it's like that air feeling never went away I never understood how did it grow so fast where is it even coming from how did it get through this crack so this real life um concern because it almost did feel Supernatural the way it appeared I I went through my formula I had to use the word formula but I have an approach let me say my approach to creating a short story would be okay you take that thing in real life that scared you which in this case was a fungus and you amplify that so that it's way bigger than just a fungus it means something it is a message of some kind you find the protagonist who is the best person to experience a relationship with the strange fungus and and what is the ex you know why is she here where is she and this was one of those stories where I used transgression so she has suffered a loss she's lost custody of her daughter that's I don't think that's too much of a spoiler the very first line of the story is I broke my daughter's arm so she has temporarily lost custody of her daughter because she accidentally in her mind broke her daughter's arm so there's the transgression uh and and also grief because she misses her daughter and she doesn't believe she's the kind of person that this judge has characterized her as so this woman who's full of these feelings of grief and guilt and shame is thrust into a situation where she moves into a rumpus room like a stranger offers her a job and lodging and she decides to take it in this rumpus room and that's where she sees the fungus and I won't talk more about it but the unraveling of this story is is not just figuring out what the fungus means and is there a ghost or all these kinds of questions she has and but it's also who am I and what have I done and why did I do it kind of that like you said sitting with herself and the two things are directly related she can't solve her external issues until she looks at her internal issues which frankly is the way it is in real life as well when we want to move from one level to the other we have to stop and examine why do we do the things we do why have we made the mistakes we've made so that we can improve and evolve and move forward how did you move from you know Canon influenced by the Canon after school to the writer you are today which has black and brown protagonists I I have to give a lot of credit in terms of the horror piece I'll start with that because I was also rung out of me to my late mother Patricia Stevens do who was a civil rights activist she's leading the march on the image behind me if the audience can see it in the Memoir we co-wrote freedom in the family A mother-daughter Memoir of the fight for civil rights and she came out of the Civil Rights era having been tear gas like literally a police officer through a tear gas canister into her face so she had a sensitivity to light for the whole rest of her life this very visible Scar from the Civil Rights era and a lot of fear and anger left over from that era and also watching the the games rolled back but despite all that despite the fact that she and my father are both in the Florida civil rights Hall of Fame and I could look her up in the index in my college history books and she had this very you know respected uh reputation she loved horror she loved horror movies she loved horror books so she gave me my first Stephen King novel The Shining when I was 16 mean and in some ways coming back to horror might have been the easier part right uh because I was sort of turning my wheels writing non-horr contemporary realism Epiphany stories in terms of seeing myself as a black woman and giving myself permission to write black and brown characters the first breakthrough was Gloria mailer's Mama day because Gloria Naylor was such a respected writer but Mama day also has elements of the metaphysical so there was this great bridge where I could see oh I can be respected as a writer and also I can I can look at my history I can look at my lived experiences as a black woman and I can put myself in my stories and it was a slow process my first horror novel The between I was moving toward myself but I wrote a black male protagonist instead of a woman I was still sort of writing the other in some ways you know I mean there are a lot of things about my life that were in the between growing up in in the suburbs and having active parents in the community and the kind of disagreements they would have about time spent outside trying to change the world as opposed to inside trying to like be a part of this family so all that tension that you find in activist families but it was I would have to really credit um Gloria Naylor and then also I think of Toni Morrison um and beloved to I did not discover Octavia Butler until later I discovered her because of a friend's suggestion when I was halfway through my second novel and in so many ways I wish if I had just read some Octavia Butler while I was in college I could have focused my writing a lot faster I wouldn't have had to like sort of work my way through the weeds for so long and what I mean by that is any writer is going to write their best work when they go deep into themselves and their own experiences I mean you might be a science fiction writer and everyone's an alien and it's metaphor but trying to write for the marketplace which is unconsciously what I think I was doing right if the best-selling writers or white men and white women you know unconsciously maybe I was trying to aim toward Market but it was there was also this invisibility so writers like Octavia Butler or and Tony Morrison and Gloria Naylor were these sort of beacons telling me no you can put yourself your history and your experiences in these stories and it's okay and I think what's especially important for horror readers to understand and writers to understand is that novelty is what draws us to these stories you can only watch so many horror movies that are like the family moves into the abandoned cabin and their hearing noises hello I mean I do love that and I will watch every single one of those but what makes one stand out from the other is the depth of the backstory that brought the family there what they're working through as they're dealing with the Supernatural and how they respond to it and to me as a writer and maybe this is what appealed to my my late mother was whether or not a character survives in horror the point to me is that they confront and accept The Uncanny element they're dealing with which when you look at Cova denial for example so many people cannot confront and accept the scary thing so learning how to confront and accept the scary thing is super important because that helps you come up with a plan and when you come up with a plan you can face it down not before you have to have the plan you have to have the acceptance the plan the facing down and the facing down is the point um like the end of the the gray that movie with Liam Neeson I mean not to give away the ending but it's just his eyes and the fight in his eyes that's the whole point of that movie so I have a question then why is the book dedicated to your father well you know it's interesting during the early part of my life my mother was my biggest cheerleader um the horror fan giving me the writer's Market which before the internet was the way you knew all the markets from the time I was in high school maybe even junior high school but she passed away in 2012. and after that time I found I would say almost unexpected friendship with my father my father had always loved him and he was always in the house uh he slept there but as a civil rights attorney and working for the community relations board in in Miami he was always out as a community organizer and that was that was his Bliss was trying to create a better world and a lot of that responsibility for child rearing fell on my mother's shoulder so we had more of a friendship with my mother and my father was kind of this more remote figure who was always writing on his legal pads and I did steal those and I wrote on them too but after my mother passed away and his community work started to to you know dwindle a bit we saw each other and have gotten to know each other and it's one of the great joys of my life that I still have my father at the age of 88. and um because the wishing pool the story specifically was written in preparation to to visit him it felt only fitting that I should dedicate the book to my father well thank you um well we are partnering with GPB for for this conversation tonight do you have connections to Georgia absolutely I spent a lot of time in Georgia my my father still lives in the Sandy Springs area with my sister I lived there in Smyrna boy I wish I had held on to that house those prices have gone up since they built the stadium but I also taught at Spelman College for three years so I do have connections to Georgia and um yeah I I enjoy going to to see my father there so those connections are alive so you've already received a lot of um recognition for this book you've been invited to the Library of Congress National Book Festival which starts on uh which is on August 12th will we see you there absolutely I'm really looking forward to it from what I understand I'll be um with Grady Hendrix talking about things that are scary that aren't just haunted houses so uh that should be fun that's really exciting um I was wondering if you could share a little bit about any upcoming projects things that we can expect to see from you absolutely one of the reasons I wrote so many short stories and haven't published a novel in more than 10 years I think is because I was working on a book called The Reformatory which is a historical Horror Story set in 1950 and it's also in that magical town of Grace town where people see Haines and it's basically the story of a 12 year old boy who gets sent to a juvenile facility called the Reformatory it's based on the Dozier school for boys in Marianna Florida which if you look it up was a horrific facility and my great uncle died there in the 1930s so I really wrote this book as a way to repair history and give Robert Stevens a different story where he's dealing with ghosts and also monstrous people inside the Reformatory while his teenage sister is trying to work through the criminal justice system of the 1950s to try to get him out so it's about the past but the the problems with the criminal justice system have endured so it's really also about the present well I look forward to hopefully having you back when that comes out this fall okay great well thank you so very much for taking the time to talk to us about your book and all of your stories and for your creative sharing about your creative process giving us some insight into how you go about your writing I know people always value those little tips and to get inside like how they can write too so thank you so much for your thank you so much it's just it's brilliant and it's been a lot of fun thank you I'm so glad you enjoyed the wishing pool well thank you well for everyone out there I just want to remind you that the Library of Congress National Book Festival is on August 12th from 9 A.M to 8 P.M it is free and open to the public and it is in Washington DC so please go um we also are part of we are doing a series of 11 of the or 10 of these and um they started a few weeks ago and we'll be continuing through August 31st the content is all available online at pbsbooks.org also on our Facebook Channel and you can also learn more at loc.gov bookfest well this has been an incredible time and I'm so glad you could you could join me until next time I'm Heather Marie montia and happy reading [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause] foreign