First Draft Episode #261: Alaya Dawn Johnson
July 23, 2020
LISTEN TO The Episode
Alaya Dawn Johnson, Nebula-winning author of YA novels The Summer Prince, Love is the Drug, and more. Her new adult speculative fiction novel, Trouble the Saints, is out now!
Sarah Enni: This weekend, July 25th and 26, First Draft is teaming up with authors supporting authors organization, A Mighty Blaze, to present YA Weekend, an event celebrating new young adult writers. Join us for a slate of amazing panels to talk about queer love stories, writing grief and trauma in YA, political narratives and international settings. I'll also be hosting two Track Changes panels where industry experts will weigh-in and give us some behind-the-scenes perspective on publishing. Check out AMightyBlaze.com for more information, and be sure to watch the event live this Saturday and Sunday, July 25th and 26th at Facebook.com/AMightyBlaze.
Sarah Enni: Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week, I'm talking to Alaya Dawn Johnson, Nebula-winning science fiction and fantasy writer of YA novels, The Summer Prince, Love is the Drug and more. Her new adult novel Trouble The Saints, a noir alternate history with speculative elements, is out now. I really loved talking to Alaya and we got into all the moments in her life where she leveled up as a writer, how her book about a mismanaged pandemic underestimated reality, and the story of the night when she ate crickets, drank mezcal, and changed her life forever.
Everything Alaya and I talk about on today's episode can be found in the show notes. First Draft participates in affiliate programs, specifically bookshop.org. That means that if you shop through the links on FirstDraftPod.com, it helps to support the show and independent bookstores at no additional cost to you.
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If you are an aspiring writer with questions about the business, or a seasoned vet who probably couldn't recite their contract blindfolded, you should be listening to Track Changes. That's the podcast mini-series that has been appearing in your First Draft feed the last few months. The most recent episode gets into the mysterious period after the book deal. What is really happening behind the scenes at the publisher? If you don't know what a sales meeting is, you might want to listen.
I've also created the Track Changes newsletter where every Thursday, or sometimes Friday, I share more of the information I gathered in researching for this project. Recently, I've been diving into Barnes & Noble which has fired a lot of high-up people lately. And I'm getting into the context of Barnes & Noble and why that is happening. You can sign up for a 30-Day free trial of the newsletter and learn more about both Track Changes projects at FirstDraftPod.com/TrackChanges.
Okay, now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Alaya Dawn Johnson.
Sarah Enni: So hi Alaya, how are you?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: I'm great. How are you Sarah?
Sarah Enni: I'm doing well, so excited to talk today.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Thank you. I'm so excited too.
Sarah Enni: So my interviews start with a little bit of background, a little bio about you. And I like to go all the way back to the beginning, which is where were you born and raised?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: In Washington DC and the suburbs in Maryland.
Sarah Enni: And how was reading and writing a part of growing up for you?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: I mean, it's been a huge part of my life since, you know, not from the literally beginning, but almost, almost. I mean, my mom taught me to read very young. I'm not sure exactly what she was thinking, except that I was her first child and she just didn't know any better or something, cause I was two. And I remember, it's actually one of my very, very first memories, is that. Sitting with my mom in my closet, for some reason. It was kind of a walk-in closet so I guess maybe I just felt like it was cozy in there or something.
But she had this very first reader sort of a book where you learn the letters and then you can put them together and then you suddenly realize that that's the name of an animal. And I just remember the day I figured out that those sounds then formed the name of this animal that was on the card, and it was like this explosion in my brain and I was so happy. And to me, it was just like the best thing that had ever happened to me, was figuring out how to read.
Sarah Enni: I also read that you had an arrangement with your parents, for a brief time, where you were paid a dollar for every book that you read.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yes. Yes. That really solidified the lifelong love. It was a dollar per novel. The problem was, at a certain point, it got my, how would I say, my incentives were to read novels that were shorter and easier. But what I would do is I would just knock those out, you know, these sort of like Disney, young reader novels, I just knocked them out and then it would be like, get $5 that way. And then I would go and read something I felt like reading, but took longer. At some point they realized, you know, they cottoned onto my game that I was reading constantly, but I'd say it was about a year-and-a-half in.
Sarah Enni: I love that. I think it's like a great method for parents to be like, "Well...? Get into it."
Alaya Dawn Johnson: It was extraordinarily like Machiavellian, but effective, you know?
Sarah Enni: I would love to hear about how creative writing was a part of your life as a kid. Were you writing? Were you coming up with stories?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yeah, like I said, when I discovered what novels were, I was like, "Oh, this is what I want to do. I want to write these." And that was early, it was more or less around The Secret Garden years, so six, seven. Yeah, I just never stopped. I don't really know what I was doing, but I was just completely convinced, all the time, that I was gonna write a novel and that it would be a huge, best-seller... [laughing].
Sarah Enni: Ha! I love that. That's so great. This is so fascinating to me. I'm really interested in the fact that you really fell in love with the novel as a format so early. But I'd love to talk about a lot of your early writing, and still to this day, a lot of your writing, it takes the form of short stories.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yes. I think, certainly at the time, my understanding of what a novel was, was a little wobbly. So I was really more or less writing short stories. At the time, when I really got into short stories, was like seventh grade, seventh and eighth. In fact, I wrote my very first short story in seventh grade. So I was like 12 or 13, right? I'm not sure now, I mean, I'd really have to think back as to like what it was that made me decide that I wanted to work in the short format.
Because I kept writing novels, I was like parallel trying to write novels that whole time, but I started focusing on short stories. I think it might have been something as simple as, and life-changing really, as people exposing me to Ray Bradbury and The Illustrated Man, and those sorts of short stories that they give you, the classics, to read when you're in like sixth and seventh grade.
I think I must have read those and thought, cause they're like these kind of perfect jewels. And a novel was... I kept trying, but it was really hard to get it together to write a whole novel. And also my middle school and high school had a little literary journal where they would publish student writing, and obviously they weren't gonna publish a novel, you know? So I think that was the other driving factor was that I could write short stories and I could maybe get them published in this little magazine.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. That's so cool. You're certainly not the only writer to say this, but I am struck whenever I meet writers who so early on, not only felt compelled to tell stories, which I think a lot of us can relate to, but it seems like you were always convinced that you were gonna have an audience. You weren't necessarily just writing for yourself it was like, "I need to then bring it out into the world."
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yeah. This, to me, is probably like the weirdest thing. Because I was a totally normal child in the sense of like, I also thought I was gonna be an astronaut, and a ballerina, and the national geographic photographer thing like lasted into high school. I always had those, but the thing that didn't change was that I was also going to be a novelist.
Being a writer, or a writer of fiction and a writer of novels, was my life goal from figuring out that that existed. And I'm not sure what that's about. Cause again, I had all sorts of other ideas, I just really desperately wanted to write novels. I just always knew that that was the format that I most loved. The best I can say is that for me, I found so much solace and pleasure and escape in fiction.
And I think it just seemed like, "Well obviously if that exists, then that's something I should be doing." You know? I distinctly remember in, I think this would've been in fourth grade, writing a novel. Again, this was like a short story, but I'm writing a novel. And it was for school, so it was a school project, but it was like, "Write a story." And I wrote, I don't know, 20 pages or something. And I put it in a little notebook, and I made a design for the cover of the notebook, and I put a review from the New York Times on the cover of my novel! [Laughs]
Sarah Enni: That is amazing.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: It was like, "A tour de force!" It's so embarrassing.
Sarah Enni: That is amazing. I'm interested in talking through... you then go to college and you don't, from what I understand, you don't choose to study creative writing, you study other things.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yeah. I majored in East Asian languages and cultures with a focus on Japan.
Sarah Enni: I'm just always curious about people who, it seems like you always knew you wanted very seriously to be a writer, was writing taking a backseat at all? Or did you think about studying creative writing?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: No, I didn't really consider it. Basically, I was already writing, like I was just...off. At that time, when I went to college and when I was deciding my major, I was super into Sailor Moon fan fiction. It was just a fabulous fandom back then. It was so wonderful and supportive and women-focused and I have a lot of nostalgia for it. It was a great place to work out some kinks and write my first two novels. I mean, not published, obviously. The first novels that I actually managed to finish were in that context.
So I was working on that. I think the reason I didn't consider seriously majoring in creative writing was that I was very focused on genre fiction. And creative writing majors, I'm sure still but certainly in 2000, were really, really focused on the realistic mode of fiction writing. Which again, now I'm much more open to a lot of those things and I'm reading all sorts of, you know? But at the time, I really, really just wanted to write fantasy and science fiction.
And I knew that it was just gonna be really hard to be the fantasy and science fiction writer in a room full of writers who were aspiring to literary realism. Not the least because they would get a lot of the genre conventions I was working in. I actually did take one creative writing class at my university, and it was so bad. It was a creative writing class and everyone was like, "Oh, it's an easy A. Bump up your GPA." And I got a B-plus in it, which no one’s gonna say like, "Oh, how horrible! A B-plus." But I mean, it just goes to show you that I really was not where I needed to be right then that I managed to get a B plus in my easy A class.
Sarah Enni: I mean, I studied writing, but I did English and journalism, so it was like this whole other thing. But it also seems like you were really filling the well. And you engage in such robust world-building and you studied these other cultures and you learned Japanese. So you're obviously building up that.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yeah. And that, to me, was always my idea, was that I need to major in anything else. I needed to learn as much as I could about the world and different cultures and different languages. I mean, right now in my life, I feel like knowing and understanding and thinking about language has really helped and changed my writing and my world-building. So I don't regret that at all.
I mean, obviously there was a lot of like, "What are you gonna get a job in?" And whatever. But I figured any kind of humanities major was gonna have that problem. And certainly creative writing didn't seem like some kind of robust career path so I just decided those where other considerations. And the thing I most wanted to deal with was just getting a broader range of experiences and literary influences, and all sorts of things. And so, I mean, in that sense, it was really wonderful and interesting.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. I'd love for you to lead me to, I think I have this correct, that 2005 looks like it's the first year that you had two short stories published. Can you lead me to being able to do that and what you were exploring in your short fiction at that time?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yeah. My last few years of college were very much me like obsessively going and trying to hone my short fiction. Because like I said, when I first got to college, I was writing fanfic. So at that point I started getting into like the online world of science fiction and fantasy publishing. I was lurking in forums. I was, I was looking at all of the markets. I was just trying to figure out how to start some kind of a career in writing science fiction and fantasy.
And then it became very clear to me that my interest in short fiction was good because that was the easiest, or the most obvious path forward, was to try to really hone that and publish. And so I was writing a bunch of short fiction. It's an interesting period in my life because I could tell I was getting better. Every time I wrote a story I could tell I was getting to something that was like, I guess realizing my potential, but I was getting somewhere I'd always wanted to go but I'd never quite been able to.
And because it was short fiction, a lot of times in my novels, I had always felt like I couldn't convince myself to finish a novel if it wasn't really romantic. And I mean, I still love romance and I got no problem with writing romance in my novels, but it was hampering me in the sense that there were other kinds of stories I wanted to tell. But I just could not make myself deal with the whole giant pile of work that it is to organize and figure out a novel if it wasn't primarily romantic. And in the short fiction, because it was shorter, it let me play more and I didn't have to give myself the carrot of the happy ending, basically. I was able to do other things in them.
Sarah Enni: Do you mind me asking just really quick? That's so interesting and that feels like, tell me if you think this is right or not, but that's so fascinating. Do you think that was a holdover from the fan fiction world where the romance is like a central driver for a longer story?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Right. Yeah, I think definitely. Because part of what helped me finish those novels was because I was posting them chapter by chapter, which meant that I got all the love after every chapter. And because, again, figuring out how to motivate yourself from page one to page, you know, in the case of the giant monster 500, was a really extremely complicated task.
And obviously, as you say, I mean, that's great. Part of the whole reason the fans were coming back, and I was chomping out all of these chapters, was because they were all really excited by the romance, you know? So it was like my carrot and their carrot. And I knew I didn't only want to write that kind of fiction too, you know? But I had to figure out a way of writing other fiction. And I could tell, on some level, that my skill level and my ambition were not matching up really.
And like I had to figure that out, you know? So that was what the short fishing was doing. And I just remember writing these stories and being convinced it was the best story I'd ever written. And I'm sure it was. And I sent it off and I would get a standard rejection. And then I would look at it and I would like try to fix it, but I didn't have any writing group at the time.
There was one online writing group that I was in, which was called Critters, I don't know if that still exists. Science fiction and fantasy was really ahead of the curve in terms of online community building and a lot of these things. But this is really early. It was like 2002, 2003 when I was doing this. Cause the first ones got published in 2005 so this is around 2003 when I was really hardcore.
So I would submit these stories to these online groups and then people would give me critiques and then I would critique their work, cause it was like a point system where you could only submit things once you'd also critique other people's work. So it was really good in that sense cause I really just didn't know anybody. And people would give me some useful, but basically my work wasn't quite, it wasn't really even close to doing what I wanted it to do. But I was getting closer, you know? And so just this constant grind, and eventually I started getting personal rejections that was like, to me, just like the stars aligning.
I actually remember really the moment where I thought to myself, "Okay, I'm doing this." Like, "I'm definitely getting there. I'm getting somewhere as being a writer." Because the science fiction writer, Charles Sheffield was the father of one of my classmates in high school. So he came to a writing day that we had. And I remember him, this, to me, was like the biggest deal, when we had the writers come to school and we would get out of class and we could ask some questions.
And this was even weirder because I actually didn't have class like one period where he was giving his presentation, but he wasn't presenting to me at all. I just was in the library, cause I was always in the library, and I realized he was a science fiction writer. So I just kind of hung out in the back behind the stacks and listened to his speech. And I remember him saying, "Listen, you're gonna get rejected a lot. So just get used to it. A lot of rejection is good because it means you're trying a lot. And you know you're getting somewhere when you start getting personal rejections." When someone actually tells you like, "This isn't quite working, but I do think you have promise." You know?
I submitted my first short story when I was still in high school it was like form rejections, I mean, it was like a mimeograph paper and it was like badly cut. And believe me, I deserved it. And that always stayed in my mind, you know? So that was like 1998 or something. And then when I first got my first personal rejection from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, one of the big magazines. And much, much, much later, I got a story published in there that won the Nebula, so it's like a long trajectory.
But that first rejection, personal rejection, and afterwards a lot of bore them you know, "Not working for me. Alas this is not working for me." He was famous for these alas-a-grams, people would call them. And then one day I got this personal rejection and it was the day, I don't know if it was the day that he died, but it was the day I heard of his death, that Charles Sheffield died was the day that I got that personal rejection.
I just remember thinking like, I mean, it was really sad but it was like this strange connection. We never met each other, he had no idea that I was listening to him. I literally sat there and all this time of getting my rejections I just kept thinking like, "But remember just keep going because eventually, you'll get to a point where someone will recognize that you have something that you need to keep working on."
Sarah Enni: So I'd love for you to lead us to Racing the Dark, and how your first, The Spirit Binders series came to be.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Okay. So, remember I mentioned the giant, 500 word, way overwritten fanfic novel? So it starts there, basically. I had this thing and I knew it needed to be revised, cause it was like a secondary world fanfic otherwise known as more-or-less, original fiction with the names of the characters of the series, you know?
And I was like, 'I'm gonna write this." And I looked at it and I just was like, "Well, I'm gonna put this up on this website." I think it was Critters cause they would also let you put chapters up. And so I think I just solicited someone who would help me revise this novel. And this woman agreed. Again, talk about people who you never meet, your lives touch, and they help you out in a way that you can't... it's really far beyond anything that certainly you deserve. This sort of came out of nowhere.
And so she looked at the first say, half. Again, it was 500 pages of this monstrously overwritten... I literally had scenes that were like eight pages of her taking a bath. It was so extreme. So she basically looked at it, she gave me a lot of pointers, and she was like, "Listen, you have potential, okay. I will not deny you have potential. But this is just, it's just unreadable right now. You have to fix all of this."
So she gave me this sort of long, long list of pointers. Like, "You've just got to go back and deal with all of this and revise the whole novel. And then I'll look at the rest of it." And I said, "Will do. Thank you so much for your help." I'm sure I was like smarting but I was just kinda like, "Someone's willing to help me, I will not waste this opportunity." And this is all through email. I mean, again, this was someone I encountered because of this website. And so I spent a whole summer taking... I had this book called Self Editing For Fiction Writers.
Sarah Enni: Yeah! I have that too!
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Which continues to be the best book I've found, this simple sort of basic. And basically, every chapter is a thing that writers do that you should really go back and fix and rework and think about. Every single one, every single one, I had done. To the degree that had blown up my novel to 500 words. Not only did I use words other than said all the time, for anything, I used words other than said with an adverb every single time.
Sarah Enni: Oh my goodness. That's a lot.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Every time! The most astonishing! When I went back and I looked at the manuscript, basically I would read a chapter, I would go and look at the manuscript, and I would just start to blanche, like, "Oh God!" And then I would read another chapter and I would look at the manuscript and I would go like, "Oh my!" I mean, it was like all summer long.
And so I just kept at it. I printed it out, I highlighted everything I did wrong according to the chapter that described the thing that I was doing. It was a lot. It was a lot. It was the first time I'd really critically evaluated my writing and the first time someone had just concretely explained. Cause I understood that there was something different about what I was doing than what I was reading, but I couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was, you know? Cause I'd read a lot.
So it seemed to me that I should know how to do it, but that wasn't the case. There's a lot of stuff that for all that I read it, I mean, even stuff as basic as punctuation with dialogue, like I didn't realize that you put the comma if you had a dialogue tag afterwards. I mean just stuff like that. And again, I'd read that correctly. I just hadn't internalized it as a rule. So there was a lot of that. And basically how this relates to Racing the Dark is I spent a whole summer, like 10 hours a day, revising and revising and revising and revising, and more or less without changing the plot, I managed to cut 200 pages out of that novel.
Sarah Enni: Wow.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: That is how over written it was. And I remember the feeling after the end of that summer, I was like, "I'm so much better of a writer now." I'm so much better of a writer. I just improved to some astonishing degree just by critically evaluating. So I took that revised novel and then the woman who was helping me, and this is what I mean when I say sometimes you just get lucky, I don't know, your paths cross and you're just incredibly lucky. And this woman basically printed out every chapter of the revised novel. She would mark it up and she would mail it to me.
Because she said that she basically, she couldn't really work on the computer. She was also recovering from cancer surgery. And I said to her like, "You know, you don't have to do this. I appreciate everything you've done for me." And this is totally like, "No worries." You know? And she said, "You know what? It kind of takes my mind off of things and it's fine. And I'm happy to do it."
So all summer I was receiving these hand marked chapters. And so then I went through a whole other round of huge revisions. This time I did change the plot and I changed all sorts of stuff, you know? And so it was just amazing. It was just amazing to me. So basically over the course of multiple revisions, and this often happens to me, I'm in the middle of doing one project and I get this seed spark for another one. And I think it was relevant that it was towards the end of my monstrous growth of trying to figure out how to revise this novel, that I had this seed spark for a novel.
Basically the idea I had was a family is fleeing their island home after some kind of natural disaster. And that there is tension between the mother and the father and this sense that like the daughter has to figure out her way, but she isn't sure what to do or how to do that. But that was it, just this image of this family on a barge boat fleeing an Island. But it really stuck with me. I just kept thinking. And the world and all of that was just sort of like hanging out.
And so I finished the revisions of the other novel. And then I hunted for agents. I got a million-and-a-half rejections. I had become a much better writer, it continued to not be a publishable novel. So it was good, I was pleased with myself. I still have a lot of affection for that novel, you know? For what it is, it's delightful. And that's great. But it wasn't really a novel that should have gotten published as attested by the giant stack of rejections that I got, cause it was back in the old, snail-mail and self-addressed stamped envelope days. A lot, a lot of rejections.
And basically at some point I realized that that wasn't gonna work. I just couldn't publish that novel. And part of what really got me to understand that was because I started writing Racing the Dark. And it had a ton of problems and everything, but it was so clearly me finally being able to write my fiction, my long-form fiction, in the way that I'd been honing my short-form fiction.
Sarah Enni: Right. You leveled up.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yeah, I just had clearly leveled up, and so when I went back, I was like, "Okay, I love you, you helped me so much, but now I'm just gonna have to let you sit in the drawer. In my old story file." And so that was when I wrote Racing the Dark. And then that was like its own long process of revision. Basically, we all keep leveling up and working, but when you're on the early part of the [unintelligible] curve, every novel you're just constantly overhauling your process, and your way of thinking, and literally how you think and how you create and how you craft your stories.
So Racing the Dark was its own crazy extreme game of one-upsmanship or something. But the first book was hard for me to write emotionally. It went to some dark places. And the second one was just brutal. I mean, truly, I have never had a more complicated and fraught writing process in my life. It was just the hardest book it was ever possible to write. I feel like I barely made it. It was really brutal.
My long-term relationship at the time was ending right when I was finishing it. I was incredibly isolated. I wrote most of it in the middle of winter, a brutal winter in New York, where I didn't leave the house for months. And I had this horrible sleep schedule where I was waking up at like, let's say two or three in the afternoon, so I would get maybe two or three hours of sunlight and then it was dark. And then I would work these 15, 16 hour nights.
Because I'd promised that I would turn it in at the end of January. Basically, when I promised I'd turn it in at the end of January, I had written half the book. So let's say the book ended up being 130,000 words, I had like 60,000 words. So I wrote 70,000 words in like a month-and-a-half and I'm not a fast writer. And it was a hard book. I definitely leveled up, I could tell. I reread that recently, like last summer, and it was like visiting this old time in my life. And I was really having a hard time and it was... whew!
But I was really impressed with myself too. I kind of felt like, "Well, you know, at least for how hard it was, I'm really glad I managed to get this out." But it really took something out of me. I mean, it took months for me to recover and write something else after that.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. I've had some of those projects, you have to walk away for a while and recover and be a person again.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Right. And I think on some level it certainly helped me, but it was in a sense that I just had to really put out there a lot of things that I'd been repressing or not able to deal with. For me in a lot of ways, that's just what fiction does. It allows me an outlet for disentangling things that I haven't been able to figure out on my own.
Sarah Enni: I wanna jump ahead to talk about the more recent stuff. I want to touch on The Summer Prince and Love is the Drug and then get to Trouble the Saints. But The Summer Prince is when I got to know your work. It kind of burst on the scene, it was very exciting, especially in the world of young adult. I mean, I'll just speak for my experience, but I love YA fantasy and this felt like this breath of fresh air in that genre when it came out. So I'd love for you to lead us to how did The Summer Prince come about? And did that book, when you were developing it and creating it, did it feel different to you?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yes. The Summer Prince I knew, from the moment it came together in my brain, that I was finally getting to the place that I feel now. That incredibly hard experience with The Burning City was more or less laying the ground, or tilling the soil, to allow something like The Summer Prince to come out. Cause basically I finished that novel, that relationship ended, I was on my own as an adult for the first time in my adult life, I was 27. Cause I moved in with that boyfriend when I was 19. So I basically went straight from my parents' house to living with somebody who was significantly older than me.
So really, I hadn't had a freedom, or an ability, to just see and feel myself in my own space. And that idea for The Summer Prince really started to germinate exactly when I left that relationship. All of the pieces came together and I kept thinking about it, and it kept growing. And it had this like pyramid city, and the matriarchal society, and the summer king. Using those very old folk lore, traditional ideas, and mixing those with extreme science fiction and what now people call cli-fi or solar punk. At that time, believe me, I had no idea what on earth those terms meant.
I was not thinking about that but I was, and am, so very interested in those sorts of issues. How people might manage to create better worlds and what those problems, those worlds, might have still. I read Ursula Guin for the first time a couple of years before that, The Left Hand of Darkness. And those interesting experiments that she was doing, I love her, were really also percolating in my brain. And so I think I just was finally at a place in my life, in terms of skill level and just personally, to actually tackle something that was as ambitious as that idea.
And I started writing it because I just felt like I needed a change. I needed something to be different. I needed a space of my own. That was really what it was, I just needed a space of my own. And so I had a lot of Amtrak points and I used them to literally take a train across the country. Like I took a train from New York to Vancouver.
Sarah Enni: Really?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yes. And that was when I started The Summer Prince, it was sitting on a train. And I'll tell you something about trains, long-distance trains. People who take them tend to be people who are interesting in a lot of ways, maybe slightly more displaced, and I'm totally including myself in that. We're just people who are not going from one town. But if you're gonna take the train across the country, there's a reason why you're doing it, I guess is the best way to put it. And so a lot of different reasons, right? But there was a sort of comradery, people telling stories, kind of hard, brutal stories, people sharing a lot of themselves.
And, you know, me sitting around like, "Yes, yes, yes. I'm so sorry that this tragic, horrifying story you're telling me happened to you, but can you just give me a second." You know, like looking over my shoulder like, "You're writing something religious?" Oh my gosh. You can only imagine, if you think about that novel, what these people thought that I was writing. And I had, of course, as always I'm drastically overestimating my ability to write a novel quickly. And so I had some notion that I was just gonna be able to bang this out.
Cause I rented a place in Vancouver for three weeks and I was just gonna write as much as I could on the train and then write as much as I could in Vancouver. And then that was gonna be like the first draft. So I didn't know if it was gonna be published. I really just didn't know an idea of anything. I just knew that it was easily gonna be the best book I had written. I knew that it was finally me getting to where I'd wanted to be as a writer.
And so that was it. I just knew I had to throw the dice at this point, take some time off, and write it. Even though financially at the time, it didn't seem to make that much sense. And I was living on my own. It was a lot of stuff that I was trying to juggle. I just did it.
Sarah Enni: Do you mind really quick? I do want to ask about Love is the Drug. But do you mind just pitching The Summer Prince in case people aren't familiar with it?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yeah. FYI, I am the worst pitcher of my work, but I will attempt to do this. So basically it's set in a fictional city on the coast of what had once been Brazil in the post-apocalyptic future. And it's in a matriarchal society where every four years they elect a man to be a king, who's basically a figurehead, political symbols, like sex symbol and rockstar. And then at the end of that year, he is ritually killed. And so it's the story of that year of the life of the summer king and his artistic partner June. Basically they create revolutionary art and explore the roots of where they live and it's injustices and also the beauty of where they're living.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. It was a really beautiful book and everyone should go read it. I really love looking at the shape of your career and seeing how open you are to these different kinds of stories, because then you follow up The Summer Prince with Love is the Drug, which is a very different story. Do you mind, before we dive into it, do you mind pitching Love is a Drug for us?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Basically Love is a Drug takes place in Washington D.C. around the corner from the future now of the past, let's just put it like that. Because it's around the corner of the future of 2014, when it came out. And in the midst of a global flu pandemic Washington D.C. is under protective quarantine. And it's all about the differential effects of healthcare access, of education, of all of these things that we're now totally in the middle of seeing, but through the lens of a political thriller of a young girl, who's at a D.C. private school, and is in between these worlds.
Because D.C. is at once a very political, wealthy enclave. And when I grew up there, I don't know if it still is at this point, a majority Black city with a very large Black middle class. And also a really substantial population that's in poverty. And those extreme class differences are always bubbling under the surface, or are very much on the surface depending on who you are, you know? But the main character, Bird of that novel, is in between those worlds. And so through her for a second, you could see all the ways in which D.C.'s political structure is based upon and exploitative of those class differences.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I want to get to the pandemic in a second cause that is just very interesting. But in The Summer Prince, you have this fully realized secondary world, as you say, it's like a true futuristic fantasy. But Love is the Drug, like you're saying, political thriller. It's contemporaneous, and it feels like it was at least a little autobiographical as far as going back to your childhood, and real world settings that you know. So I'm interested in what made you want to tackle these very different genres?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Right. Yeah. I guess on the surface they certainly do seem like extraordinarily different books. I mean, I think to me what the core of it is that I am always hunting for a story that allows me to explore an angle of class differences, injustice, racial injustice, those themes to me are really important. And so with The Summer Prince it was very much like taking it into a future possible world and exploring a complicated utopia, is what I like to call it.
You know, it's not exactly dystopia because I think, frankly, it'd be really great to live in Palmares Tres, so that was one thing. And then maybe the political stuff in that was sort of something that continued to interest me because I grew up in D.C. Because I went to this elite private school in D.C. where a lot of the kinds of class, and race, and those intersections and gender, and all of that were so much a part of my experience as a teenager. I guess I decided that I really wanted to try to get at some of that in a way that was less allegorical.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Right. And I'm so interested in it, especially because, I lived in D.C. for about six years. And I have this idea in the back of my mind for a book that's set there. And the reason why I feel compelled to tell this particular story there is because D.C. feels like one of the closest American cities to a fantasy world. The stakes can be raised in D.C. so easily because it's the seat of power, because there's a lot of history there. Because, as you say, it's a mix of so many extremes. So it struck me as, in some ways, it is fantastical and has a lot of that element to it.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yeah. I mean, it definitely is very high stakes. And I guess that's also part of the reason why I wanted to do it. Because when you grow up, especially if you grow up the way that I did which is, as you say, very autobiographical as someone who was straddling worlds. A Black girl who was in this elite school, but also her religious community is very much not part of that world. And it was part of middle and lower middle class Black.
And D.C. has African immigrants, immigrants from the Caribbean, African-American descendants of slaves, like all of us in this other world. And my family is like third-generation D.C. The first generation, my grandfather's generation, they were able to come in and get government jobs and established because the government was one of the very first institutions that desegregated for Black workers. And so D.C. really did have a very vibrant middle-class Black community.
So that context for me, it gives D.C. a layer that it very rarely gets in all of the political thrillers, and all of the movies that are set in it. It's funny, as I mentioned, I went to Vancouver to start writing The Summer Prince. I'm always complaining about how everyone makes D.C. like D.C. Vancouver, because they'll actually film a lot of D.C. in Vancouver and it's just ridiculous. I mean, it's ridiculous. It doesn't look like DC. It doesn't. And they turn it into this totally whitewashed place. I mean, no one's ever heard of Go-Go. Nothing is like what it actually is like. And so I think I just really wanted to be able to write something that had those kinds of stakes, but actually describe the city.
Sarah Enni: Well, I want to ask about writing a pandemic story, and then you and I are talking in May where we're still sheltering in place. I'm not sure how it's like where you are?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yes. Mexico City is locked down until at least the end of May.
Sarah Enni: Okay. Okay. LA is through at least the 15th and basically everyone's agreed we're not leaving anytime soon. What has it been like for you to see this unfold after you spent a lot of time building a world around this kind of a circumstance?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: I mean, it's been very uncanny. It's been really odd. I mean, people keep asking me, like, "You never thought anything like this would happen." And I'm like, "I can't say I never thought that, because I definitely did think that. In fact, I wrote a whole novel about it." And yet, I am on some level just as shocked as everybody else. Part of it is that I'm shocked... let's put it like this. I wrote a novel that was literally about a pandemic and a government conspiracy and an extremely bad government response to a pandemic. And I did not even touch the surface. Like, I barely managed to imagine something like a bad government response compared to actual reality. And that is more than the disease, that's, what's getting to me.
And obviously the response in the States has been extraordinarily appalling. On some level, truly for a fiction writer, you just stare at it. Like no one would write this. Like no one would have written this. If I had put this in my novel, it would have been written out because it would not be believable in any way. But that attitude is infecting and also reflective of the attitudes of other leaders in the world. You know, Bolsonaro is doing his best to go as far, or worse, than what Trump is doing. In Mexico the response has not been great. I mean, it hasn't been that bad, but it's not been great.
There's a lot of people who just actually don't seem to care that much about a lot of people dying, which is not something I was able to predict in that novel. I was able to bring it to the extent that they don't care about certain classes of people dying, but the extent to which it really just seems to be like all people? That actually is sort of surprising to me.
Sarah Enni: Let's talk about Trouble the Saints, but I want to ask about between Love is the Drug and Trouble the Saints, I think there was a lot of change in your life, and there was a span of years, and I know you went back to school. I'd just love to hear about what's been going on in that time.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yeah. Yeah. So it's been like six years of gap, right? So I've been doing a lot. It sort of seemed like I had just fallen off the face of the earth, but I had really fallen onto the earth is how I describe it. I was living in New York when The Summer Prince came out. And when it came out I had a draft of Love is the Drug, but I needed to revise it. Basically, a lot of things in life, like our relationship ended and I was left there in the sense of I didn't have enough money to live in New York. I mean, it was pretty clear that I had to make some serious decisions about my life.
Because, you know, a lot of people live in major cities, especially in New York. You can maybe make it if you're sharing the rent with someone in a one bedroom apartment, but the second you can't do that, a lot of equations have to change. And so I was like, "Do I get a day job? Do I do something else? Do I freelance?" I was barely managing even before, and then everything started changing and I was like, "Oh gosh, what am I gonna do?"
So I just decided to put all my stuff in storage and put off the decision and say, "All right, I'm gonna travel to Mexico. I'm just gonna spend five weeks in Mexico." Like, "That's my plan, because I don't know what to do with my life right now." Basically I was like, "I have enough money to do that." So I took five weeks. I flew to Cancun cause that was the cheapest ticket, cause they'll subsidize those tickets. But I got out of Cancun as quickly as possible. So I just flew to Cancun, took a bus to Tulum, which is a smaller beach town. Spent two weeks riding around like diving in cenotes.
I actually had the first part of what became Trouble the Saints, and on that trip was when I decided that I was going to continue it and turn it into a novel, cause it was at that point, just like a novella. The first section of Trouble the Saints was what I had and it was just gonna be one novella and I decided I wanted to keep going with the story.
And so that trip was when I first started drafting like the next parts of that story. Which to me, was again, a big leap because it was a totally different thing than anything I'd written before. Plus I also had to actually revise Love is the Drug, but I could not get my brain in that space. It just was impossible so I just put it off. And I'm running around, I didn't know any Spanish, but I just loved Mexico. I'd gotten a grant to do a research trip there a few years before that, and I went with my sister and we toured, we went to every archeological site, and I got all these books that I couldn't read cause they were in Spanish.
Cause my dream was to write a novel that was set in pre-hispanic, Aztec, Mexico. And that was like my giant Magnum Opus, which by the way, continues to be the giant Magnum Opus that I haven't written. You know, that was like my whole dream. And so I came there, I was like, "I'm just gonna go." Eventually I did like couch surfing, I stayed with some people and I kept doing Pimsleur Spanish. And then I went to San Cristobal in Chiapas, and that was when things really started exploding in a sense of just like me seeing all sorts of different possibilities of my life that I couldn't see before.
Because I ended up hooking up with these students and they were students of like an ecology program that went to various different locations in the South of Mexico. But at this point they were in San Cristobal. And so that was how we ended up... like the acquaintance who I did couch surfing with, knew someone else, who knew someone else. And eventually I ended up meeting these people. And it was such an interesting experience because they were students. They could read English, but they couldn't speak it very well. I obviously spoke zero Spanish.
I mean, at this point my Spanish was like at 1%, so it wasn't actually zero, but it was maybe 1%. So you would think that we would not be able to communicate with one another and this would just fizzle. But no, I spent like an entire 10 days hanging out with them and we would just go do things. We went dancing and they invited me to their parties. And I had like this total opening into a completely different world. A completely different world. I don't know how even to describe it. It's so odd. To me, at least at that time, I'd been a student, but I never had that kind of comradery. I'd never seen people... that kind of sharing of artistic and political and academic vision.
It's something that in the year since, I've really become part of those communities and have many more friends in them. But this was like my first window into that. And again, I'm not sure the extent to which this also exists in the States, but at least in my experience, I never experienced that. And I think it's something that is much more common and welcome in Latin America. And so that was the first time I'd seen it. Again, the language barrier was kind of extreme, but eventually, again, cause I was hanging out with them so much, I ended up learning more Spanish.
My Spanish picked up, so by the time I ended that trip, my Spanish had gone from like 1% to 10%. And I remember there was a night that I was hanging out with them, these two friends in particular, and it was on one of these wonderful walking streets in San Cristobal which is a beautiful, beautiful picturesque city. And it was kind of like a mescaleria. We were just drinking shots of mescal and sitting outside. And they give you botanas, these little plates of food, salty food, that you eat with your drinks. Right?
And cause we were drinking mescal they were like, "Well, do you want botanas?" And my friends were like, "Oh yes, bring us chapulines." So chapulines are roasted crickets. It's a very traditional botana in Mexico, not so much in Chiapas, but you know, we were drinking mescal, so whatever. So they gave us some chapulines and I remember looking at them and I was like, "Oh, those are insects!" And they're like, "Yes, yes."
And I'd already had like two or three shots of mescal so I was kinda like, "But those are insects." I was like, "Well, I can't cause, you know, I'm vegetarian." And they looked at me and they said, "Well, you know, insects, aren't meat." Again, this is like extraordinarily basic Spanish and mixed with extraordinarily basic English. But we managed to understand one another and like, "Insects aren't meat." And somehow this like struck me as very logical. I was like, "It's true. It's true! Insects aren't meat. They are insects!"
And I kept looking at them and then another shot of mescal came, they were like 20 pesoes a shot. They're dirt cheap. So I looked at them and then I was like, "Alright, alight." So I picked up the mescal and I like looked away and I just reached out and pick them up. And I was like, "Just don't look at them. As long as I don't look at them, then I can eat them." And I chewed them and I drank and I was like, "These are delicious!" Would you believe that I ate that entire plate of crickets?
Sarah Enni: Oh my God, that's amazing.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Not looking at them, but I tell you this story because it was in the middle of that night, and I'm eating crickets, and it's this beautiful night, and we're just hanging out and talking about all sorts of things, and a lot of like serious issues, you know? Ecology and politics. And again, I cannot explain to you how we managed to do this, except that when you get drunk, it's easier to let whatever language you have in you out. And so we just figured it out. And we were talking about all sorts of things.
And I just thought to myself, "I don't want to leave. I just want to live here." And it was like I was talking to myself, you know? And this other part of me said, "Well, you know, you could just live here. Why don't you just live here?" And I was like, "Yeah, but. Oh, come on." Like, "How can I just move here?" It's like, "Well, why not?" Like, "You can just live here." I said, "Okay, okay, pause. I'll just come back to this when I'm not drunk." You know? Like, "Let's just make this decision sober. Because I don't know what's even going through my head."
And I woke up the next morning. I said, "Okay. So, I thought that. Now I'm sober. What do I think?" And I was like, "Nope, I think I might! I think I do want to live here." I just think it never would have occurred to me. I don't think I ever would have been able to get outside of myself enough if I hadn't just been in that space, which sometimes happens, right? You get your heart broken and you're just kinda more open than you have been. You're just kind of thinking about things differently or just in a weird altered space. And it's horrible. Don't get me wrong.
I'm not like, "You should break your heart every few years and figure out your life." No. But if it's happened, there is a sort of a weird opportunity in it, like a kind of perverse ability to sort of take a step back and go, "Okay. So what do I really want?" And that was what ended up happening to me. I just said, "Well, I could go back in New York." And I love New York, you know, but it's become a very uninhabitable city without money, which means for artists. For artists without day jobs, and even with day jobs, it's become very different from what it was.
What New York represents and what it is, are more or less as diverged right now as they've ever been. And what I found in Mexico City, when I moved here a few months after that, I couch surfed on friend's couches for six months after I came back from Mexico that time. And lots of loving kindness, that's all I can tell you. A lot of people put up with me and like went on vacation and let me stay and house-sit and stuff. I mean, I just made it work until I could get another ticket out. And I moved here without speaking Spanish and without knowing anybody.
I don't know. I think it's just an amazing opportunity that I took, but it was not one I would have ever been able to take if I hadn't been willing to make that leap. And in Mexico City, I found a place that really is more welcome to artists, that does allow you to create. And I'm not saying it doesn't have its problems because it obviously does, but it just has more room in a way that I felt New York was just squeezing us out and out and out, you know? And also a wonderful, amazing community of people from all parts of the world also congregating here. And that's what I loved about New York. And so to find it here, was just like...
So basically this has changed my life and everything was much better. And that was why I was able to write Trouble the Saints. Cause I finally had room to breathe, I didn't have as much financial pressure. The thing that would have been most logical, because I did have some success with Love is the Drug and The Summer Prince, would have been to write another YA, and I love YA. And I'm right now, finishing a new YA novel, but I just did not have a YA novel in me at that time. Like I really didn't.
Sarah Enni: Before we talk more about specifics. I'd love for you to pitch Trouble the Saints, just so we have a good sense of it.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Alright. Here we go again. So, Trouble the Saints is basically New York City in the dawn of the U.S. entrance into World War II. A woman is a jaded assassin, is trying to get out of the game, and discovers the truth about her mob boss and her former lover who she's still hung up on. And the woman who is the jaded assassin, is an African-American woman who's passing as white for the mob. And so it's about the dual worlds that she lives in, about her negotiations, it's about power, it's about what we sacrifice in order to try to get some and how much that takes away from our own humanity. About how marginalized people in white power structures have to make a lot of very bad choices and that those choices have a long-term impact. And that's part of a legacy of trauma.
Sarah Enni: It fascinates me that you had that first novella of Trouble the Saints that it was built on, but then it sounds like you left New York in order to feel free enough to write about New York.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yes. I mean that, to me, was always like very odd, like I'm sitting around in Mexico City and sometimes I went to Veracruz and I wrote a bit of it. I was traveling all around Mexico and I'm writing about New York. But I felt like, ironically, New York never would have let me write about New York if I'd stayed there. It was for no other reason but financial, I just did not have the resources to be able to write as risky of a book as this was.
Sarah Enni: Well, and given what you're tackling in this novel, like you just eloquently said, the way that New York wants to think about itself and the way that it actually treats its artistic class, is so different. It seems like perhaps through writing Trouble the Saints in this place where you did find that community, you're like processing all of the disappointment maybe?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: I mean, it's interesting because anyone who goes to New York, people who move to New York, especially artists who moved to New York, we're all moving there with a notion of its artistic history. A notion of like being part of that group of wonderful people who also moved there and found art and found a creative expression. To me, that was part of like joy of discovery there, you know? And it is hard to realize that you can't. I'm finally able to write and take a leap and do more daring things because I'm not constantly terrified of paying rent and health insurance premiums.
Sarah Enni: What is it that made this story an adult story and the correct story for now?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: It's interesting. I have friends who write... well, okay, let's play with this. I have a friend who writes middle-grade and she writes adult. And she said she's thought about YA, or she's tried, but it just hasn't worked. And so she says, "Well, you know, I just think I have an inner 11-year-old and an inner 24-year-old. But I just don't have an inner 17-year-old." She just can't get to that part.
And I think for a lot of us, that's true. We just have ages at which we can always go back, and there's always a creative spark around that. And it's interesting to me, because for a long time, was only really able to write YA. Even if it was technically not YA, it was more or less YA. I just have an inner 17-year-old. I mean, I really do. I have an inner 17-year-old and I can always go back there. And I always feel this powerful need to try to express and write stories for people at that cusp page.
Because you're almost an adult, but you're not quite. You're still under people's power, but you are really questioning that power. To me that is endlessly ripe, right? To me in any case, for all I've grown up, I've never lost that questioning. And that sense of moment of really understanding certain injustices, which was for me 17. And so writing an adult novel that was straight up an adult novel, wasn't something that I'd really thought about or been able to do until I wrote the short story, or the novella, that ended up being the novel.
And I can't tell you exactly what it was, but I think it was something in me, maybe it did actually come from this. Because I had this moment when I was 28, 29, and it was thinking about how I wanted to travel. But as we were discussing, these financial issues meant that I could barely manage to pay the rent in New York. So getting on a plane and going someplace else was some kind of a joke. And so I was feeling kind of sad because I was thinking I wanted to live in other places, and I wanted to do this and that. And I just said, "Well you know, I guess it's too late. And I guess I'm just too old."
Okay, now obviously, I just turned 38. So this is sort of hilarious to me, but it was very, very clear in my mind that I just felt too old. That I'd lost that window of opportunity. And maybe it's more that I felt being adult was that, just giving up on a certain level. And I think I started writing it in a certain way, because I set the character to be older than I was at the time. She's younger than I am now, but she was older than I was when I started writing it. Cause at that point I was like 30, 31 when I wrote the first draft of that. And so I was just like, "Well, what is it like to have made decisions that you can't get away from? You can't take them back and they've had really brutal consequences?"
And at the time you made them, they seemed like good decisions. Or they seemed at the very least, or maybe even they seemed like great decisions. That you were doing something really good. But at some point you're older and you realize that they were actually really bad. That you had totally lied to yourself and been lied to. And now it's too late. You just can't get that back. It's too late. Like what do you do? And I think that was that feeling and possibly really rooted in this weird notion I had of just like, "It's too late. I'm too old." You know?
And I think it's interesting, now that I'm saying this, that it probably did come out of this. I was finally able to write an adult, or wanted to write an adult novel, because I wanted to capture that weariness. Whereas within six months of me drafting that story, my life had totally changed. And I had totally recaptured, in a certain way, that spirit of newness or of change, or just me deciding to do different things. And all of that kind of feeling of, "It's too late and now I can't do anything." It just went away because I realized I wasn't, I just did it.
And of course that was when I started writing the rest of it. I mean, that was when I decided I had to keep going with the story. That I couldn't just make it a bleak, one-note, noir story. I wanted it to do something else. But on the other hand, a lot of what I was trying to do, and I think that became much clearer to me as I kept going with it, was also trying to understand the choices my parents made, trying to understand the choices my grandparents made, trying to really delve into what does it do to us? What does generational trauma do to us? Cause none of this comes from nowhere, you know?
And that feeling of it being too late, and everything being done, can also be something sort of inherited. It can also be a sign of the fatalism that comes from a societal pressure, a history of oppression, that beats down even your notion of what you can aspire to, or think about. And those were the themes and the issues that started coalescing around this kernel of a story that I'd had. But again, it was being out of that sad or more defeated headspace. It was being out of the city. It was a lot of things that allowed me the distance in order to go back and look at it. Cause it's not just a New York story outside of New York. It's very much a story of African-American trauma that I wrote in Mexico.
Sarah Enni: Right. Right. And I like to wrap up with advice, like I said. This is kind of a difficult maybe advice question, but for people who are interested in blending genres in the way that you do. Do you have advice for how to parse that or how to keep track of that kind of thing?
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Probably the best thing to do if you want to work in any genre, and especially play, is to A: Seek out and read and enjoy as much as you can of what I would call like a center, like the bull's eyes of those genres. You know, science fiction and fantasy, but then also a lot of people in science fiction and fantasy especially, are playing in the margins and doing all sorts of wild and interesting experiments.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: And the more I read and appreciate what they're doing, the more excited and inspired I get, you know? So that, to me, is one of the best things. And there's a lot of ways in which people who you wouldn't think are experimenting or are experimental in their genres, actually are. I think if anything, now that I've brought in so much of my own range of books that I'm reading, I'm discovering all sorts of interesting conversations or possible connections with genre. By genre, I mean, science fiction and fantasy, in books that aren't part of those genres.
All sorts of interesting, weird, plays and just all sorts of stuff that I think it's really cool that people are trying. For example, a great example of this actually, is Colson Whitehead. And in his novels, he has a fabulous, deft, absurdist touch with extremely heavy material and really brutal stories that still have a lot of hope in them. He just won the Pulitzer again for The Nickel Boys, which is great. I love that book too. And he deals with a lot of these issues of the legacy of trauma. But I think he has a certain kind of take, which is very absurd.
And I think his notion of the absurd is what gives his book, to me anyway, a touch of what I see as a fantastic sensibility. Not content, but sensibility. And that is what I love about having branched out. All of a sudden I find these things, all sorts of places. There's Colson Whitehead, obviously. I mean, there's all sorts of magical realism and stuff. Things that are published as literary realism, but have all sorts of different angles and aspects and ways of viewing the world.
So in folklore, and other kinds of stories, and other kinds of nonfiction, there's all sorts of weirdness all over the world. I think that the more I expose myself to it, the more rich and fertile my imagination gets. And it almost makes it automatic and obvious, like genre-hopping and blending. That's the way the world is, you know?
Sarah Enni: I love your use of the word sensibility there. I think that's a really powerful word to embrace. I write contemporary YA books, but I read fantasy really broadly. And I feel like there is an element of that sensibility that I bring to my work just by virtue of having immersed myself in it so deeply.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Exactly, exactly. And I think what I read for, more than anything at this point, is a certain kind of sensibility. I tweet once a year, but when I tweet, maybe last year, was was that the thing I find I read most for now, than any other thing, is emotional honesty.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, not to bring it back, but we've talked a lot in this episode about ways that people are not being emotionally honest right now. So it is nice to find that in your art now. It's comforting. Oh my gosh Alaya, what a wonderful conversation. I so appreciate you giving me so much time. This was a total joy.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: This was wonderful. Thank you!
Sarah Enni: And I hope we get to talk again in the future. I would love that.
Alaya Dawn Johnson: Yes. I'd love to too.
Sarah Enni: Thank you so much to Alaya. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @Alayaadj, and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). This show was brought to you by this weekend, A Mighty Blaze YA Weekend July 25th and 26th. Check out AMightyBlaze.com for more information and tune in live at facebook.com/AMightyBlaze.
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Finally, if you have any writing or creativity questions, I would love to hear them because we are revving back up on getting these mailbag episodes going. We took a little break for production reasons, but we're getting back in the swing. So I want to hear from you. Call and leave your questions at First Draft's voicemail that's at (818) 533-1998. Or you can record yourself asking the question and send me the audio file at mailbag [at] First Draft pod [dot] com.
Hayley Hershman produces First Draft and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Callie Wright. The theme music is by Dan Bailey and the logo was designed by Collin Keith, thanks also to transcriptionist-at-large Julie Anderson. And as ever, thanks to you, 20 pesos, mescal drinkers for listening.
I want to hear from you!
Have a question about writing or creativity for Sarah Enni or her guests to answer? To leave a voicemail, call (818) 533-1998 or send an email to mailbag @ firstdraftpod dot com!
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Every Tuesday, I speak to storytellers like Veronica Roth, author of Divergent; National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jason Reynolds; Creator of Sex and the City Candace Bushnell; YouTube empresario and author Hank Green; Actors, comedians and screenwriters Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham; author and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast Linda Holmes; Bestselling authors and co-hosts of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow; Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar: The Last Airbender; John August, screenwriter of Big Fish and co-host of the Sciptnotes podcast; or Rhett Miller, musician and frontman for The Old 97s. Together, we take deep dives on their careers and creative works.
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