First Draft Episode #277: Leah Johnson
October 29, 2020
Listen to the episode
Leah Johnson talks about her bestselling debut novel, You Should See Me In a Crown, and the forthcoming Rise to the Sun.
This episode is brought to you by Everything I Thought I Knew, a new young adult novel from Shannon Takoaka out from Candlewick Press October 13th. Eight months after 17 year old Chloe has a heart transplant, everything is different. Most notably, vivid recurring nightmares about crashing a motorcycle in a tunnel and memories of people and places she doesn't recognize. As Chloe searches for answers, what she learns will lead her to question everything she thought she knew about life, death, love, identity, and the true nature of reality. Everything I Thought I Knew by Shannon Takoaka comes out from Candlewick Press on October 13th.
Welcome to First Draft with me, Sarah Enni. This week I'm talking to Leah Johnson, bestselling author of You Should See Me in a Crown, and the forthcoming Rise to the Sun. I loved what Leah had to say about how burning out on journalism led her back to creative writing, how her experience in an MFA program changed her life, on and off the page. What she wishes someone had talked to her about before promoting her debut novel, and she gives great advice for people with books coming out during the pandemic.
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Okay, now please sit back, relax, and enjoy my conversation with Leah Johnson.
Sarah Enni: So hi, Leah, how are you?
Leah Johnson: I'm okay. I'm really excited about being here so anything that I was feeling before, if I was like upset before I came on this, now I'm definitely okay.
Sarah Enni: Well, I am so excited to chat today. I'm so excited to talk about You Should See Me in a Crown. I'm gonna ask non spoiler-y questions and I want to hear a lot about Rise of the Son, so we're gonna cover all that stuff. But as you know, I love to start at the beginning. So I'm gonna ask you about where you were born and raised.
Leah Johnson: So I was born and raised on the west side of Indianapolis, Indiana. And I specify that I was raised on the west side because there's a really specific experience to growing up where I grew up. I like to call it rural adjacent. We're like right on the edge of the Indianapolis metropolitan area. So where my parents live, you can drive like five minutes further West, and you're in the middle of corn fields and soybean fields and a town that's like incredibly sparsely populated with a lot of white people.
But if you go five minutes, 10 minutes, the other direction, then you're headed towards downtown. You're in a busier area. You have a lot more people of color, a lot more economic variation. And so that's where I was born and raised. I really feel like that experience shaped everything I know about race and class.
Sarah Enni: Which I definitely have some questions about that because your debut novel is very specifically set where you grew up, or in a fake town near where you grew up. I know that informs a lot of your setting so I want to ask about that for sure. In that context, how was reading and writing a part of growing up for you?
Leah Johnson: I know that most writers say this, and I know that most writers say this on this show in particular, because I've listened to hundreds of episodes. Listeners, I just want you to know, I am a First Draft stan, okay. I am an A-one day-one stan of this show. But yeah, I was a voracious reader growing up. If there was one thing my mom wanted to make sure we had instilled in us as kids, it was a dedicated, spiritual practice and a love of stories and storytelling. And so if I wasn't at church, I was at the library.
And we didn't come from a family that had a lot of money, or a lot of disposable income, and so we weren't buying books at Barnes and Noble. We weren't running to Indie Bound to find, I don't even think we had Indie Bound back then. We weren't running to Indie Bound to buy the newest hardcover. We were reading books that were given to us. So I had a lot of hand-me-down books when I was a kid.
I was at the library sitting in the teen section, curled up in the bean bags, trying to lose myself in these worlds. That was the beginning of everything, I guess. Not even an escapist need, I didn't identify it as escapist until I got much older, but back then I just knew it was the thing that I was supposed to do. And so if we didn't have much else in the house, we were gonna have some books in the house.
Sarah Enni: This is kind of a random question. But I'm interested in, when I think of the Bible, I grew up reading the Bible, and having that as kind of the backbone of so many stories. Of course, it's the backbone of a lot of American stories and Western lit. How do you feel about storytelling in that context and how was that a part of forming a love of stories for you?
Leah Johnson: Yeah, that's a really interesting question, actually. It's one I haven't gotten a lot of time, or a lot of opportunities, to think about. But I will say, I realized I could read - I don't know if other people have this lightbulb moment where it's like, "Oh my God, I actually know what these words are." I realized I could read when I was in church and we were standing up to read the scripture on a Sunday morning, and I looked at the Bible and I could identify some of the words that were going by. And I was like, "Oh, hey, I'm in that thing. So now y'all can't stop me." Like, "I don't need somebody to read to me anymore? I'm on it."
And so what I know of story, and I think there's so many fantastical elements in the Bible, there's such interesting structure to stories in the Bible. It's like, everything has a beginning, middle and end. There's a really clear three-act structure, especially to parables, right? And so when you are growing up in that environment and you are indoctrinated so strictly in this way, to know the word inside and out, to be able to recite it on command, I think inherent to that is an understanding of how stories function.
And not only how stories function on the page, but how they function in the world; how people receive them, how they internalize them, how they metabolize them. And so I'm good at public speaking because of the experiences I had in the church in the same way that I think I understand stories the way I understand them because of what the church gave to me.
Sarah Enni: Yeah. I love that. And what you're saying is making me think about, I don't want to jump around too much, but we're gonna talk a little bit about your express desire to create books that are filling a need that was lacking when you were growing up. And I think what you just described as seen through your religious background, how stories are used to inform active decisions in people's lives. People use the stories of the Bible to move through the world in a way that they can believe in. That just feels so necessary, like that just fits right in with your desire, I think.
Leah Johnson: Yeah, for sure. It's definitely in line with my, I don't know if you can call it writing practice, like pedagogy, but that's definitely in-line with that for me.
Sarah Enni: I want to ask about the books that you wrote. You had an essay, which we're gonna bring up later when we talk about getting your agent, but How Young Adult Literature Taught Me to Love like a White Girl. The line within that essay that applies here is, "So many of the books I read when I was growing up were riddled with anti-Blackness, and not just implied anti-Blackness either." Can you talk about that reading experience and how you came to understand that what you had read was so out-of-step with your own life?
Leah Johnson: So I think I didn't recognize the explicit anti-Blackness in the things that I read as a teenager, until I was old enough to look back on them and have a different context for it. And so I remember just at the beginning of the pandemic, for instance, I was living in Brooklyn and I came back home to stay with my parents for a couple of months. Cause, you know, at the beginning of this, everybody was like, "Okay, it's gonna be a couple of weeks. We'll be in and out." And I was like, "Oh, that's a good reason to go home, get a quick vacation, hang out with the family."
So I was back in my childhood bedroom for the first time in years. And I was reading some of the books that I had read when I was a teenager. I was like thumbing through these pages. And I got to one book that I remember loving when I was a kid. And there were so many lines in the book where things that were coded as Black, even if they never said explicitly, 'We're talking about Black people,' they were talking about rap music, or they were talking about a certain style of hair, or they're talking about certain clothes. And you knew that they were talking about Black people or Blackness, but they didn't have the guts to say it.
And when I was reading it, I was like, "Oh my gosh!" So I'm internalizing all these ideas as a teenager about what it means to be Black, or not even what it means to be Black, but the shame that I should have about being Black and the limitations that's in the white imagination. What that is going to place on my life.
And so I think even if I didn't know consciously then what I know now, I was certainly taking in a lot of stories about how white girls were the people who were supposed to have happy endings, straight people were the ones who were supposed to have happy endings and queer Black girls either do not exist, or if they get love ever in their life, it's in exchange for trauma.
And so I certainly didn't have a full understanding of what it means to be queer, Black, having grown up in relative poverty, and happy. Those things did not compute, they just weren't aligned with each other. Because the books that told me how to move through the world were telling me that there's no way that you can be all these things, and be them wholly, and also have a happy ending. Like that just doesn't happen for us.
Sarah Enni: Right. Right. And I don't want to jump around too much, but I want to come back to that, but I want to track how you started to find your own voice and when you started actually creatively expressing yourself in that way?
Leah Johnson: For sure. So I started writing really early. I say this all the time, I don't have that many talents. I'm good at a very narrow scope of things. And those things are writing, and talking about writing, and maybe history and historical context. But all of this comes back to the humanities, like that is my bread and butter, but I was not ever gonna be a scientist. I wasn't gonna grow up and be a mathematician. These really were not in the cards for me. And I could recognize that very early on in my academic career.
But the thing that I loved most was sitting down like deer, you know, drop everything and read when they would be like, "All right, everybody shut up, go to a corner for 30 minutes and just pick up a book." That was me in my bag. And so, I was reading a lot and I was writing these stories in this torn up notebook, which I also rediscovered when I went back home for the pandemic.
They were all stories that were rip-offs of other things that I had read. But I think, you know, what writer doesn't begin with work that is a little bit derivative. And so I was a kid just like The Great Gilly Hopkins, I remember, was a book that really stood out to me growing up. And so I had a short story that I wrote in like the second grade or something called The Great Billy Bubble Blower. And it was like, "What are you writing about Leah?" Nobody knows! But the ideal was there. The idea was there. And so, yeah, I started really early finding a love of telling stories in my own way, even if they were rip-offs of other people's work.
And that just evolved over the course of my life. I wanted to write. I wanted to tell stories. And I didn't think that there was a way I could be a professional author. Like that was not realistic to me, that doesn't happen. But you know, who does tell stories? Reporters. You can turn on the news every night and catch a reporter on there telling the story. You can flip open the Indianapolis Star or the Indianapolis Recorder every week and see them telling a story. And so journalism, really early on, became the vehicle for me that I was going to use to do that work or to feed that part of me.
I think in middle school, like as early as middle school, I had joined the yearbook and was helping do newsletter stuff. We didn't have a newspaper, but we had a newsletter. And I was in the mix on that. And then I don't want to jump too far ahead, but I did the newspaper in high school. I became editor-in-chief by my senior year. And was a sophomore just trying to tear into whatever I could tear into. I wanted it all. I wanted all the stories. I was like, "Yeah, I'll write an op-ed. Yeah, it's no problem. Yeah, I'll call the mayor right now. You think I'm scared to talk to the mayor?" I was so ready to just go for it. And so that was the plan. I was like, "I'm gonna be a political correspondent for the New York Times. Boom. That's life. That's it."
Sarah Enni: Amazing, I love that. Well, you know, that's my background too, so I can definitely relate to that. And I'm just kind of leading us to, you decided to go to graduate school for creative fiction, or I think it was creative fiction?
Leah Johnson: Yeah.
Sarah Enni: Okay, for MFA. But undergrad you were pursuing journalism and reporting?
Leah Johnson: So I went to Indiana University, go Hoosiers, to study journalism and African-American studies. And so that was my double major in college. I wanted to report specifically on issues of race and class. So I got there and I also was doing some political science stuff because I hadn't given up on New York Times yet. I was like, "I'm gonna make it to the New York Times, you guys just wait." That was my goal. If there's one thing you can say about my career is that I've always been in dogged pursuit of my goals. If I decide something, that's it, she's doing it. And that's not to say there's not a lot of barriers in the way. And that's not to say it's a 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' type of situation, cause I don't believe in that. But I will say that I knew that I have a limited set of skills and a lot of passion in one area. And if I had to go to a job every day, then this was gonna be the job that I did.
And so, yeah, that's what I studied. I started as a print reporter and then my sophomore year, I took my first radio class and that changed everything for me. And so I got really into public radio, shout out to Sarah Neal-Estes and American Student Radio, who changed my life, like really changed the entire scope of what I understood storytelling to be.
So from that point on, I was interning at NPR affiliates. I was in the lab more often than I was anywhere else. I was gonna say at the bars, but I was too young to get into the bars at the time. And then I got some internships where I got to do some multimedia work. I was an intern at the Wall Street Journal for some time. I was an intern at a newspaper in London where they were trying to get a podcast off the ground. And so I did that for them. And that was really it. That was the last iteration of my journalism career.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. Okay, I did not know that, but that makes me wildly happy as I'm like, "Somewhere here is my gigantic NPR mug." Of course, every podcaster has that little beating part of their heart. What do you think it was about audio storytelling that was so engaging for you?
Leah Johnson: I can actually pinpoint it to the podcasts and the stories that were most influential to me. So I listened to Radiolab, that was the first podcast I ever listened to. And we were studying it for my class, my audio storytelling class. And I was like, "Oh my gosh." You could hear everything. Everything was so much more visceral. You can hear the way somebody's voice skips when they get super emotional.
And even if you can't see them, I know that there's tears welling up in their eyes, or I know that their hands are shaking because of how their voice is shaking. It just felt to me so alive. And there was something about the way stories leapt from the voice of these people into my headphones and out into the world that made me excited about telling stories again, in a way I hadn't been for a really long time.
So I think, even now in the stories that I'm telling, all of it is meant to be thought of in different mediums. I think that's why I love the audio book of You Should See Me in a Crown so much, partly because Alaska Jackson is incredible. But also because when I was writing it, I was reading the entire book aloud. To me, any story is also meant to be experienced in as many different ways as you can.
And so anyway, all that to say, there is this episode of This American Life where it's like 24 Hours at the Golden Apple, I think is the name of it. And they're inside of this restaurant and I cried like a baby. I just thought it was the most incredible thing. And I don't even think that episode is particularly sad, but there was just something about it that never left me.
Sarah Enni: I just listened to that episode of This American Life recently. So that is so funny that you bring that up. And a huge part of it is like teenage girls just desperately trying to get these guys to hang out with them. It's like, "This is so relatable."
Leah Johnson: This American Life also has this episode called Picture Day. And it literally was just kids on picture day. And it was part of the TV show they had for like two and a half seconds, I think they had like maybe five episodes. It's on Amazon prime now, but Picture Day really stuck with me. It's just these 'slice of life' stories that really made everything come alive.
Sarah Enni: And the language you're using to describe this is really creative. So I'm interested in when you started thinking about storytelling and with novel writing in particular.
Leah Johnson: I never stopped reading, but I had obviously taken a step back from writing The Great Billy Bubble Blower. It didn't win me the Pulitzer and so I said, "We're done. We're out of here." Nah. I was in my senior year of college and I was on track to do an internship at a pretty big newspaper. And I was supposed to go for enterprise reporting which, for anybody who doesn't know, enterprise reporting is sort of long form narrative journalism, but also brings in a lot of different elements. So sometimes there's a visual element, or there's a video, or an audio component. And I had been gearing up to do this as a print reporter. I had some mentors who were really generous with their time and attention and were like, "Leah, you can do this. I believe in you. Go forth. Do it. Tell these stories."
I had spent all of 2015 reporting specifically on police brutality because this was the era of Ferguson. This was the era of the Baltimore uprisings. This was a really interesting moment in American history, but also specifically, America's relationship to race and racism and how that was part of the conversation. And so that kind of work for anybody is exhausting, but particularly if you're a Black person in this country to engage yourself in those stories over and over again, and be reminded constantly that this country does not care about you. And there are not policies in place to protect you. That kind of work was draining me. It was taking everything out of me physically, emotionally, and it was also sucking all of the joy out of this thing that I had once loved so much.
And so on a whim, my first semester of senior year, told my mom, "I don't think I can do this anymore. I think I want to write books cause I just want to have fun writing again." And that was the last time I remember it being like just writing for the sake of writing, not because it was related to capitalism. And my mom was like, "All right. So what do you want to do?" I was like, "I think I want to get my MFA." She was like, "Sure. Why not?" And after I had my mom's stamp of approval, I was like, "Cool. She's all right with me living on her couch after I graduate, then let's do it." And so that was it. I applied to three programs, all in the East coast, cause I knew I wanted to get out of Indiana. I ended up choosing Sarah Lawrence and that's how I got to grad school.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. Oh my gosh. There's so much there that I love and, obviously, I love talking to other people who have backgrounds in journalism and reporting, especially audio storytelling. That's so dear to my heart, obviously. That's such a powerful moment to say like, "I'm gonna choose something that's good for me that brings me back to a place of joy with the craft I love so much."
And it's reminding me, going back to the books that you read growing up, was that part of your calculus right away? That you wanted to focus on stories for young people or write about things that you wish you'd seen growing up? How were you thinking about where you wanted to go with your creative storytelling?
Leah Johnson: I knew that I wanted to write books and I knew that I wanted to write them for young adults and it was not ever a question for me, who I was writing for. If I was gonna write a book for young adults and I was gonna write a book for Black kids and it was gonna be for Black kids from towns like mine, who had similar experiences to mine. That was where my head was at the time. The minute I got to grad school, first thing I ever handed in, well the first short story I ever wrote to completion, a full three act structure short story, was for my application to Sarah Lawrence. And so the minute I got to grad school, I came into workshop ready to go. I had 30 pages hot off the press. Like, "I'm ready."
Like, "It's about Blackness and it's about small towns and it's about integration." And I brought it into the room and my classmates were like, "Okay, girl." You go to an MFA that's not specifically for writing for children and young adults, you got a lot of people who were there ready to talk about literary fiction. They're like, "Oh, if you're not talking David Foster Wallace, I don't want to talk." And so I didn't even know who these people were. You know? There were so many names that were being thrown around in the workshop that I had no grasp of.
Because even up through college, like when I was studying African-American studies, my concentration was in African-American literature, and so if you want to talk about Zora Neale Hurston, I got you. You wanna talk about Maya Angelou? I got you. You wanna talk about Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, these are the giants in my universe. But I got to workshop, these folks were not talking about them. They wanted to talk about David Foster Wallace. They wanted to talk about Ben Lerner. They wanted to talk about Walden Pond guy [laughs]. I don't have a grasp of any of these writers. And so I was like very fish out of water in that first semester trying to find my footing.
And the thing that anchored me, the thing that grounded me, even when everything else felt tenuous, was that I knew who I was writing for. If I didn't know anything else I knew if this - not if - when this becomes a book one day, cause I was very, very goal oriented. I was like, "There will be a book out of this. Whether somebody publishes it? It's none of my business, but I will finish this." And as I was writing it, I was like, "When this is done, this is a story for Black kids and they deserve it. And I deserve that. 15 year old me, 16 year old me, deserves that." And so whether they're rocking with me or not, I'm here to do what I'm doing.
Sarah Enni: I love the perseverance, maybe is the word we can use for that, or grit. There's a lot of great words for it and it's something I think everybody needs, if they're gonna go through the publishing experience cause it requires a lot of patience and perseverance. And I don't want to presume anything about your MFA program experience, but that was a question that I had for you. It's sort of famously these programs are not exactly hyped up about YA stories, or the people that wanna write them. But how was your experience and what were the things that you took away from Sarah Lawrence?
Leah Johnson: I needed that two years, regardless of how the program started, it ended up being exactly what I needed. I needed the two years to find my voice as a writer. I needed two years to just play around with fiction where I didn't have to also work a full-time job and try to navigate those dynamics in addition to school. I was just there to focus on that. And I think that I found my people in my MFA and that's kind of what gets you through it. These spaces are inherently classes, they're inherently racist, sexist, add an 'ist' to it and the MFA is that.
But I was really fortunate to get an assistant-ship in the Office of Diversity. And so I was doing a lot of work with undergrad POC students. And that was my lifeblood in grad school. It grounded me. It gave me something to pay attention to. It gave me something to focus on outside of myself and outside of the work. And so that was really it.
But I was really lucky that I had a great group of friends. There weren't that many of us, but all the queers, we flocked together, all the Black and Brown folks, we came together, and that was my family. For those two years, we really leaned on each other and relied on each other for everything.
Sarah Enni: You were also in New York living outside of Indiana for the first time, I think?
Leah Johnson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was so permission giving, you know? I had an inkling, when I went to grad school, that the feelings I was having about women were not strictly friend feelings. I was like, "Probably a little something going on there, kiddo." And so being in New York, none of my people were in New York. I didn't have to be what I'd always been. I could be whoever I was to them when they met me. And so that act of reinvention, of being free to take chances and think of myself in a way I'd never thought of myself, was really eye-opening.
I think, had I not gone to New York, had I not gone to Sarah Lawrence in particular, I don't know that I would've come into my queerness in the way that I did over the course of those two years. And so when I think about leaving Indiana and think about what being in New York meant to me in those first couple of years, I think very much about how much it gave me in terms of the language that I now have to talk about who I am.
Sarah Enni: That's amazing. So let's get to getting your agent because it's kind of an unusual story from what I understand. I think you wrote this essay, How Young Adult Literature Taught Me to Love like a White Girl. Can you talk about writing that essay and then what came out of it?
Leah Johnson: For sure. So I was in grad school hustling trying to pay my bills, which is the story of my life. Like as a writer, as a creative, all of us are out here just trying to do what we can do to be able to live this life as an artist. And so, I was in New York, I was broke. I was like, "Okay, what skills do we have that we can leverage that will keep me from having to go back to working at Aeropostle because I don't want to do that again." And so Electric Lit had an open call for essays and I was like, "All right, cool." I read the description of what they were looking for and I was like, "I can do this." It was my first time writing something like that for a major platform.
So I was like, "What can I explore? What topic-wise, subject-matter-wise, can I explore that fits into this?" And that was, for me, the thing that I always came back to, which was young adult fiction. The thing that got me into this to begin with. And so I kinda came in a little hot. I was like, "Why is it I'm in my twenties now and I'm still looking around and there's no books for girls like me, or the girl that I was growing up. Why have we gotten to this stage?" And I still feel an acute sense of shame every time I think that I like somebody. Why am I still holding on to this? Why are these ideas still being perpetuated for and about young women like me?
And so it came out and it's like the day before Christmas morning, like when I first started writing essays, it was like the day before Christmas morning. Every time I put something new out, I was so filled with anxiety. And I woke up at like six o'clock that morning, like, "Oh my God, has anybody commented on it yet?" And nobody had, cause it was six in the morning and nobody cares. And so I went to work, I went about my day, I went to my classes. And I get out of one of my classes and I have an email from my first agent and she said, "I read your essay. I thought it was really interesting, really beautifully written. Are you working on anything right now?"
And I was like, "It's funny you should mention it, yes, I am." And a couple of editors had emailed me after that essay. And it was just really exciting. I was like freaking out to my grad director. I was like, "What do I do? What do we do? This is not a drill!" And she was like, "The first thing you do is stop yelling in my office. And then the second thing we do is call your thesis advisor, ask him." She was like, "I'm not a writer."
And so they pretty much walked me through how you meet with an agent. And I went down to Wall Street the next week to meet with her and tell her about my project. And that was it. I didn't query any agents that was pretty much it. She found me and we stayed in touch after that meeting. And it was a number of weeks until she emailed me again and was like, "Hey, Scholastic needs a writer to work on a certain type of project. Are you interested?" And I was like, "I can cook something up real quick." And so we sold You Should See Me in a Crown, like weeks after I graduated from grad school on like a couple of pages and a synopsis.
Sarah Enni: That's incredible. And I'm glad to be able to talk about that with you because everyone has such different ways of getting an agent. And I think that's an important thing to know. It isn't just literary fiction off in the heavens where people write essays - it can happen to anybody.
Leah Johnson: Yeah. For sure
Sarah Enni: You wrote about young adult and it worked out, which I love. Let's talk about You Should See Me in a Crown. I'm so excited to talk about this book. It's so pretty. I'm looking at it right now. I loved reading it. Actually, before we get into specific questions about the book, do you mind pitching it for us?
Leah Johnson: For sure. So You Should See Me in a Crown is about a girl named Liz Lighty who's growing up in a small, and small-minded, Midwestern hometown. And her dream is to get out and to get to college. But those plans are derailed when her financial aid for college falls through and she has to run for prom queen for the scholarship that's attached to the crown. That would be tough enough for a wallflower like Liz, but it's made even more complicated when she begins to fall for her competition.
Sarah Enni: Ooh, you got that down. I love it.
Leah Johnson: Sarah, when I tell you I did a virtual event every day for two months straight, so now it's like a science. I can do that in my sleep. In fact, I do, do it in my sleep.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I love it. I read somewhere you described this book as, 'writing about queerness without trauma and Blackness without pain.' And it seemed like a want to cross stitch it and frame it kind of mantra, or something, for what you're interested in exploring through your work. But what does it mean to you to write a book with that as your thesis statement?
Leah Johnson: I knew really early on that this was intended to be a Black girl joy book. If I had one chance to write a book, if nobody ever let me do this again, I wanted to throw everything at the wall and see what stuck. And so that's why you have a protagonist who is poor, is raised in a non-traditional familial situation, is from a small town in Indiana who has anxiety, who suffers from anxiety, and who is queer and is not struggling with her queerness, but struggling with what it means to be queer where she's growing up.
And so I wanted all those things to be able to exist together, but also have the ending that I have seen so many straight white girls get over the course of my life. It felt like a way to course correct, sort of. I started writing You Should See Me in a Crown in 2018. And at the time CCBC came out with their numbers for kid lit and what the stats were for diversity. And they release the study and it said that over the course of the three years prior to 2018, there were maybe 21 or 22 books that had a Black girl as the main character. And of all those books, which still isn't that many, of all those books, there was one that had a Black queer girl as the main character. And that was Little and Lion by Brandy Colbert.
And so I was fully grown and I was still writing into a space that felt empty in a lot of ways. I still had not read a romcom, a YA romcom, with a queer Black girl as the lead who didn't have to suffer trauma to earn her love. And that's what You Should See Me in a Crown was intended to do, is be a book where you don't have to be shunned by your family in order to get an ending that feels even remotely satisfying. You don't have to be on the receiving end of physical violence in order to deserve a happy ending, cause I read my fair share of those queer novels.
Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan sort of offers this utopian world for white queer boys where it's like, you don't have to experience pain except for a breakup, which is caused by a slight miscommunication, but everything else gets to be magical and beautiful. And I wanted that for Black girls, queer Black girls. And so that was my first intention with that book. And it remains my guiding light through everything I write is like how can we put Black girls on the page in a way that shows them, "If you don't feel at home in your town, you don't even feel at home in your own body, at least you can feel at home here in these pages and know that somebody out there gets it."
Sarah Enni: That's reminding me of what your advisor said, right? About having something to say where Blackness without pain is a radical statement, right? It's an active revolution, in the page, obviously.
Leah Johnson: And it shouldn't still be revolutionary to have a Black kid who gets to experience joy, unabashed joy. But we know that we live in a world where Black folks are denied that type of joy. Denied autonomy, denied their right to live freely without pain. And so it's still, in this book, I wrote a contemporary romcom, but in many ways this is a fantasy novel because this still feels to me - many days I wake up - and it still feels untenable to be all these things at the same time, or at least that was the case when I was writing the book, cause I was still very much coming into my own queerness.
And so as Liz is experiencing these things for the first time, as Liz is working on how to own all of her identities, I was also trying to figure those things out. I was also trying to write myself into a future in which that felt possible. And so yeah, many days it feels really radical to me to be a Black person who gets to love really wildly and unabashedly. And it's exciting to me to be able to do that work on the page.
Sarah Enni: Absolutely. I mean, it was exciting to read. It was really fun. And it was also just the pure pleasure of this kind of story that we've all seen in teen movies. But so now, and so many elements that were just like, "Oh, this is a very modern version of that story," in a way that was just so refreshing and funny. I don't want to, this is a tangent, but there was one line in the book about people writing letters to cats with high blood pressure or something.
[Both laugh]
Sarah Enni: It killed me. I was dying, ah! I was like, "This book is really sending me." So what you just said about writing yourself a world to inhabit is so interesting to me. Can you talk a little bit more about that coming into yourself in this really major way while writing this book?
Leah Johnson: I think right now is an especially pertinent time to talk about who gets to write what stories. I think we've all been privy to a conversation recently about who gets to claim ownership over what narratives, especially queer narratives. And when I wrote You Should See Me in a Crown, I was not out. I didn't even feel comfortable inside of my own mind. I didn't feel comfortable putting a name to my queerness. And I wrote the book anyway, I wrote the book because writing the book was me giving myself permission to claim those identities.
And I didn't come out until, some of my friends knew, but it had been a really casual thing. I had maybe said like, "Oh yeah, I'm going on a date with a woman," or something. And my mom, who is the person who I was always most concerned with coming out to, cause at the end of the day, anything else could happen in the world but if my mom's got me, I'm not worried about it. And I had grown up in a really strictly religious household, and the Pentecostal church has really strict positions on homosexuality.
So even though I knew that I had evolved past those beliefs and my sister obviously had evolved past those, I had never talked to my mom about it. And so I didn't know for sure whether or not, if I came out to her, it was going to be something that was acceptable. And so I didn't come out to my mom until You Should See Me in a Crown got announced. The Publisher's Weekly announcement, that Thursday night I texted my mom and said, "The news is out. Here's the book." And she was like, "Okay, you shouldn't celebrate alone. So I'm gonna fly to New York and we're gonna celebrate together." And she flew out the next day.
We went to see The Prom on Broadway, which is also about queer girls in Indiana. And I sat through this musical with my mom and I was like, "She's having the time of her life. She's having a blast." She's like, "This is the best show ever!" She's in the aisle, she's dancing. She's just going for it. And the entire time I'm like crying. I'm like sobbing and it's not a sad show for the most part, it's supposed to be pretty light-hearted, except there's a couple moments in the show that are pretty sad.
But I was just sobbing and we left and I was like, "Mom, I have to tell you something." We go to Dallas Barbecue in Times Square, because we're tourists at heart, Midwestern tourists. And at the table, I was like, "Look, I can't, I just can't keep this from you anymore. I wrote this book because of X, Y, and Z reasons. And I'm really sorry if this is embarrassing to you. I'm sorry if this means I can't be the kind of daughter you can love anymore." And she was like, "You could never do anything that could keep me from loving you. There is no way that I would ever love you less." She was like, "I wish you would've told me before now. Do you want your hot wings now, or do you want to eat the ribs first? Or do you want to get out of here?" Then we were back on track, you know?
And so this book, for me, was my way of not only writing a world that I was hoping was possible for Liz and for other young queer girls, but I needed to write it for myself. I needed to write a family that accepted Liz without any caveats or without any shame. I needed to write a love story that ended with the Black queer girl who wasn't sure of herself in the beginning, getting the happy ending she deserved. Cause if I could make it real on the page, then I could make it real for me one day. And so I did, eventually. It happened after we announced the book, but after that, it was like full speed ahead.
Sarah Enni: Oh, I love that. That's such a sweet story and really special. Thank you for sharing that with us. I think that just proves your point about the power of a book. I mean, you created this book, but you've also made this world where you could live inside of it. It just is this beautiful self-perpetuating virtuous cycle of goodness that comes from books.
And I want to ask about how what we're talking about right now relates to your experience in promoting this book, because as you've just laid out, this book is very personal. And I had another quote, but I'm not gonna quote you back to yourself, incessantly. But basically where you discovered so much about yourself in writing the book, and then it sounds like were maybe were a little bit surprised at how personal it was going to be for you to promote the book and the kinds of questions that were getting thrown your way.
So I think this is so important to talk about, especially if anyone listening who might be about to do a similar thing, how you dealt with that. How you created and discovered your own boundaries and enforce that when you have a lot of, as you just said, promotion to do all summer long.
Leah Johnson: That's an incredible question. And I'm really glad to talk about it actually, because I wish that somebody would have pulled me aside and told me like, "Leah gear up. Cause this is a real thing. You're gonna have to figure out what your hard lines are." Because I live my entire life on the internet. Like I said, I was raised in the Facebook turns into Twitter era. I've had a blog since I was like 12 years old. My tightest group of friends were people that I had met online growing up. And so, sharing pieces of myself to people who are virtual strangers did not feel foreign to me, but there was something really different about the way that felt as I was promoting this book, in particular, because of how intimate the subject matter is to me.
As far as my life is concerned, there's nothing more personal to me than talking about my body and also my relationship to my sexuality, and my relationship to family in regards to my sexuality. And so, like I said, I didn't have a problem sharing, but what changes is that people feel an entitlement to your life when you have given them fodder for conversation like this. And so I had to figure out really early on like one: I had to talk to my publicist about like, "Hey, can we screen these questions before I go into an interview? Because I don't want to be asked about this, or I don't want to be expected to answer this." There were a number of times I'd be in an interview, or be in a virtual event, and I'd get caught off guard because somebody would ask me something that I wasn't comfortable answering.
And then it's like I either have to stumble through an answer that's super inarticulate, or I have to say, "I'm not gonna answer that question." Which is fine and you absolutely have the right to do that. But being a Black woman, I also had to think about what it looks like when I refuse to engage like that. What does that say to people? How do they respond to that? And so, yeah, I had to really try and separate myself from the book, even though the book came from a really personal place.
When it came to promoting the book, I had to find ways to draw hard lines between, "Okay, this is Liz's story, and this is my story." I am willing to tell you anything you need to know about You Should See Me in a Crown. But when it comes to me, and asking about how this book interacts with my life, or how I move through the world or, "When did you first kiss a girl? What's your coming out story?" That's nobody's business but mine, unless I come forward with it of my own volition.
And so now I have friends who are debuting a couple months after me and I am really grateful that I now have this ability to tell them like, "Yo, first of all, turn off the tags on Instagram cause people are going to criticize your book. And it's gonna sound like they're not criticizing your book, it's gonna sound like they're criticizing you." Because you are so bound up in this plot. And so I was like, "I don't read reviews anymore." I used to read all the press about my book. So if it was on a list, any list that came out, I was checking the list because I was like, "What if I'm on there?"
And then somebody, one of the senior writers - I feel like I'm a freshman - one of the sophomore, junior writers was like, "If you're on a list, somebody will tag you. And so you don't have to check every time something comes out." And so just figuring out ways to separate my lived experience from the experience of Liz and the book was really crucial to navigating this post-publication space. Especially when now not only is all of my promotion online, but everything is online. My interactions with my friends are online. I had to lock my Facebook down and change the access people had to my photo albums. Everything is on the internet. And so now people are more curious about those things because I'm public facing. And so we had to shut it down.
Sarah Enni: And I really appreciate you speaking to that because it is not something that everyone thinks about. Writing a book is so like, you're just in your own head for months at a time. And then it's like, "Oh, wait a second." If you're lucky enough to have that many people respond to it, which you definitely were with this book, it comes with a lot of double-edged swords. So I think that's really important to talk about.
And that's such an important and interesting point. I hadn't quite thought about like, you're promoting this book, it's getting a lot of traction, but people are asking really personal things. And a zoom call between friends feels just like a zoom call between an interviewer. And then it just all becomes flat. This is how we lose our minds in quarantine, I guess.
Leah Johnson: Right. And another element that I think people forget is like, "You're in my house." We're doing this interview - Sarah, you're sitting in my closet right now. My suits are right behind me. This is my prize possessions. This is very intimate. And so I'm inviting strangers into my home every day. And then I'm also being expected to, in my own home, confide in these people that I do not know and tell them my deepest, darkest secrets. That's a lot to ask of somebody.
And it's not that I don't love sharing with readers or interviewers, I do. I'm an over sharer by nature. But it's the idea that anybody is entitled to that information that really gets me. And I think that's where we trip up in a lot of our online discourse, especially about sexuality. You're not entitled to know anything about how people identify, you really aren't. And so what happens is we get a lot of folks who were like, "Well, you didn't have the right to do this and you should have done it this way. And this isn't the right portrayal!" And it's like, "Okay, well experience was unique to me. And I don't owe you any explanation about how I experienced my queerness. So, I'm gonna sell you!"
Sarah Enni: Yes, I so appreciate that. That came up at the very end of Track Changes in the marketing talk. And I was like, "Ah, this may be in season 2 we talk about it in a whole episode." Because if you're writing about really intense stuff, especially writers I know who have talked about self-harm or things like that. And then you go do an event and you have these kids come up and talk to you and they are so in need of you, but the degree to which you're gonna be able to handle that, you know? It's all this stuff that every publicist should sit down and be like, "Heads up. Get ready."
Leah Johnson: And they don't really media train you, you know what I mean? Most of us don't go through media training like celebrities get when they have a movie coming out. So we're just kind of fumbling through this trying to figure it out.
Sarah Enni: Right. What you're just saying about, like no one's feeding you the line of like, "If someone asks you a question in the middle of a zoom that you don't want to answer, here is a tried and true way to pivot and move forward that everyone's gonna feel good about."
Let's talk about Rise to the Sun specifically. You Should See me in a Crown had such a wonderful reception and you were everywhere and you were talking to everybody which was so fun to watch and exciting. And then you have this book coming out a year later, one year exactly, later. Where were you in promoting and finishing writing? Having the first book be so well received comes with so much excitement, but also it could put some pressure on you. I mean, how are you kind of feeling about all that?
Leah Johnson: Ooh, child. Okay. So let's see, where to begin? So I started writing Rise to the Sun at the beginning of 2020. And so I had my first draft due, I think, at the end of January. And so we were living in a very different world then. I worked on this when I went to Toronto, again. I go to Toronto once a year to write, so Toronto comes up a lot. But I went for a weekend and was like, "Okay, that's my last push before my deadline." And I was gonna get it done.
I wrote the first draft of Rise to the Sun in a month and a half maybe. And so I sent it off to my editor and I'm getting a couple of weeks off. I go to North Texas Teen Book Fest. I have the time of my life. And you come back and boom, the world has changed. You can't leave your house. We're fearing for our lives. Everything is very different. And so there's a huge sense of anxiety about the world at large, which is looming always. And that was looming through the promotion of You Should See Me in a Crown. It was looming through the editing of Rise to the Sun.
And then on top of that you have a book who I thought, at best, I'm not even gonna lie to you, at best I thought my mom would buy a couple of copies. I thought maybe the homie's would buy a couple of copies. I had very modest expectations for the way You Should See Me in a Crown was going to perform. Because we didn't have a blueprint for this before the book came out. It's not like we've seen so many romcoms about Black queer girls come out.
And so I was like, "I've never seen a book like this really do numbers before. So of course like mine is just gonna come out and it's gonna be all right, and we're gonna keep it moving." And I'm working on Rise to the Sun and as I'm working on it, working on the edits, You Should See Me in a Crown was getting starred reviews. You Should See Me in a Crown was making a list. You Should See Me in a Crown is getting Reese Witherspoon's book club. And I'm overwhelmed with what's going on.
It would have been different had I braced myself for it. Had I prepared for it, had I mentally calibrated myself to those expectations, I think it would have been very different. And these sound like champagne problems but I do want to be really transparent about the fact that when I started writing You Should See Me in a Crown, I didn't know what I didn't know.
And so I didn't know what lists I was supposed to aspire for. I didn't know what American Booksellers Association thing they hand out to new writers. I knew Kirkus, I guess, in the back of my head, but I had never read Kirkus. I don't care about trade publications. I read books for fun. It never crossed my mind. And so I was free in the first draft of You Should See Me in a Crown to just do whatever I wanted to do. I was just playing around, like I said, I was stumbling through the dark on it and I was unencumbered by all those expectations.
And then once you get to the other side of things, all of a sudden, you know what there is waiting for you. You know what you should be gunning for. You know what people are expecting. You know what marks a successful book and what marks a flop, or whatever. Even though, just for the record - side note - I don't think a book can be a flop. If you wrote the book, you put the book out... It's a successful book. But you know how publishing goes.
Publishing is risk averse so they want numbers. And so I was really aware of the fact, even when writing You Should See Me in a Crown, that if my book really did not do well, then the likelihood that they would acquire another book like mine after that, was very slim. And so that was the only pressure that I was really concerned about outside of like, "Oh, I have to come out to my mom when this book comes out."
And so my writing of Rise to the Sun was really bound up in all these fears about like, "What happens if this book doesn't do what my first book did? What happens if they don't love my new main characters, the way they love Liz?" Or, "What happens if this plot doesn't...?" You know, it's not as joy forward as You Should See me in a Crown. And so, "Ah, nobody's gonna put me on their list of best, whatever, blah, blah." And so those things are happening concurrently.
So my entire journey with drafting and editing Rise to the Sun has been from January until now. And I ruptured my patellar tendon a month ago and that derailed my editing process for Rise to the Sun. And I have to say, I don't believe that it's a blessing in disguise, rupturing your patellar tendon just sucks, it's a terrible thing to have happen. But being able to take that time from my promotion of You Should See Me in a Crown and my writing and editing of Rise to the Sun has been so freeing for me. It's really allowed me to re-contextualize everything and think differently about what is urgent and what's not. "Leah, why are you writing? What is it you're writing for? Who are you writing towards?"
And so that's where we are in the writing process of that. It's been a very stressful year to put out a book, but it's been an even more stressful year to write a new book for sure,
Sarah Enni: Man. And second books are always really wild, but yeah, you absolutely had all the stresses that come with the first book, as you say, about writing about a Black queer woman and wanting that to take off. And then when it does take off, it comes with a lot of other stuff too.
Leah Johnson: It took off a little more than I thought it was gonna take off, maybe.
Sarah Enni: I want to give you the chance to pitch Rise to the Sun, because this sounds like a dream. I'm so excited about this book. Would you mind telling us what that story is gonna be about?
Leah Johnson: So Rise to the Sun is about two girls named Toni and Olivia who were coming off the heels of two really difficult years and want to go to a music festival in pursuit of one last epic weekend before they embark on the rest of their lives. While at this music festival, they find each other and realize, in order to accomplish all the things they want to accomplish over the course of the weekend, they need to stick together. And, of course, because it's a Leah Johnson novel, they fall in love in the process.
Sarah Enni: I love it. Music festivals, I mean, what a wonderful place to set a romcom and hi-jinx, and anything imaginable at a music festival.
Leah Johnson: It's gonna feel very much like the summer we didn't get. Every time I get to work on the book, I can allow myself to be totally absorbed in this fantasy world in which like, "Everything is normal. And I get to eat elephant ears while listening to my favorite band with my best friend next to me."
Sarah Enni: Yes. Well, I'm very glad for you that you've had that this summer. That sounds like a real dream. As you know, I love to wrap up with advice. So honestly, you kind of just shared a little bit of this right now, but advice that you might have for someone else who is gonna be coming out with their first book in this really unique quarantine pandemic situation.
Leah Johnson: Oh, I have a lot of nuggets of wisdom about this, actually, now that I've been entrenched in it for a long time. So if you need me, new writer, feel free to hit me up on Twitter. I would say, first and foremost, a piece of advice my friend Rosie gives out often is you don't have to be the master of all elements on social media. Nobody's asking you to be a Twitter guru and an Instagram maven, and a TikTok queen. You might not have all those things, you're not gonna be able to collect all the infinity stones. But if you're very good at Twitter, lean into Twitter, be very good at Twitter.
Learn how to do an Instagram Live, sure, but nobody's asking you to generate content on every platform, every day. Cause your audience knows where they can count on you to deliver your consistent work and promotion and content. And so I would really rely on that. And also I would say the urge for a new writer, I know, is to say yes to everything. You want to get your book out in front of as many people as possible. And I know that it feels like you can do even more because you do everything from home. But do not let this burn you out. Your mental health, your emotional wellbeing, is more important than that zoom, I promise you, it is.
You might move one or two additional copies by going to that panel that's not gonna pay you any money, but you know what? That nap that you could take during that timeframe, that nap is gonna enable you to write three more chapters tonight. And that's the work. The writing is the work. Everything else is just exposition. So take care of yourself. You don't have to say yes to everything. And figure out where your bread and butter is on social media and just really lean into that.
Sarah Enni: That's wonderful and really practical advice, which I super appreciate cause I know people listening are gonna be like, "What the heck are we doing here?" Oh, this has been such a fun conversation, Leah. I so appreciate your time today. You gave me so much time. It's been wonderful.
Leah Johnson: Sarah, thank you so much for having me. This was a dream.
Thank you so much to Leah. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @byLeahJohnson and follow me on both @SarahEnni (Twitter and Instagram), and the show @FirstDraftPod (Twitter and Instagram). And thank you to our sponsor, Everything I Thought I Knew, by Shannon Takoaka out from Candlewick Press now.
Hayley Hershman produces First Draft and today's episode was produced and sound designed by Kallie 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, Time Square diners, for listening.
Leah Johnson: Wait! Oh my god, Sarah, can I just tell you this? When I was in grad school, I should have mentioned this, but it's honestly, it's embarrassing, but you have to know. When I was in grad school and I was working on my first novel, I would be driving to and from campus, listening to First Draft. And you would ask a question of whoever you were interviewing at the time, and I would pause the episode and I would answer the question as though you were asking me about the book that I was writing then. And I don't outline, but that is how I began to think about my book like what the book was doing and how it worked and how it would exist in the world. I was like, I have to tell you that.
Sarah Enni: I love that! That's so cool. I feel like that's actually something that people can probably learn a lot about their process and how they feel about writing by doing that. I mean, I'm not gonna act like I'm above pretending I was on the Seth Meyer show in the mirror sometimes. So, you know, we've all been there.
[Both laughing].
Sarah Enni: I'm like, "Yes, Terry Gross. Please ask me more questions."
Leah Johnson: Absolutely. Right.
Sarah Enni: Oh my gosh. Not that I'm comparing myself to any of those people, but you know what I'm saying?
Leah Johnson: Right, the point stands.
Sarah Enni: So, so fun to talk to you, Leah. I really appreciate you, and being willing to reschedule. Thank you. I know it was kinda wild going back and forth, but we did it.
Leah Johnson: Of course. Thank you so much. Yeah, this is fantastic.
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