Bookwild - Ghosts, Girlhood & Generational Memory: Erin Crosby Eckstine on the Humanity of Junie

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

This week, I talk with Erin Crosby Eckstine about her debut Southern Gothic, Junie. She shares how the book developed across years of writing, the importance of portraying enslaved characters with full humanity rather than stereotypes, and why she crafted Junie as a flawed, emotionally real teenager navigating a world she can’t yet fully understand. Erin also explains Gothic and Southern Gothic traditions, the role of ghostly elements like Minnie, the influence of literature within the story, and how intergenerational family history shaped both the novel and her own life.Follow Erin on:InstagramTikTok Check Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackGet Bookwild MerchFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrianMacKenzie Green @missusa2mba 

This week, I am so happy to tell you that I got to talk with Aaron Crosby X-Een about Junie, which will absolutely be in my top 10 of 2025. I loved this on audiobook. I love the story. I loved getting to talk to her. But here is what it's about. 16 years old and enslaved since she was born. Junie has spent her life on Belorraine Plantation in Alabama,

cooking and cleaning alongside her family and tending to the white master's daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry. and far-away worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie. When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at a marriage for Violet and upending Junie's life, she commits a desperate act, one that rouses Minnie's spirit from the grave tethered to this world unless Junie can free her. She enlists the aid of Caleb, the guests to coachmen, and their friendships soon become something more. Yet, as long as long as

held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Belorane is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored. With time ticking down, Junie begins to push against the harsh current that has controlled her entire life. As she grapples with an increasingly unfamiliar world in which she has little control, she is forced to ask herself. When we choose love and liberation, what must we leave behind? This book is fantastic on so many different levels. You know that I am a sucker for books that include books and the power of stories and that is actually worked into this even though you didn't hear about in the synopsis. I think it's really important to be hearing these stories as our current administration is trying to kind of gloss over the part of history

where America was only functioning because of enslaved labor. And I think it's really important to spend time even fictionally with a character to imagine how difficult it would be to live a human life with all of that going on. But something that Aaron and I talk about is how she really wanted to make sure that Junie had her own humanity and how would she be grappling with the world as an enslaved teenager. There's just so much about this book that I love. So I won't keep talking. Let's hear from Aaron. So if you guys have been listening to me all this year, you've heard me talk about Junie by Aaron Crosby-Exteen. And I am so excited because I am going to talk with her about it now. So thank you so much for coming on, Erin. Thank you so much for

having me. I'm excited to be here. I am too. So obviously I loved Junie, but I do typically want to kind of get to know a little bit about the authors before we dive into the book. So what was, I mean, I kind of know the answer because I just reread your author note. and acknowledgments, but what was your journey to writing? Like, how long have you wanted to write? And, like, what was it like getting to Junie, essentially? Sure. So I don't know exactly when I started wanting to write. I did, like, I wrote a lot of, like, books on printer paper as a child. Like, I was always sort of, like, stealing printer paper and, like, stapling it together at my grandparents' office and turning it into books. I think the first, like, major thing that I

ever wrote that I felt a sense of confidence in was a short story I wrote for like an extra credit project in like the ninth grade and um I remember feeling like for the first time my I was always a really good student but I was sort of the type of really good student that a little bit flew under the radar like I was very quiet um and I so I had attended it was the first time I felt like I did something where I felt like uniquely good in a thing um and that I really enjoyed this thing I'd done um but I end up writing this one story I kind of didn't write for a long time. due to just being a high schooler and then I got to college and I was often really just had a lot of anxiety and or insecurity about writing. I think I often thought that I just

like couldn't possibly be good enough to actually write books. So I did everything sort of adjacent to that. So I was an English major and I studied books and then I became a high school English teacher which I loved. And I really just kind of devoted my life to studying books and spreading reading and really being involved in it but um one year way way way back in 2018 um i was visiting my grandparents in alabama and my grandmother told me the story of my ancestor who's my grandmother's grandmother's grandmother my we called my grandma jane um and i'd heard the story before many times but my grandmother just like happened to retell the story and it's just stuck with me kind of differently for on this particular telling

and in that sort of story of my ancestor who escaped from slavery, I ended up just kind of sitting with it and starting to connect it to other family stories I knew. I wanted to create this sort of intergenerational family novel or I had this idea to. And I got started there initially. I ended up taking a writing class, which actually full circle I teach at the same place where I took my initial writing class now. And I, you know, I initially started in this class with the author Rachel Lyon. Rachel was really, I think, very instrumental, very early on and kind of pushing me along with doing the book and working on it.

And I met some really incredible other writers in Brooklyn, who I think we all became each other sort of accountability buddies. And it just kind of moved along that way. I ended up writing the majority of June, actually, during COVID lockdown. Basically, I reached, due to a series of different factors, you know, I was obviously, I was a high school English teacher. So most of the time I just didn't have very much free time to be devoting to writing. But all of a sudden, I couldn't leave my house. And so when it came time that I, you know, was teaching from home, I couldn't leave my house. It reached a certain point in lockdown as well when

most of my, I think all of my friends and family had left New York City, which is where I live. And so I was pretty much just me and my cat in my apartment. And I ended up using that and like really devoting my time during that time to writing the book. And so that is very, very, very, you know, really where that initially came together. And Junie was really, I think, came from a place to being inspired by a lot of different other novels and stories, but also wanting to weave in my own personal family history while also up there that's the aforementioned cat.

He, I wanted to weave in all of these different other books and authors that inspired me with my own family history to create something that I just felt was a narrative I hadn't seen when it came to insulate. meant an American slavery before. So that was really my overall inspiration. And then, you know, books take a very, very long time. That's, I think, the thing readers often don't realize is that, you know, that book,

when you go to the store and you're like, oh, my gosh, the brand new book out. For us authors, we probably started writing that thing, like, at least five years ago. So it's, you know, I think there's a lot of secrets behind the scenes in some ways of, like, how long that process can be. But that was sort of the journey to getting Junie to exist. Yeah, especially, I'm assuming, because I read what your author's note in the acknowledgements, when you're trying to include, like, some of the essence that is your family. But I also thought it was cool, is hard to use it in terms of, like, enslaved people.

But I appreciated how you said that, like, some of the depictions are either, like, paternalistic and angelic of like enslaved people or it's like just trauma and like so heavy um and you mentioned how you wanted juni to like feel like a true sense of humanity actually all of the characters um but junie specifically where you like wanted it to be that she had these similar feelings and experiences and things that she was grappling with that like kind of all of us do as humans so I'm assuming that, like, it sounds like you kind of really were thinking hard about how you wanted to tell the story and maybe like change some things a few times, too. I did.

I, um, I sat with that a lot as I was writing the story because I had some awareness of the fact that I think there is a bit of sort of exhaustion out there. I think with a lot of like black trauma narratives and that the books that are consistently published in fiction are often, and in beyond. fiction film, whatever. There's a lot of things that come out that are these sort of projects that are center around these moments of like black trauma. And there are a lot of people I think who really want to see more depictions of black joy and more positive, you know, positive narratives. And a lot of people who I think think like slavery narratives are just kind of laid out, which I

disagree with, obviously. But I do think that where I did come from, though, was that notion that you bring up from my author's note, which is that I often felt like when I read stories about slavery you either have the book behind me over here you've got like the gone with the wind version um which is the gone with the wind version is like the slaves were just so happy to be there they were just thrilled it was grand old time they wish frankly once they got freed they wish they could be slaves again like that's literally gone with the win it's like obviously ridiculous and beyond not true um and like deeply offensive while though that said on the flip side i do often think that we also can often see depictions of enslavement which i think are far more accurate where they are

very, very focused on just the physical horrors of slavery. And I do think that, like, when it comes to those narratives, those are necessary and important. But at the same time, I have often felt reading those that I wanted to know more about the character's inner lives. And I, there are a few things that really led me to that. One thing was what my writing teacher way back, Rachel Lyon said in one of our classes,

where she said something about how, I'm going to misquote her a little bit, but that every character you write should have dreams. every character needs to have dreams. Regardless of their situation, you need to write characters who have some sort of a dream. And I really felt that to be a necessary point. And it really intrigued me to write a character who is in a situation that most people would think is going to squash any hope of a dream possible, but to still see a lot of the human need and ability to dream under, you know, horrible circumstances. I also

really felt strongly as well about wanting to depict like a teenager. I wanted, I wanted Junie to really reflect like it's an adolescent mindset because a lot of what the way I kind of go about thinking about is there are expectations. So societal expectations of teenagers have changed. Brain science of a teenager has not. Like teenagers' brains have not changed since 1860s. Right. So I, you know, I was a high school English teacher. I really felt like I wanted Junie to reflect what I knew to be adolescent brain development. And I wanted her character to reflect that under her circumstances.

And I wanted her to as a result, therefore, be flawed, complicated, making mistakes. I wanted it to be clear that these are people who lived their entire lives under this particular system. That this wasn't just something that they stumbled into and it was new to them one day. This was, you know, by the time you're getting to Junie, She's living at the, she's living right before the civil war. She is at the, you know, the end of the 250 plus year history of American slavery. But she, and she's not aware of it. Like, we are as we read it.

And she's not. We know that, but she doesn't even know that. Like, she's the tail end of this. She has not, there's not a soul that she knows or could have possibly known who was not going to have been a part of the system in some way. So that is really a lot of what I also wanted to do. was very much almost like a kind of what I thought of is almost like a Plato's cave kind of vibe of like if you think about the Plato's cave allegory it's like the person who's in the cave

doesn't know there's anything but the cave they're just living their life in the cave like that's it and so I wanted Junie in some ways to reflect that even under these horrifying conditions there are still aspects of the human condition that persevere regardless that we know to be the case that people still continue to fall in love they still continue to like be annoyed with their parents They still continue to like, you know, want to rebel or find ways to find excite. You know, these are all things that are just true about people. And for me, I didn't do that out of a desire to soften any of it. It was really because I wanted actually, in a lot of ways, I felt like leaning more into

the full humanity of the characters actually amplified how awful the circumstances were because I wanted everyone to be able to read the book and say, wow, like this character reminds me of a real person I know or I wanted this character to feel like someone that people could imagine and connect with which would therefore make reckoning with oh my god we used to just people used to just real full complex human beings used to exist under this system um and you know many who continue to exist under similar systems even to today so I um that was really my my thought process and wanting to create this book was really wanting to craft these like very well-rounded flawed characters that felt fully humans. Yes, they really do. If you're an author who's

listening right now, I'm sure that sometime recently you thought to yourself, I really just want to write and I don't want to have to think about social media. The good news is I have a couple solutions for you. If you just need help brainstorming ideas and building out posts and Canva, my monthly consulting might be good for you. If you're about to publish a book, I can help you with a book trailer the other option is accumulating a content bank of both long and short form content that can be used now and generically into the future i love reading your books and i know you don't love figuring out how to post on social media so i would love to help follow the link in the show notes to learn more um and i think at least for me because i was

you are you're just so attached to her and other characters as well but especially her um it like it almost added to the suspense which this may fit with the southern gothic vibes is there there there was so much the suspense for me was in like the fear that I knew that like at any point like the McQueen's could have just like I killed her like whatever there's like this suspense where it's like oh like I'm pulling for her but I know the circumstances and so then you're like scared just because of that part, but you are so connected to her as a human. And you're like, no, we can't let that happen. Yeah, absolutely. I think that the circumstances themselves and it may produce like dramatic irony is the English teacher term for it, where you, the reader, know something that the character doesn't. So you, the reader, you know, we the readers are sitting there knowing we know what happened during, you know, American slavery. We know these like wide, we have this wide contact on these different experiences, all these different things.

Obviously, Junie doesn't. Junie only knows her own set of experiences. So there is an additional, 100% like an additional tension. And I think fear that just comes in with just knowing how that entire time period went and us having a knowledge that she doesn't have. Because it's funny, I get a lot of reader comments that are like, why is Junie so stupid? Like, why is Judy like so reckless? Like, why is this character like, she is making me mad?

she's like yeah and people have it's funny and I like I totally get it like Judy's meant to be a kind of frustrating character like I wrote her to be frustrating under the circumstances but I wrote her but I think that frustration for readers often comes from the fact that one she is a teenager and teenagers are just deeply frustrating like as a person who spent my I mean I like I said I was high school English teacher for many years teenagers are deeply frustrating like I loved being high school English teacher but like part of working with teenagers is being aware of the fact that like they don't make good life choices they don't they don't do it like i you know i regardless of the day i was like there was going to be some kid who like threw a jug of milk down the hallway

and filmed it for ticot like or like we had kids who would be like i think it's a good idea to like throw plates on the freeway like anything could be happening because they're teenagers and teenagers are just even the hormonal transition like they they don't even feel like themselves they don't know what themselves means really they don't know what it means like they're getting into fights in the whole like they're doing anything um you know and that is so much of what i wanted to feel in junie that everybody you know i think a lot of us can read it and be like girl the thing you're doing is clearly unsafe and stupid but it's like yeah but 16 year olds do stuff that's clearly stupid um and then on top of it

similarly i think a lot of our own anxiety for her about being like girl you're being really really unsafe under your circumstances is again, we know about these circumstances in a way that she does it. She only knows as much as is available to her on Belrain and as much as her family is going to tell her. And again, if you're thinking about a teenager, I don't know about you, but personally when I was a teenager, if my parents came up and told me, hey, don't go do that thing. There was a pretty decent chance I was going to spend a lot of time thinking about going and doing that thing. Like that's, you usually, you know, teenagers are trying to touch the stove, as I, as I put it. Like that's, you can tell them that the stove is hot, but they sure will be touching the stove

because they want to, they have, that's part of unfortunately, that's kind of part of human development is people, teenagers do crazy risk taking behavior because it is, you don't know yet that life's actually scary. You kind of don't know, you don't agree with your own mortality. like you don't think you're really going to die like exactly you don't really think that's going to happen to you you don't really think that your body's going to like change in some meaningful way you just you hear these things but you don't really think they could actually happen to you as a teenager and you know that's why we see teenagers you know do all kinds of stuff like and that's that's what that's how teenagers have been you know for time in memoriam um and we see it in all kinds of you know funny ways

in history. People, you know, there's all kinds of like revered authors or, you know, figures and people like that who did stuff when they were really young. We're like, wow, the one that comes to mind right now is Mary Shelley off the top of my head. We're like, because I just watched Frankenstein last week and I love Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley. I did. I saw it in the theater. I'm so, so glad I got to see in theater. But she, you know, I think about Mary Shelley is a great example that like we think of her as this like revered author, but she wrote Frankenstein when she's 19. She started Frankenstein at 19, which means that all of the stuff that happened in her life prior to Frankenstein, she was like a full-blown teenager. So if you think about the fact that she like ran off with a way older man that was clearly not a good person for her to go running off with, who were like, was she was doing crazy stuff.

You lead her biography and you're like, why was this author so insane? And then you're like, oh, right, she was like 16 doing running off with Percy Shelley or like disappearing with like where. you know, running off to Italy with a bunch of, you know, poets to go sit in a castle somewhere with a bunch of dudes who are clearly not way older than her and like clearly weird, you know, bad vibes. Also with her like step-sister, she's wild. I know. You're like, now I need to read her biography. I went to the Mary Shelley Museum when I was in England. Okay. A while back. There's a, there's like a Mary, and I learned so many things. That woman like i was like this i learned so many things about this human being well and it makes it

makes it makes sense how she could write that at 19 is like something that like that book is so and there's so many quotes form it so aware of like men without empathy and tons of power is a problem so like no wonder she knew that by 19 is what i'm realizing exactly she was surrounded you know she had like her father who was because her mother died giving birth her mother was like a famous feminist and her mother died in childbirth like her mother's is like Mary Wollstonecraft who's like this very very prominent famous um like old like 18th century feminist um and you know so she was like raised by all these like very domineering men and then like ended up in a relationship like a way older dude who was like also hooking up with her sister it was a mess like it was bad um and then there's like

lore like it was so you see it all though all this to say I think that if we often I think people look back on the past and imagine that people had were all you know these old refined people who had figured out their stuff and that it was I was like the past is so messy and humans have always been messy and teenagers in particular have always been messy and we have to I think it's super important to like remember and acknowledge that as we look back at all kinds of different historical contexts including you know ones that seem harrowing and insane and ones where you would think that the people would learn to have caution but we know people don't know no well and yeah like her being a teenager in your point um about plato's cave like

uh not in much less much less harsh conditions i like very much much much understand what it's like that in your childhood you do not know what you don't know so it's even just like she's only grown up there uh she's she's around it but like again even if you're 16 you might still think like this life is kind of good like there are good parts of it and and there are good parts to her life which is like that other like endearing part i guess maybe or the part of the story where it's not just horror and it's not just the trauma that um enslaved people we're living through then it's like she does like love being outside she does love reading which i thought was such a cool and if you think this is a spoiler i can move it but you talk about your

choice to make her literate um somewhat just because of like a way to connect to you said how like your family has always loved stories and reading so i thought that was really cool too but also um it like gives her a framework to try to understand her life is how i felt when i was reading it that it's like helping her know like oh this is what you can hope for in life or this is what's hard about life so can you kind of talk about like there are so many books referenced i have like cinderella snow white keats wordsworth we've got like so many things we can feel your english teacher in there can you talk about wanting to include those books sure i think partially it was just for fun like my own inspiration in it but a lot of it as well was i wanted book i felt like books

were a really good anchor in her relationship with Violet and to better understand their relationship as well as, yeah, again, it does give Junie, I think, a really important framework that allows her to start seeing things differently than she might have other rights. I think it's very obvious why they did not want enslaved people to know how to read, because if they could read, they immediately started quickly figuring out that things were not right. If you communicate with each other better. Yeah. Pretty obvious, exactly.

But I think one thing I often thought about with Violet is that I think the reading becomes an interesting point in their relationship. Because I think Junie initially, I think Junie often interprets the fact which of Violet taught her out of read as like a positive, like this kind of sign of like love friendship in some ways, right? Like it's a bit of their connecting point and it feels like this connection of the relationship. But often what I try to emphasize is that like Violet doesn't. teach Junie how to read out of like a sense of benevolence. Like it's not really that Violet is like, I think it's wrong that you can't read. And I'm going to teach you because I think it's wrong. Violet teaches her how to read because Violet's basically like you are my living playmate. Like you are my, you are essentially like an animate doll for me in some ways. And Violet loves to read. So if she's

essentially doing like build a best friend, she's like, my best friend needs to also know how to read. And so that was really often what I kind of thought about in the context of what was going on that. Junie also, again, only is limited, of course, by whatever Violet's going to be out. It's not like Junie gets to have wide access to whatever she wants to go read. It's going to be whatever's available to her. And so that was some of what I also was really reflecting on with the reading. And it gave me an opportunity to just, again, want to be sort of intertextual and thinking about like how did Junie's story reflect these other ones?

I thought that I don't really know when in my process I started thinking so much about like the sublime. I think I really liked all of those romantic poets when I was around that age. Like I think I got into that whole thing when I was like 16. And I thought again, it was really this interesting contrast again to, I wanted to put it in like the most extreme terms possible

of this sort of someone desiring this sort of like limitless freedom concept that the splime is but you put it into someone who seems to be like the absolutely most disempowered person you can think of um and in many ways again i really which um i wanted to also think about this in the context of again like the guys who you know all the people these romantic poets who i was you know the lord byrons the percy jellies all of these guys who were writing about that they're these are all like affluent white men like all of these men were you know these were all men who had money, who had the ability to travel, who could essentially, like, you know,

go off and be like, I'm going to go sit on a hill and think about how the city sucks. And I am pursuing, you know, the ultimate sublime out near nature. Yeah. It's like, it's doable for them. It's like, it's doable for them because they were these affluent white men. And, you know, and I think that was some of what I also wanted to explore with Junie as it goes on. But yeah, I think a lot of the books were really me sort of sitting with. And I think it also just became fun for me to sort of point, too, to like think about the time period and like try to imagine what would Violet have on this bookshelf and like think about what would be the books that would make sense for her to have had. I did a lot of thinking too where I tried to not have any books that would

have come out like within 10 years of the start of the book because I was trying to be relatively like, okay, it wasn't like easy to get books. It wasn't the same way it is for us. So I tried to be like careful and be like, okay, well, I'm not going to try to pick something like, it's 1860 I'm not going to pick something that came out like 1858 because like would you know I was like I don't know actually how she might have acquired that and so I'm going to like stick with stuff that's like older and would have given her time to somehow come across it and so yeah I found it to be just like part of it was just like it was fun but also those were some of my thoughts of these yeah the what you were saying in the beginning about violet that was the part that like the whole time

when you're well you said she's got to like build a friend essentially is what she's doing and i had a quote highlighted where um basically she says where was it oh i completely lost the quote but she basically says oh i had it pulled up that's okay it went away but yeah like even violet kind of says something to her she's like well you have to like you have to because i said so um and i was like, oh, and Caleb is like a friend and kind of a, I don't know if that's in the synopsis, but kind of a love interest. Basically, Junie's intrigued by Caleb, who comes to the plantation at one point. And he kind of feels like he was like the one that was challenging her naivete a little bit, where he's like, she kind of thinks she's in a loving friendship with Violet. And then

the whole time, I at least, I'm just like, when is Violet? Kind of be terrible. terrible to her like I mentioned earlier and he mentions like there's he says something along the lines to her of like ain't no love if you got to own the person to be friends with them first and I was like well that is a lot to grapple with and to your point of like her being a teenager too like she wants to believe that she could be friends with Violet and that maybe she did teach her benevolently which we're not thinking that necessarily as we're reading it either. Um, so yeah, it's, it was just such a complicated relationship where she just wants the convenience of like a forced book club to make it even more like, like, she's like, I want to talk to someone about these books. So you learn how to read too. Like, yeah, you're going to read too and we're going to read together. And like, Violet in our own way doesn't really, you know, she's fine with she. Violet doesn't particularly like her parents rules anyway. So Violet's fine with teaching them because she's like, I don't care what my mom has to say about it. I'm going to. I'm going to. I teach you anyway. But it's, you know, again, it's out of a violet's own desire. And I do think that Caleb is meant to come into the story very much as someone who has seen way more of the world than Junie has, even though Caleb has only seen as much as he's seen. He's still seen a lot more than Junie has. And I think that he's meant to be sort of an interjection of a type of person that Junie has just never met, experienced, heard from any of that.

And he's supposed to come in and very much be like, hey, maybe think about this thing differently or maybe see this thing differently in a way that's meant to sort of, you know, shake up her life a bit. And she does, when you were talking about like the romantic poet, like she connects to that. And that's probably because of even like her age, but it could also be like personality. But it's like for her, it's never going to be. practical to be as romantic as they are about things and like you're saying like i i had pulled that quote too where like the like keats and wordsworth saw it unattainable beauty because they

already had it all so it's like of course they're able to just like daydream about kind of like utopia or the sublime like all of that and it's it ends up not being something that works for her but also consuming it still i think is kind of cool there is it still helps her start to understand the world a little bit more, even when she's getting to the point of like, oh, this is not how I can live my life and like think about things. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think it definitely is meant to spark like something in her, but initially she doesn't

really know what that thing is quite. Like she, she's just like she knows she kind of want something that feels freer or she's like pursuing that, but she doesn't really know what it is. she doesn't really know how to lock onto it she doesn't she's not quite she's not there yet as the story right right yeah and she needs sort of the the kick of people of like mini of of you know caleb of all these different things to start to open her eyes far more to her reality so i heard you on the booking podcast i'm friends with um amy who does that and you were explaining southern gothic which is actually something sometimes people do ask me they're like

like, what do you mean when you're saying that about a story? Because I got, I got really into it, probably more like contemporary modern Southern Gothic at first. And now I just enjoy it in general. So can you kind of talk about like what Southern Gothic? I mean, you're an English teacher, so you would know, what Southern Gothic is, kind of how Gothic fits with the Southern Gothic. And then like the choice to kind of include like many and her sister's like ghost elements in your story. sure so gothic has like a long history if you're going back initially very kind of like early gothic stuff is going to be like 18th century and it used to be that at its root like originally gothic is always going to take place like kind of traditional like Britishy European Gothic you've got like crumbling castles like there's mystery there's melodrama there's often used to be in very old school gothic there's usually going to be some sort of like damsel and distress

situation with some sort of like creepy dude who might be like trying to cause problems for her um there's it but there's always an real emphasis on sort of gloom and darkness and death and decay um these sort of kind of that those sort of darker underbelly themes and that's really when you're looking at like early initial gothic novels they're usually going to be like you're in a crumbling abbey somewhere and maybe it's haunted blah blah blah and that changes over the course of the 19th century, as gothic sort of develops much more with things like Frankenstein is a great example. Frankenstein is totally a gothic novel, but she does something really different with it by making it into what is now known as the first science fiction

of taking these themes of death, decay, whatever, you know, on putting in all these crumbling places, but she morphs it to mean, to dig into more of like human condition, the limits of humanity what is moral you know what are what's ethical all these different things um and there's so many who build upon it who kind of move it away from being all about just like weird guy chases girl around castle to being much more like you know jane air weathering heights um even things that they start doing you know charles dickens does like bleak house that's set in a city there's just so many different examples um pretty much like every one of the sort of like classic old school horror stories that people feel you know the dracul and hide all jackal and hide all of that is going to fall under

some level of gothic because they're all these kind of like dark um you know dark historical dark settings that are going to feel gloomy creepy mystery oriented suspense oriented melodrama is very important as well all of these kind of features are going to be there and then southern gothic is different because southern gothic moves us from the sort of european context into an American context. And of course, in America, we don't have, you know, crumbling medieval castles because we don't have that here. What we had in place of that is we get into the, like, I think Southern Gothic really is like a 20th century situation. What we had is crumbling buildings. We're crumbling old plantations. So Southern Gothic really develops out of the context

of the crumbling American South and really this like taking this sort of. and vibe of the of Gothic, the kind of like traditional British Gothic and moving it into plantations, swamps, like moss everywhere, ghost stuff. But it's all much more about the haunting of, in many ways, like slavery itself and the historical context of all of that.

Yeah, it's like that haunting. So you have a lot of Southern Gothic is really going to be that sort of like, yeah, swampy plantation-y kind of horror and it's just transplanting the setting it's keeping the themes the same but it's moving it into this setting and it's interesting too because now we're starting to like i feel like i've seen a lot more gothic popping up that's like almost like latin american gothic is becoming much more of its own thing recently like mexican gothic is a great example by sylvia marino garcia like the hacienda is another really great example there are more that i'm not thinking of right now there's so many that have been popping up i feel like there's one called salt so salt bones that i just read. It was really good. Yeah. There's like a bunch, which is interesting because I think a lot of those are taking what is the hacienda system and they're sort of setting them all within the hacienda system, which the hacienda system is very similar to like the American plantation system. So you see a lot of again, this sort of new world Latin American takes on it where you're

getting the same exact sort of like creepy, haunty feels, but they're putting it within again, history's horrors essentially yeah yeah and in a lot of cases i think gothic is ultimately supposed to really get back to like the horrors of people and i think like the best gothic novels are usually the ones that aren't scary because of the like they don't like gothic you don't have to have super natural yeah you don't need the supernatural like a lot of them have it but you don't need it but what it comes down to is like ultimately it should circle back to the idea of that like the real horror is like other people usually um i often think about like pan's labyrinth by guile del torre was like a really great example film wise of a lot of that of like it's creepy it's totally

gothic and weird and like but ultimately the point of that movie isn't like that the weird stuff is scary it's like the other people are the problem like it's like the other people are what is scary um and like are the real evil and i think a lot of gothic ultimately circles around that so for me with including mini mini is certainly definitely like a a ghost we're definitely working in gothic gothic land particularly if you have like a rueful angry ghost i think a lot like something like tony morrison's beloved also which like fun fact um a lot of people often think that like my book was directly inspired by beloved i'm currently reading beloved for the first time i've never read it before um i completely offhandedly by chance happen to have overlaps with that book

it's really wild um but i'm reading for the i've read other tony morrison but like weirdly had not read beloved and so i'm reading for the first one now but again the that sort of like vengeful ghost concept is very much entrenched in a gothic idea and i that's why i wanted minnie to sort of fit into that that like this plantation is very much haunted but it's not haunted in the way of you know, it's not haunted housey haunted. It's not haunted as in there's stuff that's jumping out at you trying to scare you. It's haunted in the sense that

there have just been horrific things that have happened there. And that Junie has this connection to really a ghost that in some ways is one that she wants to see, but it's also a complicated ghost for her in many ways and a ghost that is vengeful ultimately and is also

trying to motivate her towards things that Junie doesn't necessarily do. I kind of like I did not think of this at the time that I was writing and I like realized it after the because it kind of introduces the mystery element the mini does she's kind of like figure this out and I didn't really think of this until after written it but like many almost functions kind of in a similar way to the ghost in hamlet is like if you think about I and I will say right that was not planned I did not realize that when I wrote the book but in what I think comes through with her is this

idea that like she shows up basically and it's like hello i'm presenting you with stuff you need to figure out now see ya um in some ways in the same way that like claudius's ghost rolls up on hamlet and is like hey or sorry no hamlet's dad's ghost rolls up and it's like hey claudius killed me you need to go to revenge figure it out by um and you know and then hamlet spends the entire play being like should i um and being like what happened to me was that ghost real what's going on um and so i many in some ways, I think, functions to some extent, not as directly, but like in a sort of similar way. She introduces a lot of the mystery and the tension that wouldn't otherwise be there and focuses on, you know, moving Junie forward and you need to like be pushed along her

path and her journey in a big way. And I just like, yeah, I love ghost stories. I love a good ghost. I just think ghosts are great. I love, I like, I like, I love, I like, I love. love the concept i love you know i like finding out about ghost stuff in your life love some ghosts and literature like ghosts are just fun yes my friend my friend step coined the phrase recently where she was like i really do love stories where the dead or undead are along for the ride i'm like i love thinking of it that way they're just here hanging and i and i think it's it can be really fun to like work that into it and um and to just have that narrative in it and that was why i think i think I was pretty inspired.

Right before I started working on, I was quite inspired by Isabella Yende's House of the Spirits, which is a book I absolutely love. And that's another one where it's magical realism. So it is, again, like, otherwise pretty like historical standard setting that just like has some ghosthood. Yeah. Like sometimes there goes there.

And I think that was very much kind of what I wanted to convey in Junie was that it's a pretty otherwise not supernaturally book. It's just this one introverture. of a ghost that appears. And I wanted the book to have that magical realist quality of we're not in like a full fantasy world, but we do suddenly have their sort of like a thinning of the veil going on. Can I ask you a really huge favor? One of the biggest indicators in audience growth and podcast popularity is ratings and reviews. I am always going to be growing bookwild and the range of guests that we're able to have. But the one thing that you can really do that

would help grow bookwild is rate and review on whichever platform you listen to. And if you do rate and review, send me a screenshot because I would love to send you some bookwild bookmarks. Now let's get back to the episode. I have a note here. I can't remember if it literally starts in the river, but it kind of does and ends in the river. Was there, was there any like, did you kind of want to bookend it that way? Or is it just happened that way? It kind of happened that way. I think. think the book the beginning of the book i weirdly has like not ever really changed like that's one of the things about the book that i think stayed the most consistent across drafts and i and like i she kind of just doing the same thing at the beginning every time and then i think if we're getting

into spoilers for yeah for spoiler alert ending yeah for spoiler alerts on the ending yeah i did want her it felt right to like have her end there as well like i wanted it to have that sort of circular moment for her in some ways of like we start kind of we don't start in the same place but we start with harketing back to things that happen in the beginning or we end with things that happen in the beginning um and honestly like that was the truth of what actually happened to my ancestor so that was some of what i also wanted to convey there like my real and it's so funny because for years when people had asked me what my book is about and i was like oh it's based on this ancestor of mine but i can't really tell you what happened to the ancestor because it's a spoiler for the

right like i was like i can't really tell you what happened because that's kind of the whole thing um but you know my real ancestor um she escaped from a plantation and somehow got across this river and made it to the area that my family now lives in um you know she like went through this absolutely harrowing escape and crossed a river like upstream and somehow made it there and we've still really like don't a hundred percent know how like i don't really know how she pulled that off um it's it's you know it's not like a crazy far distance to us now but of course in like 1861 when you're enslaved and running away like i really don't know how that happened um so a lot of you know junie's escape at the end is partially

me you know knowing some details but essentially like concocting a lot of it because i was like um i'm like i don't really know how this woman pulled this off um um Um, but she did somehow, um, and at the end of the book, you know, I, I, I wanted the place where the book ends is like a real place. Um, that island where she like lands is a real island that's just off of the town, like legitimately just off of the town where my, um, family's from. So she, I like had her, like the three rivers meeting thing is a real place. And so I, I, I knew I wanted to bring her to this particular location and I wanted her to end up there just because I knew where that was on the, um, the map and I have such like an awareness of it for my own family history and just like being in this town all my life. So I knew that's where I wanted her to end up. And I think the other big thing for me in the ending is I always, always, always knew that Junie was going to have to end the book by herself. Like she was always going to have to end up alone. That was always going to be critical to me about this, which has, makes a lot of people sad. But is unfortunately like what happened

to the real person. And I, you know, I felt it like deeply, deeply necessary to honor my ancestors real experience there by having that be the case. Because my real ancestor, the story varies. Like, I've heard it both ways, but like either she was pregnant when she ran away or she had like an in-arm baby. It was like one or the other. Like, it's either way. Yeah. Yeah, it's either in her stomach or.

she's holding it or she was holding it it was like one or the other and then her husband was like killed during the escape like they go to escape together and he was killed um and you know in my original ending that is what happened to Caleb but i got so many protests from my agent and like other people that they were like you literally have to change this and so then we had to settle on the like ambiguous ending that it now has we settled on the ambiguity ending um but it yeah that was that was I mean my real ancestor she genuinely like got yeah ran away and like a big part of the town or was a big part of developing it or yeah she lived to be like well over a hundred she only died because she got hit by that was crazy I was like to have lived

that life and then that's what happens yeah she was bringing a cake across the street apparently she was like walking a cake across the street and got hit by a horse and bungy and died and we were like it's insane to me every time i'm like the fact fact that this woman somehow like that was that was what that was it that was what ended up for her um and you know and it's cool in a lot of ways that i have even disinformation about her it's rare for i think a lot of people you know af you know black people who are descendant from slavery in that way to have these types of like immediate accounts of of their ancestors but because she lived such a long time does her story stay alive and um and she ended up raising i think it's like a it's interesting in my family because there's like a chain of grandmothers that basically have kept it alive where grandma jane raised my grandmother's grandmother so basically if you're doing the chain like she raised my grandmother's grandmother and then my grandmother's grandmother raised my grandmother so it was like this like and then my grandmother very have like raised me in many ways. And so it was this sort of chain of ancestors who kept this particular

narrative alive because there was such, it was just passed down. And so, you know, it's cool in many ways that I have this ancestor who I, of course, like, could never have possibly known, but who I do have enough details on to be able to, like, write this book and think about. And, you know, a lot of it, too, as I got older, it just sat with me. It happened. It happened. how unbelievably harrowing and risky her choice was, you know, once you really know the context of how escapes went most of the time, thinking that. And I also came to, you know, there's a lot of context around where she ended up

in the town where we live in. The place that she ran away to is an area that ended up being like much more open to black land ownership in the South, which really surprises people. So she ran away from a county. the county that she was enslaved in is the county that to this day is like one of the most impoverished counties in the United States like it is a level of like I think the UN went in there years ago and said that like the levels of poverty are like on par with some of the worst they've ever seen like it is like a deeply deeply impoverished county because it was it historically after slavery ended it became like a share cropping county and it's just then pretty much just got abandoned and like there was no economic development. It just, you know, a horrible systemic racism happened and it has become what it is. But on the flip side, the county that my family, that my ancestor ran away to ended up becoming

a place that was open, more open to black land ownership. It was much more open because it's hilly. It's like the foothills of the Appalachas. And essentially the white people couldn't really get all of the Native Americans out. Essentially, the Native Americans, like, took to the hills and were like, genuinely, genuinely could not get them out. Like, they were, they were, like, formidable. And so, literally, yeah.

So, like, apparently, I think initially, a lot of the white settlers wanted to set the capital of Alabama to be, like, further up river closer to where my family lives. They literally could not do it because the Native Americans were, like, you have to, like, were, like, pushed. We're like, no. And so that's why the capitals in Montgomery, because Montgomery isn't as hilly. They had to move down river.

They, like, had to give up. basically. And so as a result, that area stayed is a much more like preserved area for like black land ownership and just like land ownership by non-white people. And that was huge because my family ended up being able to own land, which is if you're thinking about the history of like wealth in America and all these different standards, my family, you know, they were, they did not grow up. They did have money by any means, but they did have land. They had, you know, they could have a farm. they could have a house on their land that was their land they were able to keep possession of it too i like just i just read happily recently which is like really talks about how a lot of it

got taken back in that area which would be worth so much now the number she dropped in the acknowledgments is like 350 million dollars or something it's literally and i think my my family figured out both sides of my family because my grandfather i'm the book is about my grandmother's side. My grandfather's side is also from the same down. And so they, they somehow, yeah, they figured out how to hold on to it, basically. They held on to their land. They, you know, they were able to keep it going. Famously, they were not playing about holding on to it. I will say that my great-grandfather on my grandfather's side famously had a rifle for every kid and he had 16 children. So they weren't playing. Like, people did try.

I'm sure. But like they also learned not to try them. It's basically, it was like a combination my mom and I have having this conversation actually yesterday about my great-grandfather who I never he died when I was a baby and he was like a man that truly was no one messed with like everyone knew that like Zee Krosby was like kind of on one and like you did not mess with Zee Krosby for any reason

like he had 16 children and he would fight and so he was like known for that and that was a lot of how the land stayed in family was that like a lot of people would try to roll up and they were like oh we actually can't mess with them like they are they are too formidable we have to yeah yeah i was just talking to someone about that the idea that people love to be

like violence is not the answer and it's like yeah if you're being oppressed or someone is trying to oppress you again violence is the only way out and i'm not saying he was that was i don't i don't know what he did but i'm like that's the only way out yeah he he he really understood that concept and took it to heart is what i was good good for him and his stories like he was like i have a house I have my 16 children. This is my land. These are my cows. This is my situation.

You will not be coming on my property. And trespassing, they really don't play about trespassing in the South. So historically, ever. But that made a huge difference, I think, for my family in general. It really just changed things. And I often then reflect on it for myself, or I think about where I am now and my mother, you know, my side of my family has able to get to. You know, I obviously am here.

I'm an author. I, you know, I've been able to go become this like educated, you know, woman in a way that would not have ever been possible. My mother is a PhD. My grandmother was even able. My grandmother was like the first in her family to go to college. Like we all ended up on this sort of chain of progress in this way that I don't think would have been possible without my grandmother Jane's initial sacrifice and choice. Like I just think that we all ended up with much more. stability in a lot of ways as black women from this area because she made this decision. Like if she had not run off that plantation and done what she'd done, like, I don't know that my grandmother would have ended up getting a college degree. I don't know what have happened to all of these different people and my family over the course of, you know, holding time. And yeah, it is crazy thing because my initial, yeah, my initial ancestor, she herself, you know, original grandma Jane was not literate. That is something I, a hundred

just added into the book she was not literate she was never literate i don't think um the census data that i came across always had her marked as being illiterate um so i don't think she ever like learned i don't know that she ever learned how to read but like eventually people did and like those are the things that i think i reflect on a lot and that was part of why i wanted to write this book was it just made me really think about you know oh my gosh like this one person in my bloodlines yeah like this huge sacrifice that she made and how much, or just this massive risk that she took and how much that paid off for her descendants. That was, that was really why I was, you know, thinking of doing this. That makes it,

I was looking at your dedication earlier, too, and says to my grandmother, who told me this story and made me believe I could tell it too. And I was like, oh, I hadn't seen it since I read it the first time. And I was like, oh, that just like now knowing so much more, it makes it so much more powerful. But another thing that ends up standing out to me in these situations is like what you're saying like you this is not far into your family history and this is another story that is like reminding me of that because obviously there's there's a push by the administration there's a push by lots of white people who'll maybe not even just white people um who are like it was so long ago get over it like or it wasn't that bad is is a new one that's

coming back. Yeah, it wasn't that bad. It's like, I think the most shock. My favorite one that's come out recently is like slaves learned good skills. Yeah. Like they're like, oh, but they learned skills. I'm like, okay. But again, I often get that.

Like, I feel like I've gotten that one on so many different accounts when you hear about when people want to say, oh, this thing was so long ago. Like my grandparents, my grandparents passed away pretty young, like relatively on the younger. They passed away both in their 70s. and a few years back, back in 2021. But my grandparents were born, you know, these are my, my grandparents, who I was extremely close with, who I grew up with. My grandparents grew up through Jim Crow, Alabama.

My grandparents, like, that's what I'm often trying. I think people are not understanding when they're like, oh, this was a long time ago. I'm like, my, they didn't de-my grandparents were adults when they desegregated Alabama. They were full-blown adults with children when they had, when they desegrograded. like my mother is like I think maybe the first one of the first people my mom wasn't born in Alabama my mother was born like very very not long after um the desegregation of much of the south or like the integration of the south um I think my aunt may have actually been born yeah my mom my aunt I think was born when it was still segregated like actually and like these are 1964 was not that long ago

this is one generation yeah I'm like I'm not talking about like this is one singular generation back. My grandparents, you know, it's like my grandparents could tell me stories about like, oh, yeah, all of them are relatives who were driving in carpools to get around the bus boycotts. Like, you know, who were all kinds, you know, my grandmother went to Tuskegee and like was, I mean, my grandmother had famous stories about the time that she like cooked for Martin Luther King because he was staying at the school because that's what, like, these are not far back. Like, this is not far back. And then so similarly, I think then when you chart back, to you know these my ancestors who were enslaved or all of these different times it's like it wasn't

that long ago in the grand scheme of history we're talking you know a hundred you know less than 200 years um there are innumerable things that don't yeah that's not that not at all it was been really confusing to me lately is it seems like there are a lot of white people who have gotten on board with and understand generational trauma in the sense of them going to therapy and being like oh this stuff from my grandparents affected my mom and my mom affected me and like they can grasp the concept

and then they're like just get over it I'm like are you kidding me it's like how could we possibly when like we are all still like people who are from who are the descendants of slavery are still reckoning with the fallout of that like

there that has that has a that a harm that has absolutely never been repaired in this country like it is never been repaired reconstruction the initial aim was to repair it and then reconstruction they just gave up on that and so then it just went you know it's never there's never been anything there there's never been any harm change really in a considerable way until you get to like maybe the 1960s and so again as a result there's not you know it's like what's there to get over like what's there to get over like what are or it's like how could possibly we be moving in that direction when there's never been anything to even repair it um and in many ways it's like i think black americans have attempted to

just kind of pick it up and keep it moving because well you have to keep surviving somehow and we got to keep you got to pick it up and keep moving yeah and i think um you know it is really really it's been really interesting i think for me you know you write a book you don't know what the circumstances of the world are going to be like when your book comes out you you write this thing know, I wrote this thing all as long as ago as I did. And then all of a sudden, it's like, here's your pub date. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is what the world's going to be, I'm finding out. And so, you know, it's been very interesting, I think, to be of someone who wrote, I wrote a book about this at the same exact moment that they're going into the museums and saying, we don't need exhibits on slavery anymore.

Like, I want the, you know, let's make the museums happier and get rid of all that sad. Let's not traumatized kids in school by telling our history. Like, oh, great. Yeah, let's not let. I don't think kids should know about this. And you're like, what? And so we already know too little, because that's been like a huge part of my journey. I mean, for 10 years is like when I was like 19 and could like pick.

I grew up in a really controlled Christian evangelical environment. So I didn't get to pick my media. I remember coming to college and being like 19 and watching Madman. This is like the weird story I have. But watching Madman. And it touched on the civil rights movement because it takes place in the 60s. 70s and I was like wait wait it was it was yeah you were like these what this was that my dad was born in 1964 like what are you talking about and so even like the education I'd had made it seemed like

it was so long ago and I think a lot of people do not understand that like slavery ended however many 218 65 so and they don't realize that Jim Crow and the attitude of Jim Crow was from then until 1964 like i think a lot of people don't yeah and it and it persevered frankly the racist didn't leave really and die because the law they didn't go anywhere no they frankly it morphed and changed and i think um yeah exactly it's like my dad was born in 1953 my mom is born you know like my mom's were in the 60s my grandparents were in the 40s like we're not looking at a whole bunch of like you know my every member of my family all of my grandfrey parents, all of these people. It's like they all had very, you know, specific experiences with

the Jim Crow South in different ways. My dad's side of the family's different. My grandfather and my dad's was a very famous jazz singer. He was kind of like the Black Frank Sinatra, who's the best comparison I can give. Same as Billy Eckstein. And he similarly had all, I didn't really know him. He died and knows little, but he, um, he had all kinds of experiences. He wasn't from the South, but he would, of course, tour the South. And it was always the situation where, you know, he was this big celebrity in many ways, but he had to go through all these insane heroin experiences touring the South. And also beyond that, leaving the South and getting into opportunities, a lot of his opportunities that he landed were because he was actually very good friends with

Frank Sinatra. And Frank Sinatra would basically, like, set him up with gigs. Like, Frank Sinatra would basically get a gig and then would essentially play like two nights of it and then bail and be like, I'm going to have Billy do my back, do the rest of my gigs. Like, this was very much a thing. and my grandmother Frank Snatchel was pretty cool actually he was pretty legit and then my grandmother on that side similar she grew up in like deep Georgia

in like the in full Jim Crow and she pretty much like ran out of Georgia because of all the various like terror and horror that she witnessed in Georgia and she literally left and like never read back like she was like that's a wrap she went to Harlem and was like that was like an end

of the world for her and you know these are again these are my grandparents we're not really pushing back here um you know i'm not i'm not going back that far so i think um i think it is really helpful i think for people to have to sit with and like just be aware of the fact that like this is not a far back history um it's really not far um and it still has real implications and frankly the the main person who's at the center of saying that all this stuff is far back and there's no point in reflecting on it was born during it it's like you know yeah it's like if you're you know if you're 79 years old you were

alive for all of this um so it's yeah that's what's been wild for me is i i had an experience i had a couple experiences of learning that some of the people in my life held some beliefs that I was surprised by and where where I'm headed with that is when all of that was kind of when it was like we're going to take it out of museums we're going to do whatever I had a a couple people like I just don't believe in systemic racism and I'm like tired of it like being forced on me I'm not a racist and I'm like those two things don't have to both exist like you can learn about it you can also not be a racist um and so I've been like just trying to learn more more so that I can have better conversations when I am met with that um and I it was interesting when you said

your grandmother left i'm reading um cast by isabel wilkerson right now and it was it was fascinating because i read junie i think in july so it's been a little bit and then i just happened to be reading this when you reached out um but i was just in that chapter that talks that it's talking about how much they needed it to be that like no upper caste people it which is typically people who could seem white or were white they had to like make the way that they could make it work across the board was they had they were so um they were pushing so hard to make sure that they never had one-on-one relationships with a black or any non-white person because they knew that once you have that one-on-one relationship you're not thinking of them as like a whole race of people that

are terrible so then that chapter was talking about that's why we get pools segregated and white people who think that like if they're in the same water they're going to like die or become disease catch a disease yeah exactly because they realized very soon that yeah exactly if if you spent any time meaningfully with people in that sort of way you were going to develop an understanding that yeah exactly this is not a lower cast of people you're like oh they're legitimately just like me what am i doing and you know there was a lot of cognitive dissonance in the South regardless. Like you certainly see things that I think Violet being a very good example of where you can have people who are simultaneously able to sort of reckon with like

this is a full person who's my friend, but also I get to be in a power position in this situation. And there are all kinds of dynamics that were really, you know, wild that people don't think of in the South of, you know, it was very common for like white children and black children to be allowed to play together, but they were come a point where they weren't allowed to anymore. It wasn't like, it was kind of arbitrary. It just sort of was like, oh, no more. like we're done um and similarly yeah the public pool is one of my favorite facts about Alabama is that Alabama was told during integration they were like hey you got to integrate the pool so Alabama filled in every single public pool in the state I remember

Alabama has like petty cruelty like just yeah and Alabama has no public pools because literally still to this day Alabama's no public pools because they filled them all in with concrete when they got told to integrate them. so that's like the fun fact of Alabama any any and you see this across a bunch of things you start to notice that throughout the south there aren't a lot of parks um there aren't a lot of public open spaces like that and it's because again these were all spaces that they were forced to integrate they would have been forced to integrate and essentially when it came time to do that a lot of these states basically just decided to close public spaces or make public areas inaccessible because they were like we don't want to do it so we're going to instead instead of having you know park where everybody can go no one gets a park it was a lot of that it was like nobody can go to the park um or you got to or you can go to the country club and that's your park right and so if you can get into that then you're good but you can't you know public spaces we're really you know that that's why if you go to the south you know it's like

here in new york i can walk to you know off the park i can go to central park whatever um you're to see all kinds of people you don't have that in so much of this country because literally that's why that's reminding me when I loved sinners and I did an episode about it so good so good I did it an episode actually with one of my friends who when you were talking she's like such a big example to me that I sometimes use with people who are like it's not in the system where like her dad is one of the Little Rock nine and was like the first senior to graduate in Little Rock in a non-segregated school so it's like that's her dad we're not even talking about grandpa that's her dad that's right there like ruby bridges is like oh it's supposed to

i'm like ruby bridges is not that old i know i'm like ruby bridges is not that old like what are we yeah i know anyway but yeah we did an episode about sinners and she it was really cool i mean cool to have her be a part of it because she actually has native american chinese or Asian and black ancestry so like that book or that movie dealt with all of that um anyway way we were talking about at one point about how the movie even shows how racism hurts white people too and they don't think so so like that scene when the uh native americans try to like warn them that like hey this thing is coming like you better not interact with it the dude's already in their house and they're like leave leave like they don't want to hear the message just because

he's not white and they cast him out and they end up getting bitten by a vampire essentially so it's like they even got hurt and that pool thing is making me think of that or the public spaces like one it means everyone lost access to pools but not being able to be in community with more kinds of people is hurtful whether white people want to recognize it or not yeah it's it ends up being armed and it ends up being bad regardless yeah it's like systemic racism is bad is bad for everyone no one is benefiting really other than like I think oligarchs and yeah wealthy people yeah And whether than like literally oligarchs, like literally old-garchs. Greed does well with it, basically.

Yeah, it's good for like, yeah, hardcore class issues. But I think- And in keeping people fighting with each other instead of like- Yeah, it's good for that. But it's not, it doesn't benefit anyone. No one's doing better as a result of it. And I think, you know, there are a lot of examples of that. I think that even when you're thinking about the way in which a lot of, you know,

programs in this country are racially racialized, when in the reality, like, these are programs that help everybody. I think it's something, you know, we're looking at the modern, the currently with like SNAP benefits. And the example where I think that, yeah, and the amount that they're doing, I think that there's a lot of pushes to make it seem like SNAP benefits or this like racialized issue that only certain people are using SNAP benefits and therefore it's totally fine to not have them.

When the reality is that like are white. Yeah. Yes. One, statistically that's the case. And then two, everyone benefits from this thing. It's like it, we're all benefiting. from these different programs and it's like this type of systemic racism and these types of emphasis on it in that way it doesn't it harms everyone that's what i feel like it ends up backhandedly harming

so much more aware of is like as i've learned more about indigenous culture and as well uh just the wide range of what it has meant to be black in america as well i'm like we've missed out on like cultures that actually practice community in a way that like takes care of each other cares about the land thinks about the future like we've we've lost out on like more empathetic overall cultures that's how it's started to make me feel um yeah but the other thing that the other thing that I think is so cool about Junie to bring it back to that is as I was I'm I'm almost done with cast I've been listening to it the last couple weeks and as I was listening to it and like thinking about my questions for you I was like this it's

this is one of my favorite things with books um like the accessibility to empathy for a character that like maybe you would never talk to someone like that maybe you just don't even know what happened in history but that chapter where she was saying like they were so set on making sure you didn't white people didn't emotionally connect one on one because it would make the person an actual person i feel like that is what happens with junie is we connect so much to her that you're like I know there are sociopaths who could read it and not care but I think in general if you're reading this how could you not how could you not find some more empathy for that situation and like maybe believe that history was a little bit rough so I I do love how it creates it kind of

creates the one-on-one relationship in a book yeah and I definitely have really appreciate that and I think you know that's what's really amazing I think about fiction historical fiction specifically is that it is a means of helping us to build a sense of empathy and connection to people that we otherwise couldn't because of the time. And I think, you know, you end up, I think learning a lot more and feeling a lot more because you feel this emotional connection to what's going on. And that is a lot of what I, you know, I hoped to achieve with duty for writing it. It was like I wanted people to be able to develop this different relationship to, you know,

history via a connection with a person because that's really what people connect to we connect to each other we connect to each other's stories more than we connect like facts and statistics and you know all of that information it's like you're only going to get so far with that i think a lot of times people need to feel like there's like a character or something that's going to really resonate with them on that different way to really feel something and feel connected well obviously i loved it everyone needs to go read it or listen to it however however you want to go about that um i do always ask and i know you have lots of recommendations i always ask if there are books that like you would always recommend or anything you've read recently that you

really loved sure i think um i have i mean so many that would be like i i i what's the last thing i read that i was like i absolutely like love love loved that um i'm trying to think of my last really good i think okay well i'll go to other picks that are like books that are in the Junie universe that I think are like the things that inspired me with this book which would be i think jesman wordsing unburied sing is always a really big one i love that book um and i think that that's something that if you enjoy juney you should definitely go read it was definitely an inspiration for me yeah it's like another sort of like southern gothic ghost story situation um i was really inspired by kindred for this book and i think if you haven't read octavia

butler's kindred like got to do that let's have next one i have fallen in love with her that one's the next one It's so kindred is Kindred is so good And it's like sci-fi-ish I was like damn It is it's really good And then I um you know

I love a I'm currently listening to Wuthering Heights Like I'm reading Wuthering Heights For what's maybe like the third time Just because like it's just really melodramatic and it hits Like it's just a great time It's great for fall It's like a classic that really holds up

It's just I love it and I needed to go back and just do weather nights again. So I'm currently listening to that. And then I'm trying to think of like some of the newer books that really, I'm like cataloging what I've read recently in my brain. I read the Hacienda pretty recently and I did really like that. I thought that was like a really fun, good, like solid gothicy ghost story situation. Like I like, I think it had a good, the ghost vibes were strong.

And it did, I think in general, I generally liked it. My favorite one to constantly recommend in the sort of like ghosty, creepy genre right now that I've read is Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. Love that book. It's like floating around on my shelf. I'm like always talking about it. It's like genuinely horror.

Like it is 100% horror, but it's so good. It's basically it's set during, it's set during the, sorry, go ahead. I've seen this cover. It's so good. It's set during the like Argentine dictatorship. of like the 20th century and basically again I think it's a really good example of like

characters to help you access historical period but the general gist is about like it starts off as being a father and son where the mother has just died tragically and the father is bringing the son to the maternal grandparents who just so happened to be the heads of a satanic cult and so like they are the heads of this

like insane satanic like capitalist rich people cult where they're essentially like doing insane stuff in the pursuit of like power and wealth and all of these different things. And it becomes this very like panoramic story that goes across like different time periods and all these things. It's got a lot of like Stephen Kingy kind of references. It's very haunted, very creepy, very messed up. Like just deeply, I really worried for what's going on in the head. Like I finished that book and I was like, I don't know if Mary and Rikas is okay but like whatever's wrong with her I do really like it in this case like this she has used what's wrong and has made it just really hit as a book um it's so good uh I talk

about it all the time because it was just like life ultimately great um and I yeah so I highly highly recommend that if you need something where you're like I want to read something that is going to make me think deeply about like relationships and history and power and capitalism but it's also going to be like messed up like really leading with that okay so i it started to show up on mine because october was like latinics latin america uh heritage or history my heritage um so i had been seeing it everywhere and so i when you first said it it was one were like I haven't completely remembered it where I didn't know the cover when you said it and then I looked it up I was like oh this is on my TVR so I'm going to be bumping that one up it is it's long

like you have to it is like a 500 pager so you have to just sort of like buckle up but it's like highly worth the buckle up and it's also like it's told in sort of like five different segments so it almost feels like you're reading like chunked up stories in that way um I love it it's so good just 10 out of 10 I'm gonna bump that one up definitely where can everyone follow you to stay up today sure so I'm just Aaron Crosby

Eckstein everywhere that I have a thing so I'm mostly I'm currently on like a kind of a social media hiatus because I really have to write my second book and if I have to work on my second book and like I unfortunately am one of the people where like social media like doing anything else don't mix for me so you can come find me on i'm on instagram i'm on ticot i'm there um i might not be posting as much as i used to

but you can find me um so yes if you just look my name up and i will i will you will you look my name up and you'll you'll find her yes well i'll also put the link in the show notes um and i can't wait to see what you read next or what you write next or read too yes yes i yeah i also i mean I kind of know what I'm writing next, but writing a book is it, that's a whole other conversation. I can even imagine. Well, thank you so much. I'm so glad we got to talk.