The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Scarlet Carnation: A Novel by Laila Ibrahim

Episode Date: April 24, 2022

Scarlet Carnation: A Novel by Laila Ibrahim In an early twentieth-century America roiling with racial injustice, class divides, and WWI, two women fight for their dreams in a galvanizing novel by the bestselling author of Golden Poppies. 1915. May and Naomi are extended family, their grandmothers’ lives inseparably entwined on a Virginia plantation in the volatile time leading up to the Civil War. For both women, the twentieth century promises social transformation and equal opportunity. May, a young white woman, is on the brink of achieving the independent life she’s dreamed of since childhood. Naomi, a nurse, mother, and leader of the NAACP, has fulfilled her own dearest desire: buying a home for her family. But they both are about to learn that dreams can be destroyed in an instant. May’s future is upended, and she is forced to rely once again on her mother. Meanwhile, the white-majority neighborhood into which Naomi has moved is organizing against her while her sons are away fighting for their country. In the tumult of a changing nation, these two women―whose grandmothers survived the Civil War―support each other’s quest for liberation and dignity. Both find the strength to confront injustice and the faith to thrive on their chosen paths.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly, certainly appreciate you guys being on the show. Thanks for tuning in. Remember, be sure to put your arm around your friend, neighbor, relative, and say to them, look in their eyes deeply and say with as much warmness, affection, and empathy as you possibly can. People can tell I've set something up here. Tell them that, hey, have you heard about our wonderful family that we have,

the Chris Foss Show Podcast family, the family that loves you but doesn't judge you. Grab your phone and subscribe to the show. Tell them to subscribe to iTunes. And if that doesn't work, say or else. No, I'm just kidding. Don't do that. Please don't do that. I don't want you to end up like Mike Tyson on a plane today.

If you're watching this 10 years from now, you can Google what that means. Anyway, guys, go to Goodreads.com where it says Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button on YouTube.com for it says Chris Voss. And also see our big group on linkedin the 122 000 group on linkedin and uh also our linkedin newsletter that thing is killing it over there linkedin is so hot right now yeah that's my best zoolander sorry so we're excited to announce my new book is coming out it's called beacons of leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories,

lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Anyway, guys, we have another amazing author on the show today we have with us leah leila leila did i get that right just ignore the a ignore the a ebrium did i get that all right leila ibrahim but i've heard it all ebrium And I had that written out too.

That's really funny that I still did not get that right phonetically. She is on the show with us today. She's a multi-book author and she is the author of Scarlet Carnation, a novel that just came out April 1st, 2022. I doubt it's an April Fool's joke. It really did come out. She has her book out. She's going to be talking to us about some of her stuff that she's done and how

she's done it. She is the best-selling author of Golden Poppy's Paper Wife, Mustard Seed, and Yellow Crocus. She spent much of her career as a preschool teacher, director, a birth doula. I'm not sure I got that pronounced right. You did pronounce that right. Did I? You're going to have to tell us what that is when I get done here. And a religious educator. That work coupled with her education, developmental psychology, and attachment theory provided ample fodder for her novels. She is a devout Uterian Universalist determined to do her part to add a little bit more love and justice to her beautiful, heartbreaking world. She lives with her wonderful wife, Rinda, and two other families in a small co-housing community in Berkeley, California. Her young adult children are her pride and joy. Well, I hope so.

It would be funny if you had that in the bio. I thought I was embarrassed by them. I'm embarrassed by them? I think my mom would have that in her bio. She is working full-time as a novelist. When she isn't writing, she likes to take walks with friends, do jigsaw puzzles. Those are fun. Play games, work in the garden, travel, cook, and eat all kinds of delicious food. Welcome to the show. How are you? Thank you. I'm humbled by your, well,

yeah, your tagline, all your stuff. I'm like, wow, I'm that smart. I'm going to blow people's brains away. Well, yeah. So you've got quite the ramp that we've put on you for pressure. I'm that smart I'm going to blow people's brains away. Well, yeah. So you've got quite the ramp that we've put on you for pressure. I'm just the idiot who shows up and hosts the show, but we have all the smart people on the show to come tell us all the good stuff. So give us your.com so that people can find you on the interwebs and to know you better. LilaIbrahim.com, so that's pretty easy, and on Facebook. Just if you Google Lila Ibrahim, you'll find me. I pop up. I'm one of the first Lila Ibrahims there. There's also a

doctor, Lila Ibrahim, who does lots of interesting things. You know what you do when people share your Google name? You hire hitmen. No, I'm just kidding. Don't do that, folks. Lawyers say I can't say that anymore after the judge says I can't do that anymore. Anyway, guys, so what motivated you want to write this book? This is your, how many in a series? This is my sixth novel and it's my fourth in the Yellow Crocus series, or I call them companion novels. So yeah, Yellow Crocus is what called me to be a writer. Like that story just like poof came into me and I couldn't stop thinking about it. And when I was 40, I decided I would start, I sort of thought of it when I was 33 and I started writing it when I was 40 and I didn't know how to write. And then it, I ended up self-publishing it and it got picked up by a large publisher. They wanted to know what else I had and they didn't want my second novel,

but they said, you know, are you interested in doing anything else? And I said, well, I'd do a sequel to Yellow Crocus. And they said, okay. So I did that sequel. And then when I was done writing that sequel, I had written a couple other books that were not in the series. And I thought, I kind of, you know, I think it was probably around 2016, 2017, 2018. And the Black Lives Matter movement was very large. And it's something, you know, racial race in america has always fascinated with me and the racial the caste system baked into the united states was always fascinating to me and like how the very small mechanisms of that and how they impact people in a very specific way and so i just thought wow it would be really interesting to take these characters and the descendants of these characters and just revisit these same questions every 20 years or so to see how we got to here.

And my children went to this elementary school called Malcolm X in Berkeley is one of those most exceptionally class and race diverse communities probably that could exist and and thinking about like i learned so much from those children i learned so much from those families about both sides right there's owning class there's undocumented immigrants like all in a classroom together and it's like how do we get here in this moment like in this classroom in this neighborhood so so i just i think it i just it struck me, like I think I'm going to revisit all these characters about every 20 years and see how their lives have evolved in this culture.

It definitely has been an interesting 450 years in this bloody country. So I know it was a London, England thing. Maybe it's because we left there. I think that's where that joke came from. I don't know what that means. So real quickly, though, what is a birth doula? I'm probably, I need to know what that is now.

I can't. Yeah, you said it exactly right. It's a birth doula. And it's a woman who provides, or it could be a man, but it's mostly women who provide physical, emotional, and informational support to women and their partners before, during, and after birth. So it's not the medical side. So like a midwife or a doctor does the medical side, but during actual delivery, like the moment a baby's being born, they have to ignore the birthing mother practically, right? Because they're suddenly taking care of this baby, right right like what's important is what's going on between this woman's legs not what's going on between you know not that they it's

just there's a lot going on in the room and so i'm the companion that can be there in their house with them help them transfer to the hospital be at the hospital the whole time in today's society like you don't have your mom or your cousin or your aunt as your companion during labor. So birth doulas are your companion during labor. Yeah. I tried being a birth doula once, but I kept going when they were giving birth and the legs are in the stirrups and it was coming out. I kept yelling, hike, hike, hike, hike. And they fired me within a week. Yeah. Didn't work out for me, but it's an interesting business, but evidently I was doing it wrong.

I'm surprised you were hired, but you know, that's, I was surprised. Well, they were, I think somebody, I don't know.

I don't have a joke for that, but so I just pictured it in my mind. So tell us about tease out to us. Of course, can't tell us the, you know, all the details of this, because the,

this is different than a non or nonfiction authors because, you know, the nonfiction can't tell us all the details of this because this is different than our nonfiction authors because the nonfiction authors can tell us what happens. Tease us out some of the different points or different aspects of the story that you think are fun. Yeah. So what I like to do is start with my main characters and I kind of know who my main characters are and then I like to research history. So my two main characters in this one are May, who's a white woman, who's the grand granddaughter of the woman in Yellow Crocus, who was the daughter of the slave owners. And then Naomi is the granddaughter of Maddie, who is the enslaved woman who was brought into the house to take care of Lisbeth. So these are two families that have been entwined since Virginia, and they're now in Oakland, California. It's 1915. And so they're

connected to each other, but they're like second cousins. They're kind of close, but really it's their grandmothers who are very close, and their are sort of close and they kind of know each other. May thinks she's a modern, liberated woman who has, she's enamored with the birth control movement and with Margaret Sanger and women's liberation and making a great life for herself. And Naomi is wanting her children to have as much freedom as they possibly can as she's seeing kind of the she's one of the people that's involved in the NAACP in Northern California and wanting to ensure that the the rights that her children have will be maintained in particular around housing and housing segregation is one of the main focuses of the book. And then there's the war and all. So that starts, World War I is coming into it.

The eugenics movement is an important part of the novel. My young older daughter has mild cerebral palsy, and she's someone who had she been born before the ADA would have probably had a very different life than the life she has now. And so this was a time period when they started institutionalizing people who were born physically different and physically disabled. So, and like the bedfellows of the eugenics movement, the birth control movement, and the public health movement were all kind of compelling to me. Yeah, during this time period. There you go.

There you go. What are your favorite characters in the book or the favorite character you maybe have? Interesting that you say that. I think, you know, I'm still so fond of Lisbeth. So I think Lisbeth is still a very, you know, and she's now like this grandmother and she's very maternal, very, very wise and very calm and very like, you know, listen to your own heart. Listen to your still small voice, as we say in my religious tradition, like go inside and listen for what it is that you really need to do. And don't listen to all the noise of the society around you or the people around you to know what's the right thing for you to do. That's true. If you trust society, especially if you go on Twitter, you might have a hard time.

Sorry, that's my Twitter joke. That's true. If you trust society, especially if you go on Twitter, you might have a hard time figuring out what to do. Sorry, that's my Twitter joke. So you don't want to follow society. So that makes sense. Have you been on Twitter lately? You don't want to use that for any sort of society. No, you do not. But thankfully, they didn't have that back then.

So that's probably good. Well, yeah, they did and they didn't, right? Yeah. Yeah. But I'm sure they had some bad society stuff going on. Always. I mean, that's one of my main themes. Like, it's just always going on, right? You think, oh, like, that we'll be over this.

We'll, like, we'll cross this hurdle and then we don't have to deal with this stuff. And it's like, no, we always have to deal with this stuff. It's always going to come up. The one thing man can learn from his history is man never learns from his history. It's really annoying.

We should get over it. You know, it's interesting to me. You mentioned, you know, Malcolm X and a few things earlier. James Baldwin, you can literally take everything James Baldwin said in the 50s and 60s and just reprint it now. And it's like nothing's changed. And of course, he didn't think things were going to change either.

He hoped things were going to change, but it's kind of interesting. So is there a reason you picked her as your favorite character? Is there something that reminds you of yourself in the character or other people? What kind of made you mix that one your favorite? Yeah. You know, I think it used to be Maddie was my favorite character because I wanted to be like her. And now I think, okay, now Elizabeth is my character because that's who I want to be able to have faith in the face of hard things and have enough context to realize like you can just do what you can do. It doesn't mean you give up, right? The fact that

you can't fix it all, it doesn't mean you get to give up. So it's that right balance, right? It's that right sense of what's yours to do and what's not yours to do. So I think those characters have figured it out. Yeah. There's only so much you can do, but I mean, that's probably what a lot of people find in lessons like novels and stories is hope and, and,

you know, being able to learn stuff from stories and everything else. What are some, what are some things that you, you, you find with your readers that they really love about your books? What are some of the feedback they give you that they really find, make your books appeal to them and bind to them, if you will? Yeah, I think so. All my books have birth scenes, like pretty intense birth scenes.

And most- Is there a guy there that says hike, hike, hike all the time? I'm sorry. We kicked him out. We kicked him out of the room. Definitely. Yeah, yeah. You're out of the room. Yeah. That's a joke. I think people really appreciate that. And it's one of those things that's not in novels a lot, birth scenes, which seems a little crazy

to me, but it's not. That seems like a normal thing because it's... I'm sorry I heard you. Before I wrote Yellow Crocus, I had read one birth scene in the novel in my entire life. And I was like, I'm going to have a birth scene in there. That was the best scene ever. It's like a battle. It's like a little battle thing. And you know, how many battles have I read about with broad swords and bows and stuff? So there's always

that. And then there's a lot of, of faith, but it's a very personal faith. It's about someone's kind of like turning inward and like the prayer or the thinking inward of what, what it is that I want or what will give me strength or what will give me hope in the face of hard times. So people talk about that a lot, complicated mother-child relationships. We've people talk about that. And then the history, like I, I do find these horrible nuggets of history where you think really that can't be true, but it is. And it's like,

it's like just the mechanisms of systemic oppression and how they're codified in a city, in a state, in a neighborhood. That's what I look for. Yeah. It's, it's,

it's interesting how all that's built into our society. I mean, racist, systematic racism is so huge. It's, it's funny, but no, it's it's it's interesting how all that's built into our society i mean racist systematic racism is so huge it's it's funny but no it's birth is a battle i mean i was 10.9 pounds so when i came out of birth so it was there was a battle that ensued evidently and my father's hated me ever since but there's that father came around eventually well i mean she really didn't have a choice i guess when it came down to it you know there's a certain point where it's like get this thing the hell out of me and uh but no that's she really didn't have a choice, I guess, when it came down to it. You know, there's a certain point where it's like, get this thing the hell out of me. And, but no, that's interesting. I didn't know most books that, you know, people don't write about are birthings.

I mean, why is that? That seems kind of, I mean, it's a human experience of normalcy. I mean, I don't know. What I think is, and you know, so what I think is interesting about the time we're living in now is like, even when I wrote Yellow Crook, so that was in the early 2000s, there were these gatekeepers in the publishing industry who literally said to me, like, nobody wants to read this story. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Yellow Crook has sold a million copies. And like, but I had dozens of people say to me, nobody wants to read this story. And I think they believed it or that it's been written. And I'm like, how many fantasy books have been written? How many war

espionage books have been written? What do you mean? This book's been written. And I would ask them and they couldn't really name that book. And so I think they're like the gatekeepers to the publishing industry were, you know, older men for decades. And they're like, who wants to read a birth scene? Like, why would anybody want to read a birth scene? I would think it would be really appealing to women. To women. Yes. But they, they weren't, you know, it's part of why the self-publishing has like, you know, blown open and what's out there has been blown open.

And now that those gatekeepers straight white men aren't aren't the only ones deciding what we get to read. Yeah. I mean, to me, it seems literally normal. Like, it's like, eh, people. I mean, they write about everything else that happens with normal people in a book. Yeah. And, you know, my mom went through an adventure having birth. I saw her with her fourth birth just before, I think a month before giving birth.

She passed the kidney stone, and that was hell and high water, on top of being nine months pregnant. And, of course, there were complications after the birth. I mean, it's a whole part of life experience. What are some other teasers from your book that we can tease out to readers, maybe any cliffhangers or any suspense things that maybe they find interesting. Well, one thing that was really interesting to me as I was researching the book is

in the, so I was researching it in the fall of 2019 and I saw images from market street in San Francisco of people celebrating the end of world war one. And guess what they were wearing? Face masks. I had never seen an image of people wearing face masks celebrating the end of World War I. I was like, how did I not put that together?

And part of how I didn't put it together is that in New York and in Chicago, which is where I'd seen all the images from, they weren't having a big flu bout in that moment. It didn I'd seen all the images from, they weren't having a big flu bout in that moment. It didn't happen everywhere at the same time, right? It was a much more whack-a-mole thing because there wasn't flight, air travel, right? So the flu, the 1918 flu is not a huge part of my novel, but it's definitely in there at the end. And it was certainly very interesting, both researching it it researching the same arguments around whether you should mask or not mask up whether or not

vaccines should be required whether or not a vaccine would even work like all that was in the newspapers so that was super interesting and i knew after i researched the novel and i saw that scene i was like i think that's going to to be one of my closing scenes of this book. There you go. Is, you know, mass revelers in, yeah. So that was a very fun thing to research. I mean, it's interesting how you just reminded me of that whole flu pandemic. I mean, hopefully we don't have, hopefully it's another 100 years before we have another one. Let's put it that way because I'm pretty sure I won't be around.

But I really wouldn't want to wish that on the future. So there's that too as well. So this sounds like a really fun book. Readers can, of course, experience in a lot of different formats. Anything more you want to tease out of the book before we go? Let's see. What else would I like to hold up about the book? You know, one thing I think that I really do like to hold up is the fact that it's just individual people making individual choices that allow us to move towards greater freedoms for all people, what I call mutual human liberation. Dr. King called the beloved community. It's just humans making those choices and that we can make those choices in our small ways, in our small communities or in larger ways for someone who's a larger

influencer. But everybody can do something. So that's what, that's part of what I just try to hold up in all of my novels is like, here's the ways people are making choices that expand liberation for the most people. That's the beautiful part, giving hope and getting people to understand that so that, so they're inspired to do the same thing and learn from history.

Technically. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. You're very welcome.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate you having me on the show. You're just delightful. Well, I try to be. I mean, the jokes are awful, but... Yeah, you try. It's good. You're trying hard.

We try hard to entertain you. So give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs too please lilaibrahim.com you can find me there or on facebook same thing facebook.com forward slash lila ibrahim there you go guys check out her book and her newest book and all the books in her series uh and all the ones she's written uh scarlet carnation a novel just came out april 1st, 2022. Get it wherever fine books are sold. Remember, don't go into those alleyways.

You might need a tetanus shot if you do that, if you go into those alleyway bookstores. Just go into the fine bookstores. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, Fortunes of Chris Voss. Go to goodreads.com, Fortunes of Chris Voss. And all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram as well. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.