Welcome to The Bookcase.

I'm your host, Shawna Richards, a sometime writer and a longtime reader.

I invite you to join me as we explore The Bookcase and celebrate Virgin Islands authors and talent.

Each week on The Bookcase, we'll introduce you to a local author and learn more about them and their work.

A storyteller lives in each of us, and I am so excited to give our homegrown storytellers a chance to tell their story.

Tonight’s Selection from The Bookcase is Mer, and I'm honored to welcome its author, Melissa Fredericks.

Melissa, welcome to The Bookcase.

Thank you so much for joining us this evening.

It's a pleasure to be here with you, Shawna.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about my book.

So you are a native Virgin Islander, born and raised on Saint Thomas.

Yes.

Tell our audience a little bit about yourself.

sure, I was born and raised on the island of Saint Thomas.

I went to school there for my entire we'll call it elementary and secondary education.

I went to the States.

I went to Indiana for my bachelor's degree, and then I came back to the Virgin Islands and I taught for five years at my alma mater at All Saints Cathedral School.

And while I did that, I got my master's degree in education at UVI.

So I'm an alumni of DePaul University in Greencastle, Indiana, and also of the University of the Virgin Islands.

So how did your experience as an educator help to inform your writing in Mer?

That’s an excellent question.

For me.

I was at the time I was writing or I was teaching first grade, I was teaching first grade when I first came up with the idea for the book and my undergrad degree is in communications.

And so I had taken a creative writing class and one day I was teaching first grade.

One evening I was I was sleeping.

And I have this dream about a mermaid in Victorian clothing.

And I was like, This is weird, this is odd, This is what is this?

So the next day I came into school and I was telling another teacher in the teacher's lounge, I said, I had this weird dream, let me tell you about it.

And then I said, I think I'm going to write a book about it and I think I'm going to do this and I'll write a book.

And the reason why is because one of my favorite authors is C.S.

Lewis, and he wrote The Chronicles of Narnia.

And what he said was that when he was a young boy, he had a dream about a faun in a snowy forest with parcels under its arm.

And I thought, like, this is weird.

He had a weird dream.

I had a weird dream.

I should write a book.

So that was the impetus for Mer.. And so throughout the book, you're going to see a lot of the engagement that I had, not necessarily with my first graders, but with my high schoolers to try to get them interested in literature and try to get them interested in reading because they were not.

I wish that they were, but they were not interested in reading at all.

And so I said, Well, how do I get how do I come up with an adventure that's going to get them tied into it?

to literature.

So when you were writing Mer that was inspired by a dream, you didn't write about first graders, you wrote about high schooler.

Yes.

Yes.

Did you also teach high schoolers?

I taught, yes, I taught first grade.

I taught middle school.

I taught high school.

I taught speech communications.

I taught technical writing and I taught grammar.

So all of those things were super helpful for me when I was writing the book.

And I had I had a phenomenal time.

I enjoyed my teaching time, hence me getting a master's degree in education because initially I had gotten my bachelor's in communication and then I came back to Saint Thomas.

I had gotten into NYU.

I was going to go to the Tisch School of Arts.

I was like, I'm going to be fancy.

And then my financial aid packet came back and I was like, Oh, well, my financial aid needs financial aid.

I need this money, needs money.

And so I ended up teaching at All Saints for five years.

And the first year I was I was a curmudgeon.

Like, I was like, I don't know if I really want to do this.

I don't know if this is going to pan out, but I loved it.

I fell in love with my students and then I was all in.

So I did things like I was a coach for Moot Court.

We did the Shakespeare Festival, so we did a lot of different things.

We put on plays and poetry recitals and so from that, those were that was a fuel for the students that you see in the book.

And so all of my students know.

I told them in advance, I said, Hey, I wrote this book, I put your name in it.

I just want to let you know it's a character based on you it’s not you in your in your book, you talk a lot about Virgin Islands structures that are recognizable.

Yeah.

I think to anyone who knows the community, why was it important for you to include those elements in in a fantasy book?

Because I wanted people to see themselves.

I love fantasy, I love science fiction.

And I had never read a book that was based in the Caribbean.

I never I've never seen that.

And I was like, But I know that my kids watch science fiction.

I know that they're looking at fantasy things on television.

I would love for them to be able to see themselves in this setting.

And so I made a really case in point, like I have pictures in the book of very specific places because I wanted them to be able to see themselves.

I think it's so important for us to see ourselves in spaces where we might not see ourselves or think that we exist.

And I was like, we do.

We exist in a place that's beautiful, that has culture and it has a heritage.

And I think that it's important for us to to recognize and acknowledge that we have really monumental places in the Virgin Islands.

And I wanted to showcase that for people, you know, all over the world.

You have photos of the Mermaids Chair.

Yes.

Yeah.

And you wrote a entire book.

Yes.

About Mermaids?

I did.

Yeah.

Yes.

So I wanted people to see like, oh, and so I will tell you, I did not know that Mermaids Chair existed before I wrote the book.

Really?

Yeah.

How do you find out about it?

I think I was just telling somebody.

I was like, Oh, yeah, I'm writing a book about mermaids.

And they were like, Oh, you want to know?

Mermaids Chair and Botany Bay.

And I was like, No, but thank you for sharing.

and that's quite a hike.

It is.

It's a it's a, it's a straight like descent.

And if you come in back, you're like, Oh, goodness, I don't know if I want to make this trek, but it's beautiful.

It's that.

like It's a very small strip that separates the Caribbean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean.

And so if you have an opportunity, you should definitely go see the Mermaids Chair.

So in your book, you write about this teacher and her students and she gives them a challenge.

Yes.

And says, and I don't want to give away too much of this, but she gives them a challenge and says, well, if you finish this assignment, you know the best people, I'm going to do something at my house.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

And that came from like when I was a little kid.

Our teachers would have things at their house like that was the field trip.

Oh, we going to go over to the teachers house and we're like, that’s so amazing I remember in fourth grade I had broken my arm and I went to my teacher's house.

Like the day after I got the cast removed, I went we went to McDonald's.

I had a Big Mac, and I was like a little fancy because I had a you know, I can hold it in my hand finally.

And then we went to her house and we watch Willow.

And that was the class.

Like, that was a field trip.

And so I thought to myself, those were great field trips for me.

And I would love to to extend that to my students.

So, you know, any like the best time in school is like when you don't have to be in school, like, let's be 100.

Like, if I’m going to be at school but don't have to do any schoolwork?

I'd be like, This is amazing.

So the prize is for the students to come to her house and it's a it's a historical home.

And there is a underwater observatory and they get in there and that's when all the mermaid goodness ensues.

If not for this dream that you had, do you think you would have one day found your way to writing a fantasy story?

So I had no intention I had no intentions of writing a book.

And it it felt I was I felt pressed upon to like, this is a story that you have to write.

And one of the reasons why I went through self-publishing and not through a traditional publishing process was that I didn't want anybody to tell me no.

And I was like, Well, this isn't really my like, this is a dream.

I felt God gave me.

And I was like, I don't want anybody to to break that stride.

I don't want anybody to tell me that this is not a thing.

And I was like, Let me just do this by myself and not try to seek outside validation, because for me it wasn't about other people validating it.

It was about, you know, this was a gift and I have to make this gift actionable so you never explored any traditional publisher?

I went straight for self-publishing, and the reason really was, is like, I know what that system is like in terms of rejection.

And I was like, But this is in my book, so I don't want anybody to stop me from writing this story simply because that's what they're that's what they think.

I was like no, I’ going to do it how was the self-publishing experience for you from start to finish?

It was really great.

I ended up actually meeting a self-publishing coach and I was at a conference and he was talking about this idea on book and I was like, I have a book, you know, like the kind of conference where you at?

I was at a I was at a conference for sales.

I was at a sales conference.

And this was a guy who was like, Oh, I'm going to teach you how to write your own book.

And I was like, Oh, and I literally was the very first client that he had that wrote fiction like everybody else's books that he had done before were non-fiction.

So I’m his only like self-published fictional author, and it was a great experience.

He walked me through the process.

He connected me with he connected me with the, you know, the people who you need to get your Library of Congress Number.

He hooked me up with the person who does the book design.

He there's all of these facets of publishing that if you are if you've never done it, you have no idea.

And so it was really insightful.

It was really good.

And it took it was a process.

It took maybe two or three years because part of it was like, Do I have this money?

And so did that also include an editor?

Yes.

You know, so we got an editor that your product that you put out, it was the best.

Yes.

Okay.

Yes.

There's no like there's self-publishing.

Doesn't mean not doing all the things that you're supposed to do.

So I had an editor, I had a book design person.

I had to I had a person who, like, laid the book out.

And we did all of the imagery inside of the book.

Yes.

You need to have all of those things and you need to pay people to do them, because I don't have the expertise like I taught grammar, but I can't edit my own work.

Like that's not a real thing.

So yes, you need to pay people to do the hard work for you, but all the photos in the book of Mermaid's Chair those actually I took those yourself.

Yeah.

So the majority, the vast majority of the pictures that I put in the book, those I took myself.

So in putting together Mer and you talked about representation.

What were you reading when you were younger and, and where were you not seeing yourself in those stories?

So again, C.S.

Lewis I loved The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

I think I was probably like fifth or sixth grade when I was introduced to that series, and I connected with the characters in that book.

The problem was that none of th characters looked like me, but that was okay.

I didn't feel like, Oh, the person has to look like me.

It just in my mind I was thinking like, What if you could create a character who did look like you?

How would that feel?

How would that be different?

There's very few Caribbean voices to me in the book, the young adult book industry, and so I never heard anybody on television speaking the way that I speak.

So, you know, like I watch television and I would imitate the people who I saw on TV, but they didn't sound like me.

And so you'll watch or you listen to NPR.

I love NPR.

It's great.

But everybody sounds the same, But you know, you mentioned C.S.

Lewis in The Chronicles of Narnia, and that was also a favorite of mine growing up.

But then I reread it as an adult and it has some pretty serious themes.

Yes.

Yeah.

that went over my little ten year old head.

It does.

And it's so interesting because I was like, Oh, this is a Bible story.

It's an allegory.

It is of Christ.

So I was like, Oh, that's a super cool.

But then also the more I read, the more you read the Bible, the more you understand what C.S.

Lewis is actually saying.

And you're like, Oh, that's what he's talking about.

I had no idea and I wanted the book also Mer to be be a gateway to have people to learn about, about Christianity in a way that was non-intrusive or you just I wanted to be like, as clever as C.S.

Lewis.

I'm not that clever.

I might just tell you that.

But I wanted to give children an opportunity to kind of think through like, Oh, okay, you know something?

So it's not just a story about Victorian Mermaids?

No, it is not.

So there's history, there is conservationism.

So if you're somebody who is really passionate about taking care of the Virgin Islands as it is, this is a great book for you.

If you're somebody who's passionate about VI history, this is a great book for you.

If you're you want to see like what Caribbean students, how they talk and how they behave.

It's a good book for you.

Like if you want to see the mindset of a teacher, this is a great book for you because I telling all the tea right?

Like these are all the things that teacher are saying but it was also very authentic.

Yeah.

When you talked about our uniforms, our school uniforms, and you talked about the history of that and the the colonial, the colonial era.

Yes, behind and of wearing uniforms and simple things like that.

And, and I have to chuckle in reading the book when you talked about how every couple of years, you know, the uniform debate rages, right?

And you can't get rid of them.

I mean, like but they're great.

I loved uniforms.

They were simple.

I never think about what I was going to wear, like as an adult.

I was like, man, I should have a uniform.

Yeah, it makes life easier.

Yeah, but, I mean, like, it it has its purpose, it has its place, but it does come from a colonial past.

it's funny because I know you look at it, you're like, Oh, Mer, it’s a fantasy book.

Yes.

But I also talk about not just Caribbean History, but the history of the slave trade in Africa and what oh, what what were our ancestors thinking when they sold us to people?

Right.

What was that system like?

How did that impact the people in the cultures and the countries who participated in the transatlantic slave trade from Africa?

And so it's it's it's doing a lot of things.

But I think in a in a pretty fun and engaging way.

But you even in the first opening chapters of Mer you talk about you know, the house and the house is is constructed with you know, old materials probably built by enslaved people.

Yeah.

And that house itself is a is a main character.

Yeah.

In, in your story.

Yeah.

And it's based on, it's based on our family home.

The construction is not the same as it is in the book, but what I am kind of tapping into is the beauty of like Virgin Islands.

Architecture is gorgeous and we have all of these natural stones and we build these, you know, or unique walls and architecture.

And I love when I see the walls I have like this, the shells in them.

And it's beautiful, right?

And so part of this is also it's an homage to to the Virgin Islands.

It's a love story to the VI very much.

And that's what I got from it, that it's very much a love letter to the about our history, our culture and our past.

Our present.

Yeah.

And our future.

Our future.

Yeah.

You know, like, what are we?

We're and it's it's really interesting that I finish the book at a time when we continually having these conversations about global warming.

We're having these conversations about how can we be better stewards of the gift that we've been given.

And that's the essentially the premise of the book is, okay, so we're we're more connected than we think and we have to take better care of the things and of the gift that we've been given.

And how do we do that on the small and the large scale, What is the key message of your book?

So key message, I would say is connecting with your identity, connecting with your history and your culture is the pathway to helping us to make decisions about the future.

What are our core values and how can we take those core values and make decisions that are going to help not just ourselves individually, but our communities?

What were our past victories?

How do we help transition those past histories into and those victories into something that's going to help propel us forward?

So that we can take care of not just the gift that is the Virgin Islands, but the gift that is our world, and how do we do that as a community?

And I found it really interesting that you were telling this story with young people.

Yeah.

And through the eyes of young people who are probably more open.

Yes.

More open to hey, there are mermaids.

Yes.

And open to different things.

And older people.

Yeah.

You know, with our biases and and our issues.

Yeah.

Might be.

Yeah.

Like the main character's conflict is because she's a teacher and she takes them on this field trip.

And so she's struggling with like, Oh, my goodness, I'm going to jail.

Like, I've lost these people's kids.

Yes.

And the kids are like, okay, so what can we do?

Like, how do we help?

What's the story?

And so it also goes back to fundamentally, kids are not weighed down by all of the social pressures that adults are.

They're more they're more flexible.

And how do we maintain that flexibility mentally so that we can continue to help people?

And in your story, one of the things you know, the students saw that they had these connections where they were seeing green light.

Yeah.

And and I think that was also a cue that there are amazing things happening around us.

We just have to open our eyes and and see it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we're also as adults, we have a tendency to we'll see something and we'll write that off as like, oh, that's just whatever or whatever.

And when you're a younger person, you like, you find meaning in, in ordinary and extraordinary things and so just to the kids are really the helper of the, the main character to help her to really see what she needs to see so that she can be everything that she needs to be.

And it's a it's kids are amazing.

Kids are amazing.

They're great coaches, Like I taught school, but the kids taught me more than than I ever taught them.

So it's it's just nice to to let them know that they have such a great impact on on the lives of adults all the time.

And with that intro, I'd love for you to share a passage from your book.

Sure.

And so this just sort of set it up a little bit.

This is this is chapter two of Mer .

And what I'm getting at here is, am the ancestral home.

So it's called freedom.

Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom.

And it's by Rabindranath Tagore, I wish I was pronouncing that person’s name properly.

While wiping the sweat from her brow.

Tala scan this space, bringing order to chaos always boosted her mood.

She bent over to run the mop along the eggshell baseboard.

Her goal was to tidy up before the workmen arrived.

Tala was six years old the day her grandparents first brought her to Sergeant Fry.

They drove up the nearly deserted dirt road, surrounded by the kind of vegetation she dreamed she would encounter in the Amazon.

The trees hug the windows of her grandparents Crimson Nissan Sedan.

Reaching out, she imagined to grab her when at last the jostling finished and the motor was silenced.

Her grandmother came around the side of the car and offered her her hand.

Even then, Tala thought her grandmother's hand was small, dark and strong.

She looked into her face and as their eyes locked, they both smiled.

As Tala slid out of the back seat, her grandmother whispered into her ear, We're bringing you to a very special place today.

Is it a secret place?

Asked Tala.

Excited by the notion of having special knowledge all her own No not secret, just special.

It belonged to your grandfather's father and his grandfather's father and his father before him.

Grandpa has a grandpa?

Tala asked.

That seemed a hard truth to swallow, because even at six, her grandfather looked too old to sit on the lap of an even older man.

Every grandpa has a grandpa and those grandparents have grandparents, her grandmother replied with a smile Lus, called her grandfather Lus was the pet name for Tala’s grandmother.

Her grandmother's name was Era Lucille, but every person Tala ever met called her Sister Maclevity or Lucille.

When her grandfather was in a particularly amorous mood.

Lucille was short and to Lus.

That afternoon, in the heart of Talas, newly revealed special place, her grandpa grumbled kind heartedly to his wife.

Lus, what kind of nonsense is you to ask?

Is you asking that girl?

And then she says, I was just explaining to her how old the house is.

Oh, all right.

And so I based those particular characters on my grandparents.

It's lovely.

And in your writing and in your writing about these characters and then writing about Lus, you could see the very special relationship and the history that that they have.

So when you set out to write Mer, did you have any experience writing anything else, Any other fiction?

I had written a lot of poetry in college because I took a creative writing class and probably I took a short story.

I wrote a short story or two, but I had never tackled a novel before.

So what I ended up doing was I did a story outline, which is thankfully, what my literature teacher taught me is line up.

The characters, the setting, and let's look at the story arc.

And from that I went ahead and I divided up the chapters into themes of like this.

These are the things that are actually going to happen in the story.

And from then I just wrote each chapter based on the theme.

How long did it take you from having from having this amazing dream, right?

And saying that you were going to write a book to actually finishing.

20 years it took me 20years Yes.

It didn't take me 20 years to write it.

It took me it was like 19 years of procrastination and then like a year of writing that's the truth.

And so what I ended up doing was because I would I would start and I would stop and then I would edit, which is not what you're supposed to do, is able to just write all the way through.

So the advice to people who want to write their own book, do not edit your own work.

You cannot edit your own work.

Don't edit just write, write, and write.

So I would call myself like, well, well, don't edit as you go as you're writing, because I think that that will damaging to the creative process.

Yes.

So you're not going to you want to edit but you want to write everything first and then it's going to be bad.

And that's okay.

That's when you go back and you you edit all your stuff.

So what I ended up doing was I would do sprints, so I would do 30 days Are you writing longhand paper and pen?

Oh no, no.

I type.

Everything is like everything is typed out.

And so again because I have the, like the chapter titles, I know what's going to happen in each chapter.

I know I have a gist of what's going to happen in each chapter, and then I fill in that information and people, people will like anything.

So I was like, Yeah, I got surprised all the time.

Like I would start writing and I'm like, Oh, okay, this, this.

I didn't know we were going in this direction.

This is kind of cool, this is fun.

And then I would only after I got through writing the entire book that I say, Okay, let me go back and process.

But again, I did sprints.

I would do a 30 day sprint where I was like, okay, I'm going to fast, I'm not going to watch television, I'm not going to do social media for 30 days.

So that's how you balance being creative with everything else going on in your life.

So I didn't try to do it like I'm going to do it every day for a year.

That's not going to work.

You need to have a collapsed time frame to do all your work.

And I did it for like an hour to 2 hours each morning.

So I would just get up.

And I devoted that time to writing the book.

And that is that's how I got through it.

Like when I got serious about it, that's how I did it.

So what's next?

Good question.

So I laugh because when I finished Mer and I sent it out to everybody because I was like, okay, I need to get like.

So you thought it was going to be a one and done?

I thought it would be one.

And then I was like, he was recommending like, I mean, I'm sending this to you because I want you to write a recommendation for the back of the book.

And I sent it out and I was like, Oh, I'm great.

And then that after like the evening of that, I had crippling anxiety.

I was like, Oh, this is going to be horrible.

Like, nobody's going to read it.

Nobody's like it.

And then the guy was like, Oh, you thought you was writing one book?

One book I got, I got six more books for you to write.

And so this is the first in a six book series.

So we will definitely be seeing more.

Yes.

of Mer and Melissa Fredericks.

Yeah, it's been a pleasure to learn more about our local talent, Melissa Fredericks and her book Mer.

For more information on this book or any of the books featured on this program, visit our website at WWW.WTJX.ORG We appreciate your support of our local authors and we'll see you next week when we take another book from The Bookcase.