Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Brain-Tingles of Narrative Non-Fiction with Candice Millard

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

In this episode, Sharon speaks with best-selling author Candice Millard about the history she explores in her new book, River of the Gods. Candice is a writer of literary nonfiction, and uses storytelling as a way to connect readers to the narrative of history. Candice shares some brain-tingling facts with Sharon about the subjects of her books–Winston Churchill and Presidents Roosevelt and Garfield–before talking about her newest book that centers around the search for the source of the Nile River. At its heart, it’s a story about human nature, about the expedition’s triumphs, failures, jealousies, perseverance, and erased heroes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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soft microfiber cushions engineered for comfort, and a range of colours and finishes. Dyson OnTrack. Headphones remastered. Buy from DysonCanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. Hello friends, welcome. So excited that you're here today because I am chatting with one of my favorite authors, Candice Millard. You have probably heard me recommend Destiny of the Republic many times. And Candice has a brand new book out that is full of adventure and intrigue and history called River of the Gods. And I'm so excited to dive into this conversation

with Candice about her writing process and how she chooses stories and where this story even came from in history. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am absolutely delighted to have Candice Millard with me today. She has been one of my favorite writers for a long time. I am a very avid nonfiction reader, and so it's truly a pleasure. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled to meet everybody in your book group. So thank you so much for giving me a chance to talk about my work. I have been a writer of nonfiction for 20 years now. Before that, I was at National Geographic. This is my fourth book of nonfiction, but it's literary nonfiction.

It's storytelling. What I want is to bring people into the story because what I love when I read is to totally get lost in a story, forget where I am, what I'm doing, who I am, and just get sucked into the story. And that's what I try to do with the books that I write. And that's what I hope the experience will be for the people who read this book. Narrative nonfiction, I think is perhaps one of the hardest genres to write well, because there is this tension between, I want to craft a compelling narrative that the reader will be interested in continuing getting lost in, but I also have to be true to the facts. Right. It would be great if I could throw in like an alligator,

but I can't. Where is a mistress when I need one? You know what I mean? Like just the narrative, yeah. The dramatic narrative would benefit sometimes from something that isn't true. And so you have to remain true to the facts. And that, that I think is part of what makes it so incredibly challenging. So what made you choose this genre of work? Well, I think that as you're right, it makes it harder, but it also makes it more amazing, right? And if you read something, if someone had just made it up, you'd be like, man, but it's like, no, that actually happened. You know, Winston Churchill was actually a POW and he escaped from what Winston Churchill and it really happened. And so that to me is what makes it so exciting. And, and it's true that real life is always more interesting and fascinating, I think, than

anything we can just kind of dream up. And so I love digging into it. Like I said, I worked at National Geographic and we did just a lot of deep, deep, deep research. And it's really my favorite part of the process. It takes me about five years, four to six, usually land about five for a book. five years, four to six, usually land about five for a book. And 80% of that time is doing research and organizing that research and then going back and doing more research. And then I spend a lot, a lot of time on outlining. I have a long outline and then I have chapter outlines and I break it

down. So I'm really thinking about how I'm going to tell the story. So you have all this information to work with. And it seems kind of obvious, oh, it should be chronological. But there are a lot of things that you need to tell earlier, or foreshadowing, you know, things that you need to set up moments that are really amazing, or sort of cliffhangers, you want to end on those you end the chapters on those. So all of that really goes into how you tell the story and to the structure of the story. And it's my favorite part. It's kind of like working a puzzle or something. I really enjoy it. It sounds like you have a very methodical approach to writing books where you have all these many layers of outlines. Do you like to diagram sentences? I don't, I don't. I'm not a psychopath. No,

it doesn't go that far. I do. I do love the outline. I really do because it's so much easier. And I learned this really when I was working on my first book because I had so much information, right? It's Theodore Roosevelt. He's in the Amazon. And I worked at National Geographic. So I have all this natural history and you can very quickly just get lost in the leaves, right? There's so much information and you have to be able to step back and look at the story as a whole, because if you're getting lost, your readers are certainly going to get lost and they're not going to stay with you. Understandably, there's so much to read out there, right? So if you do that first, if you figure out how you're going to tell the story, and you can move things around so much more easily in an outline, right? You working on it,

and you're like, actually, that doesn't belong there, you know, I need, and you can just move it around. And then once you know how to tell the story, then when you're writing, you can think about things like pacing, and word choice word choice and rhythm and all of those things that you hope really enrich the story. But first you've got to figure out how to tell it. It makes so much sense, especially in your genre where there are so many complex moving pieces. And like you said, sometimes chronologically this character might not come up in history until two years later, but it's important to know them sooner for storytelling purposes. So I can see what you're saying that it really does help you

write the final draft. Exactly. Exactly. Just give a quick example. In my first book about Theodore Roosevelt, he's in the Amazon and this unmapped river. And there's this guy who ends up murdering someone on the trip. I found out, okay, earlier on he had stolen a knife. And so I want to make sure you, you know, that says, I want you, the reader to worry about this guy. Like, okay, this guy is going to be a problem at some point. And everyone's all bring them up. Oh, there's this guy again, you know, what's going on. So you want that in the back of their head. And so when it happens, you're like, I knew it. I knew it was going to be, you got to structure that, you know, you've got to set it up and that's in the outline. I feel that you want to bring the reader. You want

them to be like the unseen narrator of like, I know that person is going to come back. That night is going to mean something. Right, right, right. That's going to be a problem. Danger. Yes. Yes. I feel that. Will you walk me through all four of your books? I definitely want to talk about your newest book. I'm super excited about it, but let's talk about your very first writing project, which you just mentioned about Teddy Roosevelt. Right. It's called The River of Doubt.

And it's about this expedition that Theodore Roosevelt took in 1914. So this is after he lost the election in 1912. He had been president and he thought he wasn't going to try again. And he was like, I can't stand it. He tries again and he loses. And he's shocked, right? I'm Theodore Roosevelt. I don't lose. So he's also this incredible naturalist. So he has this opportunity to go to South America

and go on like a collecting trip. But while he's there, they're like, look, we found the headwaters of this river. Nobody knows where it is. And he's not at all prepared, not remotely prepared, but he's Theodore Roosevelt. So he's like, of course I'm going to do that, right? And so it's just this incredible, incredible journey. And three men die on it. Roosevelt nearly takes his own life. But when they come out at the end, they end up mapping this river that wasn't on any map of the world. It's nearly a thousand miles long. It's a very, very important river in the Amazon. So that's that book. And then I wrote a book called Destiny of the Republic, which is the assassination about President Garfield. And I remember when I gave the proposal to my editor, he was expecting another like venture, right? And he was like, Oh, Garfield,

okay. But God bless him. He let me try. I just really fell in love with the story. You know, I wanted another story that had a lot of science. So I was researching Alexander Graham Bell and I just stumbled upon this story that he had tried to save Garfield's life when Garfield was shot. And I wondered why. And so I started researching Garfield. I'm like, oh my God, he was extraordinary. He was brilliant and brave and decent and kind. And this was a tremendous tragedy to the country, a tremendous loss. And he never should have died. It was his doctors who ended up killing him. So this was a story, this is still the story that's closest to my heart. Then my last or most recent book was

called Hero of the Empire. And it's about Winston Churchill when he was a young man and he was a journalist covering the Boer War in South Africa. And he was captured and he was taken to POW camp and he escaped by himself. He didn't have a map, a weapon. He didn't speak the language. He didn't have any food. And he made it across almost 300 miles of enemy territory and became this national hero. And that was what launched his political career. My word for like, I did not know that. That is so interesting. You know what I'm talking about? I did not know that. Yes. Like a Teddy Roosevelt brain tingle would be like, well, I lost the nomination of my party.

And so I'm going to start my own party. I'm going to try to run. I'm going to give a speech despite having been shot. I'm going to continue to demonstrate my own invincibility. Right, right, right, right. Can you give us a brain tangle about Winston Churchill, President Garfield, or President Roosevelt that people would enjoy hearing? Well, let me talk about Garfield a little bit since I love him so much and since he's

so little known. And like I said, he was really brilliant. And when I say brilliant, I mean mind-blowingly brilliant. So he was incredibly poor. So he was our last president born in a log cabin. His father died before he was two. He didn't have shoes until he was four years old growing up in Ohio. So his mother and his brother somehow scraped enough money together, just like with $17 to send him to college. So his first year of college, he was a carpenter and a janitor to try to pay the tuition. He was so brilliant that by his second year of college, while he was still a sophomore in college, they made him a professor of mathematics, ancient languages, and literature.

And so he was just like- That's absurd. It's absurd. No, it's ridiculous. So by the time he's 26, he's the president of the university. He knew the entire need by heart in Latin. While he was in Congress, I mean, picture any other member of Congress. He wrote an original theorem, original proof of the Pythagorean theorem while he was in Congress so he was just like crazy crazy brilliant but he also he had a heart to match his mind he hid a runaway slave he gave this incredibly moving and effective speech on the floor of Congress for black suffrage and he gave his inaugural address Frederick Douglass was standing with him. So he meant so much to so many people. He was really just gave so much promise and hope to, to our young country at that time.

Completely credit you with my interest in president Garfield, just like your editor was like, you know like he kind of died early he didn't have a beard about him you know like is he the same as harding right oh like i know i still i still have people say oh i love your book on grover cleveland yes yes no but yeah yeah yeah we americans tend to be real good about who was the president early on yeah yeah yeah uh we know about washington and jefferson then maybe after thomas jefferson it kind of the knowledge drops off picks back up again lincoln with abraham lincoln yeah yeah yeah and then we can get into like er i don't know and then, they will pick back up again in the 70s. Yeah. Maybe the 60s. And what's interesting to me about Theodore Roosevelt, so everybody knows and loves Theodore Roosevelt, but he didn't have, and he complained about this. He didn't have like that dramatic

moment, right? He didn't have the big war. He didn't have the great depression, anything like that to define him. It's solely, I think, on the basis of this larger than life personality that we remember him so well. It's really interesting, but you're so right about that. I mean, even I'm like, oh, what? Yeah. There are a lot of those, including Grover Cleveland. Yes. Yes. It's so true that what you said earlier about how so much of history is absolutely stranger than fiction if you tried to include it in a fiction work it wouldn't buy it or would be like that is bs no one that's exactly no one's gonna believe in he wasn't shot during a speech and lived come Come on.

Or like with Garfield, like Alexander Graham Bell came to help him. Sure. No. Yeah, not buying it. Oh, they kept sticking their fingers in the bullet hole wound? That's too gory. Amazon's Black Friday week starts November 21st with new deals added every day. Save on home goods to deck their halls, toys to stuff their stockings, and fashion like slippers to mistle their toes.

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ProAction sets standards of excellence. That's what's behind the Blue Cow logo. Dairy Farmers of Canada. Can you give us a very brief synopsis of your new book, River of the Gods? Yeah, so this is an epic journey to solve one of the greatest mysteries in the history of human exploration, the search for the source of the now. But really, it's about human nature, which, you know, while everything else around us changes, this never changes. So it's about genius and mediocrity. It's about courage and cowardice, ambition and envy. It's about friendship and betrayal. And it's all played out in the staggering beauty of East

Africa and in the hallowed halls of the Royal Geographical Society in 19th century England. Everyone in Europe was fascinated with Rome and Greece, and they taught their children and priests and teachers about the languages and the history. And then they discovered the Rosetta Stone in the late 18th century and Rosetta Egypt, right? And so then everything shifted. Here's this richer and older civilization and running through it is this longest and most storied river in the world, the Nile. We know that it empties into the Mediterranean Sea, but we don't know where it starts. And so it's this incredible mystery that everyone, everyone is trying to solve. Why did it matter to them?

Who cares where it started? I know that's what a lot of Americans are going to think. It doesn't matter. Well, you know, the Nile is obviously hugely important. So most of Egypt is desert, right? So 95% of it, most of the people live just along the Nile River. And when it floods, it can destroy everything. And when it's too shallow, you don't get enough to eat. Right. So it's hugely, hugely important. And so, I mean, it's also human nature.

We want to know. We want to understand where does it come from and what more can it tell us? I mean, we thought of Egypt at that time. And a lot of times, and in many cases, we still do as this font of human knowledge that where we all came from, we all came from Africa, we're all human understanding. So this symbolizes that. But the hard thing was nobody could get to it. They thought, okay, we will ascend the river by going south, right? But they hit this big swamp again and again and again. This is over millennia where they tried to get to it and they couldn't reach it. And it wasn't until the 19th century when they had these German missionary explorers who were working in East Africa. And they had this idea that there's a great inland lake. And the Royal Geographical Society said,

you know, no, we need to start below the equator, Zanzibar, go across to East Africa and go interior. So head west and try to find it that way instead of trying to go south. So interesting. What about this story was so compelling to you? And also, how did you find it? always going off on these amazing adventures and coming back with these crazy stories. And I was able to work on just so many different things. My husband used to say, this is not a job. So I heard the story and what really drew me to it, like I said, it's the story of these two men

who were complete opposites. So there's Richard Francis Burton, right? Who was this extraordinarily skilled and accomplished explorer, writer, linguist. He spoke more than 25 languages plus another 15 dialects. But he was always an outsider. He was really British in name only. He had been raised in Europe, moving from country to country, picking up languages and cultures. He looked different. He had really black hair and black eyes.

different. He had really black hair and black, black eyes. Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula, met Burton before he wrote Dracula and was mesmerized by his eyes and his teeth. He described his teeth as like gleaming daggers. So they think he could have been the inspiration for Dracula. So he was just this really, and so he was always treated with kind of suspicion and distrust, even though he was so accomplished. And then there's this guy, John Hanning Speak, who is what everyone in England imagines a hero to be, right? So he's thin, and he's blonde, and he was raised in the aristocracy, and he's a lieutenant in the British Army, and he loves to hunt. And so these two men are so very, very different and they meet and Burton allows Speak to come with him on this expedition. And it starts out as a friendship, a partnership, but Speak becomes so envious of Burton and resentful of Burton. But it's unspoken,

simmering hatred that just gets deeper and deeper. And we've all seen this. Again, this is human nature. You've seen this play out. You've got the genius and the guy who's just kind of mediocre and is very, very jealous. And so what happens, the dynamic between those two men really fascinated me. And then when I started researching it, then found Sidi Mubarak Bombay and the description of his portion of the story I was like oh and this is where it gets good right I've listened to European men fight before exactly exactly we're all like and that's when I was at National Geographic that's what it was it was these European men going and discovering, right? But you're like, obviously people have been living there for many, many, many years, thousands

of years and know it well, right? But it just, the outside world didn't know it. And so Burton and Speak, they go to East Africa and they meet Sidi Mubarak Mbe. And Sidi Mubarak Mbe was a formerly enslaved manidi Mubarak Mbembe was a formerly enslaved man. He had been kidnapped as a child from his village in East Africa, taken to India where he was enslaved for 20 years. When the man who owned him died, he was freed, he came back. And he becomes, in many ways, the heart of this expedition.

And really, I mean, the extraordinary thing is without him and without the many African porters and guides and translators, none of these expeditions would have happened anywhere in the world. And so that was really important to me to tell their story. But Bombay is especially incredible because he was not only with Burton and Speak on this expedition, he was with Speak when he went to the Nyanza, which ends up being the source of the Nile, what we now know as Lake Victoria. Speak comes back later with a guy named Grant. They confirm it with Bombay again. Then Bombay, you know, Henry Morton Stanley, how he found David Livingston. We've all heard that famous Dr.

Livingston, I presume. That was Bombay. Bombay took him back to Lake Kanaka to find David Livingston. And then Bombay went with a guy named Bernie Levitt Cameron, and they became the first to cross the entire continent from sea to sea, east to west. So I don't know if there's anybody else who's contributed more to mapping, certainly East Africa, but to some extent, the entire continent than Sidi Mubarak, Bombay. And he's been completely forgotten. Yes. I love that you uncovered this little hidden piece of history and that you are bringing these hidden pieces back to light because it makes the story so much richer and it makes all of

our experiences so much richer to know the truth of how these things actually happened we tend to just believe it was like well the explorers discovered it that has been our frame of like for an epic story on another, two other continents? What does it look like? Well, again, that is the best part of the job. I mean, I, I have to admit that sometimes there are a lot of things that factor into when I choose a topic, but one of them is where do I get to go to do the research? So the early research was in the UK. So I was in Scotland at the National Library in Edinburgh. I was all around London. The Royal Geographical Society has amazing archives, the British Library,

the Asiatic Society. But then obviously the part that I was really looking forward to was going to East Africa. And I had been to East Africa when I was working at National Geographic. I did a story on Ethiopia, on the kingdom of Aksum. And so I was planning it for a long time. We were talking about, I have three kids. I have to have my parents come and stay with us. And so it was really complicated finding the right time. Well, it just so happened that the time I chose was February and March of 2020. So yes, exactly. So I don't know. It's February. It's like COVID's like obviously in China, a little bit in Italy and Iran, but it's not really a big thing here yet. And so I've been planning this forever. And so I go and I went to Kenya and then Zanzibar, Tanzania and Uganda. When I was a kid,

I used to think of Zanzibar as like one of those things like, is that really real? You know, you think of like the magical kingdom of Zanzibar. It is just as magical as you can imagine. It's like every color, every flavor, every smell, every sound. It's just this gorgeous, amazing place. So, and that's where so many of these European expeditions began. And then I went into East Africa. I went to Lake Tanganyika, which is incredibly huge. And that's where Burton thought was the source of the Nile. It was really, it was an epic research trip. So when you are heading to East Africa, what do you have to plan in advance versus what do you let play out when you arrive? So you usually hire someone you call a fixer, somebody who is local and knows people, can introduce you

to people, can help you find archives, can take you to places that maybe you don't even know you want to go to, you know, and they're always these really, really extraordinary people. Interestingly, when I had been in Ethiopia years earlier, I met Donald Johanson, who's like the world-renowned paleoanthropologist who found Lucy. And we've stayed in touch all these years. And so I asked him, I was like, hey, do you happen to know anybody? And he said, absolutely. You need to meet this guy, Don Young. Don grew up in Nebraska. He's a big blonde Nebraskan farm boy. But when he was very young, early 20s, he went to East Africa and he has lived there ever since. He's also an incredible Richard Burton expert, as it just turns out. I can ahead of time, because you think you're okay, I had almost a month. And that seems like a long time, but it's really not, especially when you're

crossing vast distances, and things can go wrong. Or like, sometimes you don't know all the local holidays, right? So something can be clear, you think, okay, I'm going to go to this museum this day or this archive, but maybe it's closed. And it a Tuesday and you're like, why? I'm like, oh, of course it's this holiday. And so you really do have to think about it as much as you can ahead of time, because it's also very, very expensive and very difficult and it's hard to be away from home. So to make the most of it, it takes many, many months of planning. Well, once you get back and you begin going through your research and let's say you're going to sort through 2000 pictures that have, you know, I don't know the exact number of pictures, but I assume it's thousands of pictures that you have to go through to sort through. What is your

process like then? Do you have a research assistant that helps you categorize these things? Do you digitize them in some other way? What happens then? So I, you know, again, I'm very old school because I'm very old. So I, I've thought about trying like, you know, some kind of software or something, but I kind of have my process and I like my process. And it's sort of like with anything you want to do well, there really aren't any shortcuts, right? And so it takes me a long time. So yeah, I'll, I print everything out and then I read it and I annotate it and I highlight it. So I do keep it obviously digitally, but I want to have those physical things. I want to interact with it physically because that's when I really get to know the story, right? I really understand it. And then, this takes forever.

And I always curse myself, but it really helps is that then I start making word files for each person or in each event. And I have my chronology, but within each person, I mean, there are like many dozens of pages long because like, so for instance, Burton, I'm going to talk about what he looks like. Right. And all the times I've seen somebody say, you know, Oh, he had these black mesmerizing eyes or, you know, the, the teeth, like a bag or whatever. I write, I type it in and I put where I found it because the worst thing, and this has happened to me is you work on this for years, right? This is early in the process. I'm ready to write. I'm like, where did I find that?

You know, I see it or I remember it, but I have no idea. It could be in any of these letters or diaries or books. Or so I do that form future Candice. I always write down exactly where I can find it. And again, it takes forever. But when I'm writing, if I want, you know, it's like any, you know, any class, any writing class, when you're like, you make a statement, and then you support it. So if I'm going to say something about somebody, Winston Churchill, he's incredibly arrogant. You've got to support that, right? And you've got to give quotes and stuff I can go go through and I got all this that I can choose from. So it's an investment that you make for the future. It's very, very tedious, but I really, really get to know the story that way.

I can totally see that. And it also, I would imagine making those annotations for future Candice allows you to then refresh your memory in an expeditious way. You're like, okay, what exactly was his description again? And maybe you want to write a direct quote. I do. It makes it easy to find it in the future. Because it's very dangerous if you don't, as you know. I mean, if you think you remember it accurately and nine times out of 10, you are wrong. So you go back and you're like, oh, actually that's not going to work at all. Or it's even better than I thought. One of the things I love about your work and about just narrative nonfiction in general is that like, I didn't hardly know anything about James Scarfield. He was president for such a short time, you know?

Yes. Tell everybody why they might be interested in this book. Even if they're like, I don't know if I am that interested in finding the source of denial, even if that is their attitude, what might make them interested in this book? Well, like I said, I mean, it's human nature. And that's what I found about all the books I'm working on, that it's not a person's triumphant moments, right? When they're doing really well, that you really get to know their character. It's when they're struggling, when they're dying, when they're scared, when they're grieving, and there are these deep, deep emotions that we can

all connect to, right? And we can all understand. And you absolutely see that in this growing, again, there's this like like Richard Burton was this incredible genius like somebody you only see once in a few hundred years right he was this outsider and he wasn't trusted and he ends up being completely overshadowed by this kind of nobody and it's so frustrating and it's angered you and but they're all these also these twists and turns and I mean like at one point speak is kidnapped and stabbed 11 times Burton as a javelin thrust through his jaw from cheek to cheek he's impaled and so and you still see his the rest of his life he has this amazing jagged scar down which makes him seem even darker and more mysterious so these like unbelievable things

happen to them again and again and again. And you're always like, how are they going to survive? Are they going to survive? And so you turn the page to find out hopefully. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes when I read history, the adversity that people overcome is always so, it's so ridiculous to me because I complain about my slow internet at my house. I know. You know what I mean? This is not my preferred brand of coffee. It's a little nippy today. Shouldn't be more. It's spring. I know. Why is it only 39 degrees? 39 degrees. You know, yes. My relative life of comfort and my perspective of my world should be the way I order it. You know what I mean? Like the right coffee, the right temperature, the right environment, the right speed of internet. Yes. Yeah, exactly. It should be.

And then you read about these people have no control and are struggling and it doesn't make you a kind of appreciate what you have, but it's just fascinating. You can have this adventure while sipping your coffee in your lovely living room. That's right. That's right. But I, but reading those kinds of stories, when I read them again, it gives me those brain tingles where I'm like, what? Yeah, exactly. Yes. That's what I know.

That's why I always tell my husband, I want a book where I'm constantly like, oh my God, listen to this. Stop whatever you're doing. Listen, can you believe it? Yeah. Yeah. That's the best. Yeah, totally.

I completely relate to that. Sometimes to the annoyance of my family where they're like, okay, Sharon. Yeah. That's fine fascinating I love to read those kind of things and I love to share those kinds of facts with other people and then I want them to be as excited as I am about yeah I know that thing same same yeah I know it's very frustrating if they're not like, shut up. You're kidding me. They're just like, huh? Totally. That's not okay. I need friends and family that are like as excited about weird, but true things. Yes. Interesting. Very interesting. So if you love brain tingles, like I do, you will absolutely love Candace's work. You will love River of the Gods. Even if you're like, I don't know if I care about Egypt. Oh, but you will, you will. So what day does it come out?

Candace? May 17th. It's so exciting. And I chose, chose this book for my book club. I have a book club that happens that opens for registration three times a year. And this is the first book we are reading this summer. And my book club group will get to meet with you separately. And it, we get to ask you all of our questions. So thank you for being willing to do that. Oh, it's my great pleasure. I can't wait. It's so fun. Oh, okay. And so where can be, obviously people can buy river of the gods, wherever books are sold, pre-order it. If you're listening to this before May 17th, definitely pre-order it. So we'll arrive at your house on May 17th. That's the beauty of pre-orders is that they ship them actually before the release date. So it arrives on the release date. So satisfying. Yes. Very satisfying. Yes. And are you going to do any

kind of an in-person book tour or where can people find more information if they want to read more about you and your research and your writing? Yes. So I have a website, candicemillard.com, but yes, I am going to do a fairly limited book club, but I'm going to be in Washington, DC. I'm going to be in New York, going to be in Dallas, I think, Ohio, here in Kansas, several places, Chicago. So yeah, it's going to be really fun. So all of that will be on my website. And also if you would like a signed copy, my hometown indie bookstore, Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas is taking orders for signed copies and I will personalize them as well too, if you would like that. Oh, oh, that's a great idea. And you would just find Rainy Day Books.

That's right. On the web. In Kansas. Yeah. Look up Rainy Day Books, Kansas, and you'll find it. It's been, you would love it. This woman has owned it, Vivian Jennings, for 40 years, I think. And it's just been a mainstay of our communities.

We're really, really lucky to have it and her. Don't you love a good indie bookstore? There's just nothing like it. Nothing better. I know. So well curated. Everything is good. It's a different, completely different vibe than walking into a big chain bookstore, which of course have their place. Yes. And I love them too. Yes. For sure. You know that a person has handpicked every single book in that store. Exactly. I love it. Yes. I do too. I do too. Well, thank you so much, Candice. The book again is River of the Gods. It comes out May 17th. You should pre-order it or snag it as soon as you hear this and you will love getting acquainted. If you're not already,

I love getting acquainted with Candice's work. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.