(mechanism rattling) (bell chiming) (gentle upbeat music) - Hi, I am Alexis Okeowo and this is my book.

"Blessings and Disasters."

A story of Alabama.

(bright cheerful music) - "In Alabama we exist at the border of blessing and disaster, and it's still easier to believe in divine protection than to worry about things we can't control."

It is such a beautiful dichotomy.

Where did that come from?

- When I wrote that, I was talking about Alabama's in tornado country.

- Yeah.

- So, we would have these tornado drills in school.

And now I look back, it was such a weird ritual because the idea is you go in the hall, you cover your head, and now thinking back, if there was an actual tornado, this would not protect us, you know?

But so much of life was like that.

I mean, church was the center of our lives, mainly because it was a center, it was your social life.

And so, it was important- - Yeah.

- To everything in the community.

But there was a lot, of course, a lot of hypocrisy.

There was a lot of using religion, the idea of blessings, church to sort of, you know, to justify politics.

And in the case of Alabama, sometimes hateful views.

And so just, the idea of this was sort of looking at the two sidedness of that word.

- What is the biggest misconception about Alabama?

- The biggest that I take the most personally is that Alabama and the Deep South in general is a lost cause.

That it's too racist, too backwards, too religious, too just behind to like, ever really be a place with potential.

- What was the spark that drove you to write this book?

And why now?

- It was around the 2016 election that there was a way I felt the country was talking about Alabama and about the South that didn't feel familiar to me.

It felt reductive.

It didn't reflect the nuance I felt when I was growing up there, the lives that I saw, my own experience.

And I wanted to tell a more nuanced story of this place that in some ways I knew really well, but then in other ways I didn't know a lot about either.

- And you captured it perfectly.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for being here.

- Oh, thank you so much for having me.

- This is a really great conversation.

- Oh, I'm so glad.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm JT Ellison.

Keep reading.

(bell chimes) - [Alexis] When people asked where I was from and I said Alabama, I always got, "Whoa."

(JT and Alexis laughing) And I was like, "Oh, this is a bad whoa."