Envisioning 'A People's Future of the United States', Ep. 252
Howard Zinn’s seminal 1980 work A People’s History of the United States challenged dominant narratives of our country’s past by uncovering its darker truths; nearly 40 years later, a new collection of speculative fiction, A People’s Future of the United States challenges our visions of tomorrow. Like Zinn's work, this collection of stories centers on the experiences of traditionally marginalized communities.The collection's co-editor, Victor LaValle, speaks with four contributors— Maria Dahvana Headley, N.K. Jemisin, Alice Sola Kim, and Sam J. Miller—about the fantasies and projections for the future of the country.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
[ Music ]
>> You're listening to Library Talks from the New York Public Library. I'm your host, Aidan Flax-Clark.
[ Music ]
Today on the show, five amazing writers of speculative fiction who all helped create a new book called A People's Future of the United States. As the title probably suggested to you, it's inspired by the Howard Zinn Book, A People's History of the United States. And just like A People's History sought to reclaim American history for those who have long been underrepresented in books about it, this is looking to do the same thing for the future. It was edited by John Joseph Adams and Victor LaValle. John Joseph Adams is an editor and an anthologist of fantasy and sci-fi and speculative fiction whose books include a couple of the recent Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Victor LaValle is a novelist and comic book writer whose most recent books include The Changeling and Destroyer. John Joseph Adams lives in California so he couldn't be with us at the library to talk about the book, but Victor LaValle was on hand the night before A People's Future was published to speak with some of his contributors. You're going to hear from four of them in this order after you hear first from Victor LaValle: N.K. Jemisin, Maria Dahvana Headley, Sam J. Miller, and Alice Sola Kim.
[ Applause ]
>> Hello, everybody. My name is Victor LaValle and I'll be moderating tonight's discussion with these four amazing, amazing writers who have all contributed to A People's Future of the United States. Could you give me one more round of applause for them?
[ Applause ]
So what I wanted to do was sort of dive into just the chance to talk about the stories in the book and the impetus for the book, but my first thing that I'm going to do is read to you all, so you have a sense of what the book is trying to do, the letter that we wrote -- that myself and John Joseph Adams, my coeditor, what we wrote to all the authors who we hoped would be willing to give us stories for the anthology to help put them in the mindset of what we were hoping for. So, here's what they got. A narcissistic demagogue has been elected president of the United States. [Laughter] He wants to build a wall between the US and Mexico. He plans to deport millions of immigrants and ban all Muslims. He's supported by the KKK. He mocked disabled people during speeches. He brags about sexually assaulting women. He makes a neo-nazi his chief policy advisor. Some of these things are out of date. Some of them are still relevant. This sounds more like the plot from a work of dystopian fiction than current events in the United States of America. And yet Trump's narratives do depict a dystopian world where many Americans are disposed of, imprisoned, assaulted, and killed. In this moment when reality has become much stranger than fiction, we are asking writers to seriously consider what it would mean and to speculate how to reclaim the future of our country. Thus, we are publishing A People's Future of The United States, a collection of 20 -- it turned out to be 25 because there were so many good ones -- a collection of 25 visionary, speculative fiction stories that will show us the future through the eyes of those whose lives have been threatened throughout American history: People of color, women, immigrants, Muslims, and other persecuted religious groups, queer and trans people. We are seeking stories that show us new forms of freedom, love, and justice; narratives just release us from the chokehold of the history and mythology of the past and writing that gives us new futures to believe in. So that's the idea at the heart of the anthology. And so, I want to ask all of you, each of you, in whatever order you like. When we sent this letter along and when that sort of charged question prompt was put to you, how did it -- did it help you or how did it start you thinking about the story that eventually became the one in our anthology?
>> I'll go. I have done enough teaching that, you know, and it always sort of frustrates me when no one will go first.
[ Laughter ]
I actually had a half finished story. I had done the sort of basic draft of it already and I was writing these stories for my Patreon. I do them for, just as a way to, you know, give something back to people who have been helping me. They helped me quit my day job, so yay. But I wasn't actually planning to publish any of these stories. I didn't think that this particular one was really -- I wrote it in, like, rage and I didn't think that it was, like, publishable. When I saw this, I was like, you know what? I can make it publishable. [Laughter] So, that was it.
>> OK. The prompt, obviously, was the most seductive thing I got in years. I said yes instantly. I didn't have a story at all. But I grew up a survivalist. Idaho. So I had this notion of what if it was a story that was written by someone who was born after the end, someone who was born after the world ended? You know? And that's where my story came from. It came -- trying to imagine forward from this worst case which is not the worst case. We're not at the worst case. There have been other, much worse, worse cases. We're at a bad moment but it's not as bad as we feel it emotionally right now. So I started thinking about how to preserve the knowledge of the world. And that's what I'm always interested in. It's a story about tattoos. [Laughing] So obviously I have personal lust and experience with that topic. But it was -- I think all of the bits of it were already lurking inside of me and I shoved them into this story and it turned into something I wasn't exactly expecting. It turned into a text of its own but it's a story about unexpected texts.
>> So I'm a community organizer. And my job is about supporting folks who are directly impacted by a problem to be able to fight back to fix it. So I'm a big fan of Howard Zinn and A People's History of the United States is a really important text for me and thinking about how we tell history and whose histories have historically been centered. So the concept was really intriguing. And also thinking about, yes, I'm super mad and everything is super fucked up right now but also, like, this is not new and this did not come out of nowhere and this is not disruptive, right? This is, like, way bad and way worse than a lot of things, but also like very much you can see how this happened how looking at recent and longterm history. And also, Prince had died. And I was thinking a lot about Prince. And I love Prince. And I often, when my divas die, I find a way to write a story about them. So this is my Prince story. It's called, It Was Saturday Night, I Guess That Makes it Alright.
[ Light Laughter ]
>> I had a very long and challenging road to writing my story for this anthology. You know, I sort of got the invite and I was like, that sounds great! Everyone involved sounds great! I have no idea what I will do but just kind of, like, say yes first and then, you know, figure out the rest later. And just to, like -- you know, full disclosure. Like, this is one of those instances where I'm just so grateful to the editors and to you and John because it just would not come. And I think I also had this maybe sort of, I don't know. I had it locked into my mind. It was misapprehension that it had to be optimistic. Or I was just like, well, there has to be some hope somewhere. And I was not feeling very hopeful about anything. You know, kind of personally or not personally [laughing]. And then I, you know -- but I still had to write this story. And I felt like you and John were both so kind of encouraging but also like, hey, where's the story? [Laughter] And it finally kind of came as many of my stories do which is in a moment of delirium. And you know, I like writing things that sound like bad ideas because I'm like this can't -- this has to be terrible. But why not give it a shot? So I just wrote a story about what I was thinking about and what was in the air for me which was, you know, about the shitty media man list and Me Too and Time's Up and all that stuff. And I honestly didn't know if I could make it, like, a story that felt like a self-contained short story that, you know, didn't rely on knowledge of the news or whatnot. So, I enjoyed that challenge and that's what came of it.
>> Like, speaking from my perspective, right, one of the things that I find so interesting about all your answers already is that the stories themselves are -- every single one of them deal with some pretty intense material. I don't know how else to put it. Either they're violent or they're -- physically violent, emotionally violent, both, and more. And yet, somehow, I do think -- at least as I read them -- each of them did seem helpful in a way or at least not destroyed. The people at the end didn't seem destroyed by the thing. Or some of the people didn't seem destroyed by the thing. [Laughter] Right? And I wonder about that alchemy. Like, how do you as writers -- how do you think about, right, like working that line between helpful and hopeless? Do you think about it? Or does it just come out a certain way?
>> I think about it all the time. I also got neurotic for the same reason. I thought, oh no, this story is too bleak. It is so bleak! Because it begins with a death, with a child losing his father. And I read a chunk of this story at Reader Con and I couldn't read the whole thing. I just read maybe, like, ten minutes of it. And I stopped. And someone just said, oh no. [Laughter] It was like, there's nice things too! Nice things happen! So when I was balancing how to get there with this story -- because I am a person who also believes in the possibility of love and joy and grit to transform things. I am a believer in that. I think that changes the world. So I wanted to write about that as well. And I -- it caused me to write a long history, like a birdseye history. I wrote several generations past the collapse. I just kept going because I thought, OK, what happens when everything goes wrong and then you live through it? And then there are children and they live through it. What happens when you have grandchildren who didn't know, weren't around for the collapse? And now this is the world. And the world still has bright and beautiful things in it. But I was nervous the whole time that I wasn't writing a nice enough story [laughing].
>> I mean, I kind of feel like that's the challenge that you threw us -- is as we see the world turning into this place that it actually for some people has been all along. You know, places that it, you know, our country in particular was not too long ago for, you know, my parents' generation, for example. You know, turning back into a place that not all of us are going to be particularly proud of. As we see this happening, you know, the fear, the threat, the looming danger of all of it was that we could see the potential violence of it. You know, the words, the rhetoric, the badgering, the bashing turns into violence if it isn't stopped. And so, this is -- you know, it felt honest to engage with the bleakness of it by talking about death and, you know, just all kinds of horrible things. But I think that's the thing that, you know, probably all of us may have engaged with as you're working with this incredibly bleak material. People survive that. And that in and of itself is a story of hope. You know, generations after a collapse? Well, you just got a different world now. It's just different. And that's what we've all got to deal with and all got to address. You know, in my case I decided to write about dragons and collard greens [laughter], you know, because like the way I was sort of processing it was just sheer absurdism. And the absurdism let me laugh at this terrifying notion of people mass forced into camps and just a bunch of other horrific things happening. But you know, at the end of the day, they all sit down and they have a good meal. That's what life under this kind of situation is like.
>> I think I'm maybe either like a cheerful pessimist or a dour optimist. Hopefully I'm not, like, the worst combination of both [laughter]. But I think in one way, like, the hope in my story is actually like a sad, messed up hope because, yeah, I was thinking about, you know, men in the news who have been, you know, accused of rape, abuse, harassment, and how these men seem to come back with these very, I don't know, circular, you know, weird, non-apologetic apologies. And so, in my story I feel like I was just like, the only way I can imagine someone actually coming to terms and facing, you know, what they did, admitting it, and apologizing is they're forced to by dark magic. [Loud Laughter] Haha. Like, I was just like, that's the only way I can realistically envision this. So that's sort of like wish fulfillment, but it's also -- it's just like I still can't believe it. I can't believe it can really happen which is very pessimistic of me. But where I sort of, I guess, locate the hope in this story I wrote is among the friends who are dealing with this stuff. And what the story is about is failure and how, you know, even if we mean well, we fail each other. And that's OK. I think it's, like, good to talk about the ways in which we fail each other, kind of fall down on the job or have, like, blinkers up or something like that, because, you know, nothing is perfect. You know, even resistance isn't perfect. And even just sort of talking about it and admitting it and naming it, I think, is kind of helpful in its own way.
>> Also, it's hilarious. It's, like, one of the funniest things I've ever read. So, there's that. You know, I swing back and forth between ecstatic joy and, like, profound despair, like, every five seconds. Of like, I'm listening to, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and I feel like bliss. And then I look at Twitter and I get blind with rage. So, yeah. This is -- a lot of my fiction is me trying to come to terms with how a world can be so fucked up and so full of wonderful things and how people can be, can do such horrible things and participate often unwittingly in such horrible systems. But also, you know, be capable of wonderful things as well. And so, yeah. I don't know why that became a story of, like, a future where Prince is illegal and Big Brother is listening but that's what happened.
>> I wondered for you as readers, maybe even as younger readers, things like that, if you were drawn to, for lack of a better term, like texts of resistance? Did you read in that way when you were young? I think of myself. One of the things that I loved as a kid was the Greek mythology books by the couple who makes them. I always mispronounce their names. Delowers? [Stammering]
>> Delayers?
>> Delayers [phonetic]. Yes. And there's a husband and wife team. One of them wrote them. The other one illustrated them. And the illustrations were the thing that I loved because they were really grotesque and disturbing. And at like six or seven, I was really drawn to, like, a guy with eyes all over his body and you find out he gets them all stabbed out and all this kind of stuff, right? [Laughter and horror from audience] It was really like a --
>> I mean, Greek mythology is not exactly, like, nice, but --.
>> It's not nice.
>> Yeah.
>> But I guess I particularly liked the especially not nice ones. [Laughter] And then from there I went to the Norse mythology. So --
>> That's also not nice.
>> Also super grim, right?
[ Laughter ]
But, weirdly, I guess what I'm trying to -- where I'm trying to lead this horse is that there was a way that I found something beautiful about how often the human beings fought the gods. Right? How often they refused the sort of whims of the gods, even when it destroyed them, right? Zeus and Hera destroyed who knows how many lives. But we got trees out of it or whatever we got. You know, we got some beautiful things.
[ Laughter ]
And just wondering for you all as readers. I guess I'm always interested in -- when I speak to really talented writers, I always want to know kind of like how they were shaped. Like, what shaped them when they were young, as readers? Forget even the resistance or not.
>> I mean, I read mythology, too, growing up. And I also, you know, Prometheus' liver! Oh my god! You know, yada-yada-yada. And as I got older and as I started studying mythology instead of just kind of enjoying it, as I realized as I kind of explored the mythologies of many people around the world, one of the things that kind of drew me to stories of gods as fallible and sometimes even monstrous or evil beings was just that the core of the story was bad things happen but you'll survive and you might even win. And you know, yes, there might be trees [laughing], or there might be fire, or you might actually manage to kill the god that's been dogging your family for years and years and years. So you know -- or if you're a trickster, if you're careful about what you do, you can change the whole paradigm about how the world works. You know, and sometimes pay a horrible price for that. But it seemed more true to what I needed to understand about the world than what I was getting from -- you know, I grew up, you know, Southern Black Baptist. You know, I wasn't getting messages that helped me get through from that. I was getting messages that helped me get through from Prometheus' liver. Yeah. So --.
>> My story for this anthology is actually about librarians creating an alternate library which they call the Library of the Low. And it's the library of the untold narratives, basically. It's revisions. It's translation, elision, changes in the text that we know that are being rewritten by this librarian who's like, fuck the canon. The canon has led us here. So my Library of the Low is full of what I read as a little kid. It's referenced our Ursula Major who is, of course, Ursula Gwynn, and Octavia the Empress [laughing] who is, of course, Octavia Butler. But in my childhood, I was reading lots of mythology and folklore as well. And also any book that had a woman's name on the cover, I was like ooohhhhhh, maybe! And if I learned that the woman was alive still and hadn't been killed for writing these crazy things down, it was like instant full body bliss. So yeah, I've always been very interested in not just in texts of resistance but just in texts that imply survival of their authors, that imply this person wrote more than one story and lived. She lived to tell the tale. You know? And I mean, not just women, of course. I'm interested in all the people who are not the people you would have expected to live through some of the events of our history. You would not have expected them to be able to write these stories down, to have their words read again. And the idea that there have been so many survivors who have managed to tell their stories is for me what keeps me [laughing] going, keeps me writing. It keeps me writing books for children, hoping to create the same response for them, writing books for adults, hoping to create the same response for them. Here we are. We're still alive. Like, fucking fight for it.
>> It's interesting because, you know, what does resistance mean? What, where do we find resistance? And I think that's different for everybody. And for me, one of the sort of sights of resistance coming of age as a young queer person was sex. And finding a text that was telling a story that is talking about a kind of desire that I wasn't seeing anywhere else that validated what I was feeling and who I was and how that can be really radical. Right? Like, that can be about survival. That can be, you know, being a queer person, like, reading James Baldwin, thinking about being an out gay man in a time when you could -- well, not that you can't still be murdered for it or attacked or whatever. But thinking about the courage that it took to live and to be who you were and to have sex with who you wanted to have sex with is not that different than, like you know, the courage of the mortals who defied the gods and said I'm going to do this thing even though I'm pretty sure it's going to get me killed because not doing it would make my life unlivable. So for me, things like James Baldwin and John Genet that were sort of like about queer identity but also -- especially with John Genet, like thinking about queerness as criminality and how then is criminality defined? Who is running the prisons? How are the -- how does the world function and how is it function based on some people being oppressed and marginalized and fucked over?
>> One of the things I read a lot when I was young was horror. And I don't know if I, you know, really consciously like, you know, thought of it as like sort of stories of resistance. I probably just liked them because they were vivid and deeply unwholesome [laughter] which is, like, all I wanted. [Chuckles] But I think there is something about, you know, I would read Stephen King at way too early of an age which a lot of people, I know, did. Richard Matheson, I know, at NU, you know, edited and wrote the intro to a great collection of his recently. And just like really random anthologies by this anthologist named Helen Hoke. And those were very formative because they would just all be in the library and they would have these, like, I don't know, not disgusting but really horrifying covers that seemed kind of safe because they were like kind of 60s-70s. But you would just stare at them and kind of fall into them [laughing], in a dark dream. But she was just this anthologist who would kind of just combine, you know, all of these horror from different eras. And a lot of those stories I didn't understand but still read with great interest. And I think something I got from my reading of horror at an early age was just that, like you know, in the story there would be this horror or this thing that was after you and it was made for you somehow. Like, it wants you specifically which is part of the awfulness of it. Like, it's like a lock and key. And I really do -- I mean, I feel like that's just really applicable to life in the sense that there are all these horrors that feel like depending on who you are, right, or what groups you belong to, you know, there are things, institutions, peoples, ideas after you because of who you are. And you don't always survive. You often don't. And sometimes you do. And of course in these stories, there's so many ways of doing that. You know, by becoming a monster, the monster, getting away from it, creating your own light, you know, etc. And, you know, I always found that very fascinating.
>> I don't know if any of you are watching that -- speaking of that -- that show Russian Doll. Anybody watching that one on Netflix? It's just amazing. It's amazing, amazing. I just started watching it yesterday or whatever. [Laughter] But it's a symbol. There's an idea -- Natasha Lyonne is the main character. And I don't think it spoils anything but she's at a party. She leaves that party and she just keeps dying and then coming back and dying and coming back. And what's interesting is, what she's constantly trying to figure out. I'm only four episodes in so far. But she keeps being like, there's something I have to do or change or think differently to fix things. And one of the horrors of the show is that, at least so far it seems like, no. Like, you're not going to fix that you're dying. That's not going to be a thing that you change. And it's super creepy because, like, the first episode you're like, yeah, you know, be nice. It's about be nice to people, and then everybody will live forever [laughter] or you know, apologize for hurting someone else and then you'll be OK. And then she just turns a corner, falls over a railing, dies again, is back in that bathroom and you're just like, fuck! What's the answer? And then at a certain point, like, by episode four, you start to see that what they're trying to at least make you think about is this idea, like, that's not the -- you're not going to trick death. Right? So what are you going to do, like, with your day? And it's really profound and Natasha Lyonne is, as always, incredibly funny and charming. But I feel like in a way, at least as I was reading all your stories but the other stories as well, there is a sense for me of everybody wrestling with a thing that you can't just defeat. Right? Like, none of the stories in the anthology ever say, and then the day after that, we fixed human beings [laughter] and life was great. Right? And so for me, it feels, like, really beautiful and honest in that way. And frightening as well. And I just -- at least for me, I'm just curious or wondering, like, if that sounds familiar to the story you wrote? If in your work in general, do you imagine that there's ever a story where it's just like, and now life was solved. I mean, I've read your works. I don't think that that's the case [laughter] but I always do wonder that. I'm curious about that.
>> I mean, I always feel like this comes down to a happy ending in a story. And happy endings often just feel profoundly dishonest. Right? And even when I write a happy ending, I want to qualify it somehow. I want to have there be some horrific thing that happens [laughter] so that you don't get away clean because if you get away clean then it feels like, well, what was the point of all this? So just as a storyteller, I don't think it's good practice to make everything OK. But as a person, I'd like to think that it's possible. But --.
>> Not as a writer? Right? [Laughing]
>> Trouble is our business.
>> Yes. [Laughing]
>> In my work, I'm often -- when I was a teenager, I had a near-death experience. And so -- and everything changed and nothing changed I went back to school. I was in ninth grade. And I thought everything was different and everyone thought I was the same person. And I was like, yeah, but now I know what it's like to die. And now I know that lots of these things don't matter, and yet everything still mattered. And so in my work [laughing], I'm constantly trying to battle with the idea that anything is ever what it looks like, that anything is simple. And I'm also constantly thinking, here's this simplest haiku of a story. You know, you don't get out of life alive. You don't get out of life unscathed. It's just the littlest thing and it's what all stories are. And to have just personally, like, come back from dying and kind of horribly, and returned to being a person who can walk around looking unscathed was -- has informed my entire career and made me, and informed all my understanding of stories across history [laughing] because I think it's all that. It's all, like, what do you do with your day? What do you do with your last day because every day is your last day. It's all the same stakes, really. And do you -- can you change the world at all? Yeah. Like, the great joy of it is that you can. You can change the world a lot. You can do so many things. And that's not always happy. I mean, changing the world isn't always happy. And that's something that I'm interested in writing about. I'm interested in writing about people thinking that they're changing the world for the better when in fact they're changing the world catastrophically. And I'm interested in the reverse. I'm interested in people being, just, low-key brave [laughing], you know? Changing the world very much on the down-low without any ego involved because just that's how they do. You know? None of it ever seems happy or sad to me, although sometimes people whisper, oh no, while they're hearing me read [laughter]. It all seems like I have an urge to give villains POV and have them explain why they think it's a good idea. You know? I have an urge to have heroes explain themselves and give us the sense that maybe the hero has been imbibing too much mythology. I mean, I'm just interested in all of the complexity of the way we tell each other and ourselves stories about what it is to be good.
>> When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, my parents tried to give me, like, lots of black history. You know, I was -- my middle name is King. You know, I'm one of that generation of young, black Americans who, you know, was raised with, like you know, random African national -- not national, African cultural names picked out of a book and applied to us with no meaning or anything like that. You know, in my case it was that my father had read The Sundiata Cycle and wanted to name me after a king. I'm like, you couldn't find one queen? [Laughter] But anyway, but he tried, you know? So I'll take that. My parents would give me all this stuff about, you know, surviving slavery. And people like Harriet Tubman was, you know, my hero when I was growing up, and all these people who talked about how much we've been through and how we survived and how that's a great thing, which was useful. But what I was kind of desperate for as a young science fiction reader was, where are we in the future? Did something happen? Is something going to happen? Because of course, I'm reading all these science fiction novels and stories by the Golden Age greats. And if there's a black person in them, you know, they very quickly say, well, it doesn't matter anymore that I'm black. I just mention it for no reason.
[ Laughter ]
You know, or whatever? Or they get killed or something happens. And then you realize also that they're the only one. They're the only one in that future. The future is, you know, we're going forth. We're meeting aliens, whatever. But the humans are all white dudes. What the hell? And so, you know, and what I was desperately craving was our future. Where are we in the future? And so, you know, this is the kind of thing that for me ended up being the way in which I kind of sought that optimism. You know, the future might not be great, but we'll be there. You know, the future might be after the collapse but we'll still be there [laughing]. You know, and I need that. So that was it for me.
>> I don't -- yeah, I don't have much to say about this except I'm like a gloomy Gus as a writer. And like it's not like I'm some sort of, like, edgelord who's like, oh, chaos reigns! You know?
[ Laughter ]
But I think I -- first of all, like you know, maybe due to like my contamination with, like, horror fiction at a young age, like, I am just interested in writing about what happens after the bad stuff happens or during the bad stuff happening. But also, you know, I just think that life is full of the things you like and want and the things you don't like and want. And sometimes there's a lot of what you don't want. But I suppose the hope is just locate it in dealing with it somehow, living through it somehow. And like, I think everyone has said in different ways and Norah just now, like just being -- you know, having a story to tell or having it told about you is also, it's something. You know? It's not nothing.
>> I remember we took our kids to see Into the Spiderverse --
>> Oh, I love that movie.
>> [Cheers from audience] -- which was amazing. Yes. But there was this moment where I saw -- so our kids are seven and five. They were watching the movie. They loved the movie a great deal. But there was also a moment where -- like, my son loves Miles Morales, but if I'm honest, he was not as freaked out that Miles Morales existed as I was that Miles Morales existed. Like, he loves Miles Morales but he's got -- he reads a bunch of, there's a bunch of, now, like, brown and black kids running around in comic books and on animated shows and all those kinds of --. And so he was just sort of like, that was amazing, and all this stuff. And I was kind of doing what your parents were doing. I was just like, do you understand the paradigm?
[ Laughter ]
And like sitting him down. Let me talk you through the Marvel Universe and show you -- [loud laughter] -- what this is like. And you know, and I realized it was such a gift that he could just be like, shut up, Dad, whatever. I'm watching this now. I'm watching -- you know, and it didn't mean, him and my daughter, it didn't mean anything. No, no, I shouldn't say it didn't mean anything because he was at least in New York, right? And has hair similar to my son so there was a way that that was something. But just enjoying that way, and then at the same time thinking my son saw himself in Miles Morales. My daughter -- half and half. Right? And so, sort of being like, OK. So now, there's more to do. Like, there's more work to do, right? [Murmur of agreement] And there's always more work to do and more people to come into the tent sort of thing. But anyway, so I wanted to ask one last thing before we move into the Q&A portion of things, which was about if there is let's say broadly speaking a sense of in this moment or just in life in general, I don't know, if there is dread, if there is fear, if there is rage, all these things, how do you -- do you write despite those things? Do you write because of those things? Do you write because you have to pay your bills? I mean, all of those are damn good reasons to write. But I just wonder, in the face of, say, what this anthology sort of inspired, how do you get down to, how do you sit down and get to work?
>> I'm still figuring that out. [Laughter]
>> I was on book tour when the 2016 election happened, with a YA novel. And I was in Florida talking to a bunch of kids the day after the election. And I thought, how can I talk to these kids who are all the targets of this? Because it was roomful of queer, nonbinary, people of color, like teenagers who couldn't vote yet. And it was, I didn't know what -- I had no -- I had froze. I froze completely. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to write for teenagers, because writing for teenagers is like, it's such a gift to get to do it, to get to set them on fire and send them to do action. How fucking amazing. But I was like, but what if you're all going to be killed by this asshole? And [big exhale] -- and then, they started to talk back to me. They were like, what's going to happen to us? And I was like, I don't know. I don't have an answer, don't have an answer. And they started -- but my books are full of magic. They're full of ferocity. And so we talked about that. We talked about how to make stories about being brave. And so now when I'm sitting at my desk not knowing how to write, because sometimes I'm paralyzed by the everything, I think, OK, all you have to do is get to the next sentence and tell a story for one of -- not just one of these kids, but like tell the story for the you that wouldn't have made it without the stories you read. Tell the story for the many people out there who don't get the privilege that I have to tell these stories. And I don't know. Beating back the dread is -- I'm in the business of looking at it in the light and also in the business of kicking it in the balls. So it's -- that's the work, I think. And you know, what good fortune to get to do that work. I try to keep that in mind because it is good fortune to get to do it.
>> I think the thing about community organizing for me and activism in general, having done this work for a long time, is that you have to do it knowing you're probably not going to win. Right? You have to work on fighting to fix things and to change things and to get laws repealed or to get laws put on the books that don't exist or to get assholes thrown out of office or whatever, being pretty confident that you're not going to get ahead, that you're not going to win. It would be great if you do, but the win is not the only reason you do it. You do it because the doing it feels good and the doing it inspires others. And so, you know, getting other folks to see that they can fight back, that they can do something is the end -- not the end goal, but it is the thing that makes it worth doing even if you don't win in any kind of timely fashion. I just -- recently we passed a bill that we spent ten years fighting for that, like, we thought was going to be like an easy lift, one-year campaign. So it's like, yay, we won! But fuck! [Laughter] And so, writing fiction is the same thing, especially -- you know, I also write young adult and being able to write specifically to write to young folks is a privilege and is an honor and is this really exciting way to say to other folks, like, you can see yourself. You can tell a story that's worth telling. And we can tell really good stories and those stories have power and meaning.
>> Why I write is just -- or what motivates me is just this, like, disgusting, bubbly stew that I have no access to. Like I don't know what the ingredients are. It's just all there. So I can't really say how, like, the current moment has motivated me exactly. Although, I think, like, one of the things that -- one of the aspects of good writing, or at least good writing as I see it or as I want to do it, is also just about fighting all of the forces that are trying to prevent you and the characters you write from just being whole-ass, complex people, you know. And these forces can be, like, very intense and harsh and evil. You know, they can be like nazis yelling at you on the internet and they can also just be kind of like publishing and how, you know, publishing wants to, like, say like you know, exoticize you and make the most important thing about, like, the work you publish, you know, certain details, like biographical details. Right? And treat you like, say -- at the very best, you know, treat you like medicine. Like, oh, you're so important for your background -- and not as literature, right? And at the very worst, you know, just not publish you at all. So, I try to think about that -- just whole-ass, complex people and writing and that is what I focus on. And I think that is part of that mission.
>> Thank you all.
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>> That was Victor LaValle, NK Jemisin, Maria Dahvana Headley, Sam J. Miller, and Alice Sola Kim, all of whom contributed to A People's Future of the United States. If you're a New York Public Library cardholder, you can pick up the book at one of our branch locations, or you can read it on our app, SimplyE. Library Talks was produced by Schuyler Swenson with editorial support from Richert Schnorr and myself. And our theme music was composed by Allison Layton-Brown.
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