May 27, 2021
Tananarive Due is an award-winning author who teaches Black horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA and is an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of The Twilight Zone on CBS All Access. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. She has a 17-year-old son and 35-year-old stepdaughter and describes writer-motherhood in three words as “every single day.”
Lara Ehrlich
Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is Tananarive Due. Thank you all for tuning in. Please remember to chat with us during the interview, and if you enjoy the episode, please also become a patron or patroness to help keep this podcast going. Now I’m excited to introduce to Tananarive Due. Tananarive Due is an award-winning author who teaches Black horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA and is an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of “The Twilight Zone” on CBS All Access. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. She has a 17-year-old son and 35-year-old stepdaughter and describes writer-motherhood in three words as “every single day.” Welcome, Tananarive.
Tananarive Due
Hello.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you so much for joining me. This is exciting.
Tananarive Due
My pleasure. My pleasure.
Lara Ehrlich
From your bio, we have a lot to talk about, but I’m going to start with the three words you selected to describe writer motherhood. Tell me about “every single day.”
Tananarive Due
I don’t even know where to begin. People say parenthood changes everything, but people who are not parents often don’t really have the vocabulary to understand what that means. It’s just little things. The school system school year, for example, means that once your child hits the public school system, from that point, until the foreseeable future, you’re going to have to get up super, super early every day, no matter what your job is, to get your kids to school. We’re just basically hanging on until summer. My husband and I are both feeling a little rest broken. We work at home and always have, so given our own schedule, we probably would be getting up closer to, say, 8:30 in the morning. Anyway, it goes on and on. That’s just one small thing. There’s the actual hands-on caretaking aspect of parenthood, and there’s the emotional aspect of parenthood. The caretaking part, you can kind of extrapolate what that looks like: preparing and fixing meals, buying clothes, tending to injuries, tending to illnesses, and all these kinds of things. But the emotional part … I’ll give you an example. My son is 17. He’s 6 foot 5 and weighs 220 or so pounds, so he’s a big, big kid, but inside, he’s still kind of a little kid. He likes to to play childish games and that kind of stuff, so the way I see him is very different from the way he’s perceived by the outside world. One of the things that our family was able to take advantage of during 2020 and a pandemic was we were spending so much time together—it was just the three of us—and I think we got a lot closer. We did more activities together, and I had forgotten what it feels like when my son leaves the house. At one point, I’ll call it three or four months ago, he and his friends got masked up and wanted to go play basketball. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but we live in a mostly white community. It’s somewhat mixed, but three teenage black boys are still a standout in this community, especially at that size. And I had forgotten all through 2020—for all my hypochondria, for all my fear that there would be food shortages, for all my worries with the virtual schooling—I had forgotten what it feels like the minute my son leaves the house. That old anxiety comes in, that fear that they’re a police magnet, that my son would say or do the wrong thing. Onsite, to a lot of police officers—from the training, from TV and media—my son looks like a suspect for something, in a lot of places. The whole idea of profiling is that if you pull over someone Black, they’re bound to have done something, right? That’s really the whole premise of it, the assumption that there’s some kind of guilt, so let me just go ahead and find out what it is. That’s something that a 16- or 17-year-old kid, well, nobody really should be dealing with, but especially a teenager. You give him the talk, and you try to explain that you want to be respectful and don’t want to be rude, but also, you don’t want them to be too scared. It’s a very difficult balancing act for both his anxieties and my anxieties. My late mother told me that anxiety only begins when they leave the house, like not just going out for the night, but when they leave when they’re ready, when they’re 18 or 20.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, I’m not looking forward to that. Of course, it’s a different situation.
Tananarive Due
How old are your kids?
Lara Ehrlich
I have one daughter, and she’s 5.
Tananarive Due
Oh, OK. You’re just getting started at 5. Five is fun.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, definitely. She’s a great age. I don’t have the same concerns, though, about race. And we should mention that this week was the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, so that’s, of course, always on people’s minds, but this week especially. Tell me a little bit more about that fear and about the talk that you have with your son and when you had the talk for the first time.
Tananarive Due
That’s kind of a heartbreaking question. If I look at my childhood, my mom probably had to have a talk with me when I was a little bit younger than your daughter, because she was trying to enroll me in a Montessori school in Miami, Florida. This was post-Civil Rights Act. I’m not that old, but Jim Crow didn’t die very quickly. And these were private schools, and they have their own rules. She wanted to enroll me early, so I could get a head start on kindergarten, so as a 4-year-old, I was subjected to hearing again and again that I was being rejected because of my skin color. I remember rubbing talcum powder all over my body—my face, my neck, covering myself with talcum powder—and saying to my mom, “Mom, can I go to school now?” So that’s when my mom had to have a talk with me. And my heart kind of breaks for her when I imagine being in her place, because how do you explain that to a 4-year-old? Skin color is an accident of birth. Even people in the same family have different complexions. It’s just meaningless, except that it means so much. With my son, I don’t have the vivid memory of the first talk, but when he was about 9, my husband, Steven Barnes, and I took him with us to Marianna, Florida. We’d been called because there had been a reformatory in Marianna Florida called the Dozier School for Boys that operated between about 1900 and about 2000 or so, and my great uncle was buried there at the age of 15. So many children died at this reformatory, it had its own cemetery. The Florida State Attorney General’s office called to get permission to start exhuming from the families. So, my husband, my son, my father, and I all went and took part in this beginning of excavation, so he began to actually dig into the soil, and even though it wasn’t only Black children who died there, it was disproportionately Black children who died there, and I think that really sank in. He had a very sober look on his face, the whole time he was there, as he absorbed this idea that children would have been killed, and frankly by adults. There was a lot of mystery around how a lot of these kids died, and I’ve heard all kinds of stories—one who was put inside of an industrial dryer and never seen again. This place was like a horror novel. In fact, I did write a horror novel out of it. I call it The Reformatory, which will come out next year, and we can talk about that later, but being on those grounds and actually seeing that and being up close to that racial history, I think made a great impact on him. And then, when he got older, he wants to go to a park, right? He’s 10, 11, 12, by himself. We used to sit and watch him at the park. He even noticed one time, when he was about 12, we had let him be there a while by himself, and we came to pick him up, and he and a friend came to the window—and his friend was white—and they both look so upset. He said, “Mom, there was a Black teenager just playing basketball by himself, he wasn’t doing anything, he wasn’t talking to anybody, and then the police came up to him and they put him in handcuffs.” He was so shaken by having witnessed that is profiling. I actually wrote a letter to the local police chief. I happened to have heard about her. She was Latina. I said, “Let me introduce myself and say hello and also bring up this incident.” And to her credit, she called me at, like, 7:30 in the morning—like the minute she got my letter, she called me and looked at the case, and it boiled down to “a neighbor thought he looks suspicious, so they called police.” And she kind of said, “See something, say something.” And I actually wrote a short story called “See Something, Say Something,” which is about this incident from the point of view of a white ally, who’s witnessing this, to show people how you can intervene in situations like this before they escalate—although, it’s dangerous. I’m not even saying I advise it. But it’s a thing that you can do as an observer, when you see Black teenagers being harassed. I like to slow my car. I like to let people know they’re being watched. They don’t like it. You can actually be violently confronted for starting to tape a police encounter, so again: exercise it with caution. But situations like that, that’s what leads to the talk, and I probably had been giving him some version of that most of his life but definitely when he wanted more independence to walk around, just walking down main street. We live in a kind of a smallish town that has a main street. I can’t tell you how many times he’s come home and is telling a story about a police encounter. At least three times. And he notices how quickly they reach for the gun, because they are scared of our kids. One of the things I said to this police chief in my letter was studies have shown that children of color, especially Black children, often look older than they are to people who are not Black. Although, it doesn’t really matter. They will still shoot a child. Sometimes, they don’t care, to be honest, but at least you might get a little more grace if a police officer thought you were a minor. But that’s long ago now, because my son is 17, almost an adult. He would be tried as an adult if he were arrested, in a lot of jurisdictions. The fact that he’s never been arrested, never gotten into legal trouble—it doesn’t always matter. The judge does not see a human child. They see Other in our system. And I don’t mean every judge, but systemically. Look at the statistics. The judges see Other.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, the police, the judges …
Tananarive Due
The police, judges, the prosecutors. The list goes on and on and on. It’s, frankly, horrifying, especially for someone like me, who has a very vivid imagination.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, and I want to get to your imagination, and you’ve already referenced a few wonderful stories. I want to talk to you about, but since we’re on this subject, tell us a little bit about the book you wrote with your mother. And tell us about your mother.
Tananarive Due
I like to joke that having collaborated with my late mother and my husband, I can collaborate with anybody, because those are such tight relationships, they can be fraught with conflict. Writing is difficult enough by yourself, and collaborating adds a level of difficulty. I’ll tell the audience a little bit about my mother. Her name was Patricia Stevens, and she died in 2012. She was one of the first superheroes in my life. She was a civil rights activist who started out as a normal college student, not really giving much thought to any kind of activism for her first two years, but then in 1959, she came in contact with an organization called CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. CORE had tactics— like, here’s a handbook, here’s a workshop, here’s how you sit at a lunch counter—you don’t look left or right, you don’t respond if someone grabs you, you go limp—all these very concrete tactics to try to bring attention to segregation and try to end segregation. She and her sister, my aunt, who’s still living, started a little chapter at their college at Florida A&M University. After the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960, they said, “It’s on.” They did sit-ins, and as a result of that, my mother was arrested. She and my aunt spent 49 days in jail—they were sentenced to 60 but got a few days off for good behavior—for sitting at a lunch counter in Tallahassee, Florida. They got arrested for that. As a result of that, she got diaries from Jackie Robinson, the famous baseball player. She smuggled a letter out, and Jackie Robinson published it in his column in the New York Post, which used to be a thing. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted a party for the students in her home. I mean, the whole civil rights set from the 1960s, my mother was interacting with. And it was considered the first jail-in because they refused to pay their fine to get out of jail—my mother and other students from Florida A&M University. They kind of made history. She would show up in my history books. That wasn’t all she did, but that’s probably the most famous thing she did. My whole life, as you can imagine, if you have a mother who’s been through something, I’m hearing the story many, many times, and I knew she wanted to write a book. In the ‘90s, I was just starting to get enough fame—famous for a writer, I guess—that we could get a book contract. It wasn’t easy. We tried to sell them as a book of oral histories, just interviewing the people she knew, Black and white, who were the ones who stood up, when the vast majority of people—trust me—were afraid to. Every movement starts with three or four people, or two people, sometimes one person, who are like a snowball rolling down a mountain, inspiring other people to join them. But look at all the injustice in the world today. The movement started small: White Banker in Tallahassee, why did you sneak to the back door to hand them a sack of cash to get students out of jail? Why did you, Black Housekeeper, stop on your way to work to sit in with this group of students and then lose your job as a result of that? She never knew some of these people. She just knew that most people were too afraid to do anything, but a handful, like she always said, of ordinary people can do extraordinary things, and these were the foot soldiers. These were her words. So, she always wanted to write a book, and I finally got famous enough to get a contract. It was challenging to collaborate, but the thing about collaboration is one person has to have the kill switch, and in this case, my mom had the kill switch. It’s her story. One editor said, “Why don’t you write it as a novel,” and I got so excited for, like, five seconds, because I know how to do that. I know how to write a novel. I was not a nonfiction writer. Even though I’d been a journalist, I’d never written a nonfiction book, so the idea of writing a novel was way more fun than writing a history book. But it’s told in first person, and it’s alternating chapters, not because I really did much of anything but because that’s how my agent packaged did. He took our little book of oral histories that we could not literally give away, and he repackaged it as a mother-daughter memoir of the fight for civil rights, so we could fold in all those stories and my mother’s chapters. My chapters were more contemporary, like the anti-apartheid protest I walked out on in college because I had a dinner date. My mom said, “I went to jail so you wouldn’t have to.” And, believe me, I have been living by that my whole life. I do not ever intend to go to jail, if I can help it.
Lara Ehrlich
She sounds incredible.
Tananarive Due
She really was. She was so strong. She wore dark glasses her whole adult life, because in 1960, a police officer threw a tear gas canister in her face, because he recognized her as a leader of the student movement, and she had sensitivity to light for the rest of her life. Her sunglasses are now on display at the Florida archives in Tallahassee. And she’s in the Civil Rights Hall of Fame in Florida, and my dad is, too, and I’ll stop talking.
Lara Ehrlich
No, please don’t stop talking. You called her a superhero for a mother. What expectations did that set up? What kind of mother did you want to be, based on her?
Tananarive Due
The expectations were super high. She was someone who, for all intents and purposes, gave up a lot of her activism when she had kids. Not all of it, but she gave up the more flamboyant activism, like laying down in front of garbage trucks and stuff like that, because she really felt that it was important for her to be there. Having interviewed all these other activists who were not there for their kids, their kids definitely suffered. Any time a movement completely takes over the home, where the affairs of people outside of the home are more important to both parents than what’s happening inside the home, disaster will follow. She knew that instinctively. I got from her a sense that no matter how passionate I am about my work, I cannot make my son secondary to my career. You have to find a way. Balance is the wrong word, because there’s no such thing, but you have to find a way to do everything. If you’re going to be writing books or, in my case, learning how to write screenplays, I was going to have to do that while parenting, not instead of parenting. There’s that expectation. She was the disciplinarian. She had a deep voice. My dad was more of the writing-on-his-legal-pad-in-the-corner kind of guy, not wanting to get involved in disputes in the house. I thought I was going to be that strong disciplinarian, but it turns out, I’m more like my dad’s personality. I would rather be the one in the corner, writing in the notebook. My husband was more of a buddy with his daughter, my stepdaughter, who’s now 35. I saw her from age 11 on, and then we had Jason when she was 18, so I got to see the teenage years first, and then start from the beginning. He had been more of a buddy parent, like she was allowed to use colorful language around him. Having grown up in such a socially conservative house, that was hard for me to get used to, but she turned out great. My first lesson was something can be different than what you did or what you experienced and still turn out great. That was a valuable lesson, and I brought that lesson with me into Jason’s infancy. His childhood was going to look very different than my sisters and me. He has ADHD, and there are different issues that we’re dealing with than the ones my parents were dealing with. I’ve had to reinvent what that looks like. I’m not going to be the disciplinarian. He just responded differently to my husband’s deeper voice. I think there’s some biology in there, I dunno. My husband had to take on the role of disciplinarian, and my son has to call him “sir” if he gets in trouble. I think the most important lesson I took from my mom that I’ve tried to apply to Jason is to be there. In my case, I work from home, so it’s literally be there. Quick example: Steve and I are having a lot more interest in our screenwriting than ever before. We’re working on TV pilots, we’re working on a movie script—this is like the dream come true for people who have been slogging their way on the periphery for all these years. It would be really easy for me to just lean into that, but with Jason doing virtual schooling still, I don’t do any meetings, unless I absolutely can’t help it, before 12:30 in the afternoon on school days, because that’s when he’s in class and I need to be on him. It’s more hands-on than my mom needed to be with me and my sisters. He’s first. Jason is first in the day. Everything else squeezes after that. For us, that’s what worked for us.
Lara Ehrlich
How do you actually get the writing done? Let’s talk logistics. Do you stay up until 2 a.m.?
Tananarive Due
Heck no, I don’t stay up till 2. I lost my ability to pull all-nighters when I was in graduate school, back when I was 21. When I first got married, I used to push writing till the end of the day. My husband would be in bed by 11, and I’d stay up till 1. I can’t do that anymore. I don’t have the energy. I need seven, eight hours of sleep a night, and I really feel like robbing myself of sleep is stealing weeks of time at the end of my life, so I don’t do it. We go to bed early-ish. We get up early. There are a couple of ways to to thrive. My husband and I teach a program called Life Writing, which I can shamelessly plug, and part of the premise of life writing, which is something he’s taught but also something we practice, is that you can write a book a year in a sentence a day. People say, well, that’s not possible, because then you only have a 365-sentence book. But the point is, if you’re a writer, and a lot of writers listening understand this, if you can make yourself actually engaged with your project for 2 minutes every day, you may just write one sentence Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, but by Thursday, you’re gonna write two sentences or a paragraph or a page. And that’s the whole point. We lie to ourselves about not having time, because it’s so easy to be afraid, as a writer—afraid of success, afraid of failure, afraid of rejection—so we tell ourselves we don’t have time to write, when we know we just binged Bridgerton. We know we’re watching Mare of Easttown. How is that not having time? When I was single, and I wanted to write a book in a hurry, I narrowed my life down to get up, go to work, and then it was all writing—early before work, after work. I didn’t have to talk to anybody. I got it done in nine months. I can’t do that. I can’t lock myself in a room. My dad used to lock himself in a room to write, and that had a negative impact on me, so I don’t want to do that to my son. It’s bad enough the poor kid is being raised by two writers. You’re staring into space, he asked you to bring something, and you forgot to do it, because you’re writing. He’s already dealing with that fire. But it’s learning how to write in the margins and being honest about the fact that we do have time to write. I used to work with a reporter who worked for the Miami Herald, when I was a reporter for 10 years, and her husband passed away unexpectedly at the age of 35. He was also a reporter, and it was devastating. She’d just had their fifth child, so she has a baby and four other children. That’s why she started writing her book, so it’s not about the time. She would get up at 5 in the morning, she would let her sister do the babysitting. She finally had the clarity of mindset where she told herself, “I’m going to do this.” In my case, and in many cases, when we tell ourselves, “I am going to do this,” we let go of excuses, and we find a way. And, trust me, I still watch plenty of TV—plenty. Maybe because I can justify it. Now it’s part of my business. I’m a screenwriter, so I have to watch everything and have every streaming service. I was writing early this morning, after I made sure Jason was at his class, and I can steal 30 minutes here and there. Sometimes in the evening, like between 5 and 7, you might get that block. Some writers do need 90 minutes, or they feel like they can’t do anything. I’ve learned how to dip in and out, and it’s because the embers never go cold. There’s nothing harder than coming back to a cold manuscript you haven’t looked at in two months. The first hour or two is just getting reacquainted with the manuscript. But if you’re reading a sentence a day or even alternating projects. I’ll be working on one project the first half of the week and another project the second half of the week. It’s really a matter of discipline. I hate to use the word discipline—it sounds punitive. But it really is the difference between the inner child that fuels our imaginations, that 10-year-old inside of us who always wanted to make up stories, and the adult who has to actually make it happen—which is, by the way, one of the reasons I quit writing full-time. I was a full-time writer for 15 years, and then I slowly started doing more teaching, and now I’ve taught at UCLA for five years—just one class, but it’s a nice income. OK, it’s a nice baseline because as two writers, you can imagine our income was up and down and up and down. We can never predict from one year to the next how much money we would or wouldn’t have, and I don’t thrive with uncertainty. I never spent two years after college just finding myself and writing. I needed a job because I needed to know I had security, and I had a two-bedroom apartment so I could get myself an office. I made that proclamation to the world: This is my office. I hadn’t published anything, hadn’t even sold anything, but: “This is my office, and I’m a writer.” I’d been telling myself that since I was 4 years old. Having a job meant that I wasn’t relying on my inner child to earn our money. I realized that’s not fair. I was trying to get on that elusive, book-a-year schedule. I was trying to get on the New York Times bestseller list. I won’t name who it is, but I know a writer, who literally worked himself to death, who had been one of my mentors. He was so sweet, and I admired him so much. He told me, at one point, that he spent 50 percent of his time on the road. And I was like, “Oh, well, that’s not gonna happen.” There was a time I wanted to be a stand-up comic but, again, don’t want to spend my life on the road, so that’s not gonna happen. I wrote that down, and the man had a heart attack while pitching to Hollywood. It’s almost like really a cautionary tale: Don’t work yourself to death. Get your sleep, write a sentence a day, and stay focused but don’t exclude everything. You cannot exclude your family. You absolutely cannot exclude your children from your life to pursue your dream.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, it all sounds very reasonable. You hear some people say, “My house falls to ruin around me” or “my children are crying on the other side of the door,” and it’s like, oh, that doesn’t sound great either.
Tananarive Due
Yeah, when our son was a baby, you know those BABYBJÖRN things or whatever carriers? I have a picture of my son, baby strapped to him, sitting at his desk. That’s kind of how we rolled with it. And he came up with a brilliant technique. I don’t know how many of your listeners are new parents, but sleeplessness is like my husband’s kryptonite. We knew about those first four months, when a baby doesn’t sleep at night, so we came up with a system. One person would sleep in the bedroom alone, and the other person would sleep in a family room with the crib with the baby. Only one person is on call. Very often, traditionally, that person is the mom, when people are breastfeeding, and it takes that extra amount of faith to say, “Okay, I’m gonna pump and leave it in the fridge, and you can do it,” because sometimes moms feel like we’re the only ones who can do it right, and sometimes we do it in an extra special way. But that doesn’t mean that another way wouldn’t also work. I think we have to give ourselves permission to share the responsibilities. Even with my son’s homework. He had trouble working with my husband. They would clash, so I was doing all the subjects, and I’m not good at math. This past year, we hit a wall. I couldn’t help him with the math. It was going to have to be Steve, and he was happy to do it. I didn’t even realize how much of an extra load I was carrying. I had this idea in my head that I have to be the one. No, you don’t have to be the one. You can share, unless you’re single mom, which is so hard. But that was [this reporter]. Her husband had passed away, so she was not only a single mom, but she was a new widow dealing with grief, and I have no doubt that her grief helped fuel her clarity. I think that’s something that a lot of us need to embrace as we’re like coming out of 2020. A lot of people feeling shell shocked. Steve and I were getting all these opportunities, so we were very productive in 2020. There were some writers who just felt like they couldn’t create in 2020, and it’s OK to be whatever kind of writer you are, but now that things are getting a little better—supposedly half of adults are vaccinated in the U.S., we’re starting to go out more, we’re seeing people’s faces—try to take some of that anxiety and bring it to life in your in creative projects. I always say, “Put it in your writing. Put it in a story.”
Lara Ehrlich
Yes. This is a great transition to your work, because you’ve already mentioned a number of stories where you’ve done just that. I’m particularly interested in horror, because I am a fan of horror and your work in that genre. What is it about that that genre that appeals to you?
Tananarive Due
I’ve told everyone about my mother and the trauma she suffered. It might not be surprising to learn that my mother was the first horror fan I knew. My mother was the one who made me a horror fan. She loved it. From the time I was a kid, she had us watching these creature features or the old Universal black-and-white horror movies—The Mummy, The Fly—all that. She gave me my first Stephen King novel when I was 16. I used to think she just thought horror was fun, like I did as a kid. You’re on a roller coaster going, “Whee!” But, as the New York Times pointed out last year in a story, people who love horror did better emotionally under the pandemic than people who didn’t. I may be paraphrasing the study, but the fact is, I think that speaks to a lot of things. It speaks to how horror lets us process trauma, both past and current. In my mom’s case, although she was a bit of a pessimist—I mean, Trump would not have surprised her in the slightest—she always felt like the gains from the ’60s were being rolled back before her eyes in ways that I thought were not like, “Oh, Mom, you’re being paranoid.” And now I’m like, I was being naive. She had horror from past trauma and from current trauma. She was afraid for us to have boys, she was afraid to have grandsons for all the reasons I’ve described, and horror really helped her. I never got to talk about this with her. It was really only after her death, which was my big trauma, that I started to see that relationship more clearly. It can even be an escape, because the worst horror movie doesn’t feel as bad as losing somebody’s love. Let’s face it. The worst horror movie, you can turn it off and it’s done, and you’ll maybe forget about it. Horror, I think, is a really, really good tool. Not for everybody. Some people need to avoid horror. Some people need to go to comedy. I do both. I listen to standup every day. I watch horror every day, when I can. I just like the one-two punch. They’re really two sides of the same coin. Jordan Peele believes that, and it’s evidenced by his career. I’ve loved horror for as long as I can remember. It took me a while to get to it though, because of genre bias. By the time I got out of grad school, I had been trained out of writing horror, and I’ve been trained at writing Black people. I was just losing myself entirely in the so-called canon. But nowadays, a lot of MFA programs are much more open—thank goodness—to genre writing. People are not made to feel diminished because they want to write horror or science fiction or fantasy, because you can point to award-winning writers. In fact, a lot of literary writers are embracing it, even though they’re still distancing themselves from genre, which really irritates me—to take on the trappings of genre while at the same time distancing yourself from it. Harlan Ellison advised me not to call myself a horror writer, because he felt that being labeled a science fiction writer had hurt his career and level of respect. That bias is real. I’m not gonna blame the artists for the bias they’re walking into, but at the same time, if you’re doing the thing, it’s a little insulting to people who specialize in that thing for you to distance yourself from it as if you’re not doing the exact same thing but with slightly different language.
Lara Ehrlich
In college, I wanted to write in a thesis about Ray Bradbury. I went to my advisor, who is a Jane Austen scholar, and he said I can’t write about Ray Bradbury because science fiction is not literature. That was the first time I’d heard that, and I was like, “What are you talking about?” Ever since then, I’ve become attuned to it, and it’s insulting.
Tananarive Due
I had to find my way back to it, and it took, again, a trauma. I was just doing these sort of epiphany, short stories, white characters, typing away, when Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992 and literally turned my life upside down. Luckily, no one I knew was killed. It’s hard to even explain, but it was a windstorm more than flooding, and trees and buildings flattened. You could look for almost miles down the road, and everything was flattened, and that was my old neighborhood, where my mom lived, my grandmother’s house was damaged, my aunt screaming in her upstairs closet for two hours. It was horrible. I was single then. I’d had a someone I had a crush on from college and we had been sort of checking it out, and he gave me the “I love you, but I’m not in love with you” speech, which nobody wants to hear. That’s a death, when a relationship or a dream of a relationship dies. That’s why I hurt so much. Grief is grief. Grief is an emotion, and it can be applied to anything. It’s just the duration and depth that’s different. That feeling of grief happens when we lose things, and I was just swimming in grief. I felt like my world had been completely destroyed. I came up with an idea for a novel called The In Between about a man who has a near-death experience and wakes up between alternate realities, and he was blessed. I was like, OK, I know I’m going to write a Black, middle-class character, because, again, it’s not just the fault of canon that I had lost myself. The Black literature I’d read tended to be Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, and it was this rural, Southern tradition I didn’t know. I grew up in the suburbs with air conditioning, and I had never seen myself in fiction. I had never seen a character who grew up like me in fiction. I had to realize that it was a legitimate way to be a Black author to write about something other than a rural setting, or, frankly, an urban setting, which I also didn’t know anything about. I was like, where’s that suburban Black literature section? Just write what you know, and The In Between came out of it. Honestly, it was the best thing I’ve ever written. I didn’t know it yet. I made the mistake of only submitting it to a couple places, like an agent who didn’t like it and a screenwriting contest that accepted novels. I didn’t really want to be a screenwriter then, but I said, OK, I’ll accept this deadline. And when you asked me how do you get it all done? Deadlines help a lot. When I’m really serious, I have a quota—like, the script is due next Friday, how many pages do I have to write a day before it’s done next Friday? Anyone who wants to work in television and film really has to know how to write on a schedule. That’s often true with prose, too, but more so with TV and film. The deadlines are quicker. The stakes are very high. It’s not just one person mad at you or a few people mad at you, it’s like a whole village mad at you, because it takes a village to produce a television episode or make a movie. But that’s how I came to horror. I was very lucky that I started publishing in the ‘90s, because if I’d come in the ‘70s or ‘80s, I probably would have had a struggle on my hands. Because I came in the ‘90s, in the wake of Terry McMillan, who wrote Waiting to Exhale—which is not horror, but it’s Black—and publishers were like, “Oh, Black people buy books.” It might have been a tougher time for me if I had tried to come in through horror circles, but I never had the opportunity because my first agent sent it to an editor who had published a Black relationships novel, and she bought it. They’re like, “This could be commercial.” That’s all they cared about—could it be commercial—and horror looked like something that could be commercial. I was very lucky to start publishing when I did, and I’m lucky I’m still around to see the Renaissance. Now the film industry is finally starting to catch up.
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, I was about to ask you how things have changed since then—for you but also for horror and writing literature about with Black protagonists. What changes have you seen in all of these various areas that you work?
Tananarive Due
There’s been a lot of change, and when it happens, it seems to happen very rapidly. But in reality, it’s been almost 30 years since I published my first novel. I was lucky to be published in the ‘90s, but what none of us knew, and this was true also in the film side, there was Eve’s Bayou, by Kasi Lemmons, which is, I’ll call it magical realism, and Tales from the Hood, by Rusty Cundieff, which is a Black horror movie. There were a lot of people getting opportunities in the ‘90s, but I only started publishing in ’95. What I didn’t realize was the tide was already receding. By 10 years after that, you weren’t going to have as many writers getting contracts. All of a sudden, writers were having trouble in getting contracts, owing money on advances that were oversized that they’d been given, and all these kinds of things. It looked like we had arrived, and then it dried up. There are a lot of directors who didn’t get follow-ups from their movies and a lot of writers who were not able to sustain a realistic level of writing success, given that there’s still a lot of prejudice and bigotry and unwillingness to try new things. Something amazing happened, first in literature. Octavia Butler started to rise in prominence in the ‘90s and continued, so even though a lot of the rest of us didn’t have the same recognition, she kept the fires brewing long enough that by the time she passed away in 2006, we were all kind of trolling around together. There were enough of us. And even though her death in 2006 also set that back, it came back super strong with this idea of Afrofuturism. It’s been around for a while, but people have really been talking about it in the last 10 years, I’d say. On the cinema side, between Get Out and Black Panther, that’s the one two-punch that just completely knocked the doors open, so that you can have a common vocabulary in a meeting with a TV executive, where, if you pitch something, they can think of something recent and successful, which was not the case when we were making those rounds back in 2008. Trust me, there was nothing recent and successful that had been Black horror that I could point to and say, “It’ll be like that.” Get Out was sort of the key to every door, and Black Panther, on the science fiction/fantasy side, was hugely impactful.
Lara Ehrlich
What are the screenplays that you’re working on now, if you can tell us about them? Where do they fall in that spectrum of genre? And then tell us about the new book that you have coming out that you mentioned.
Tananarive Due
Generally speaking, I learned how to write screenplays because my books were getting optioned, but then they would stall in the script stage, which I now know is typical and happens to almost every project. It’s a miracle that anything gets made, period. But I thought if I learned how to write screenplays, I could help move that along—which is such a naive thought on so many levels, because, especially when I started learning screenwriting, and I learned from producers like Blair Underwood, who option my novel My Soul to Keep and a producer named Nia Hill, I can almost still hear her voice in my head talking about how the dialogue has to be choppier. It has to be more conversational. Literally, my teachers were producers, and I got opportunities to write scripts. We sold a script to Fox Searchlight back in 2008. Adaptation was my way in. I didn’t have any particular aspirations to write original screenplays, because I already had the books I could adapt, but about three years ago, my husband and I realized that we were really holding ourselves back by only focusing on adaptation, because that meant we had to wait for some producer to fall in love with the book and come to us and then fight to get the spot—and you don’t always get it, by the way. It was not getting that spot for one of my projects that made me realize we needed to write original scripts, like stories that are spec scripts that we just send out, and I’m telling you, it was a huge breakthrough. We wrote two scripts, The Keeper and Mississippi Shuffle, and neither of them has been produced yet, but I feel like both of them will. The Keeper is an amazing script sample. We’re getting meetings, and then on top of that, almost as if by creating my own agency, all the other doors open. I have several works being adapted right now. I don’t think any of them are public yet, darn it. Well, The Good House is at Macro, and they didn’t say it isn’t public, so I’ll just say that. Macro is a great company. We’re pitching The Good House as a television series and adapting a short story of mine for an upcoming as-yet-untitled Black horror anthology series that Shutter is going to do. Steve and I are writing at least one of those scripts, an adaptation of my short story called “The Lake,” which is in my short story collection Ghost Summer. It is kind of ironic to me that after all these years and all these people trying to make movies out of my books that it’s a short story that is my first adaptation. I really want to leave that to the writers out there who may be lost in novels, and I may be talking to you. If you’ve been working on your novel for years and years, as I did for seven years, you might have some emotional aversion to either the story or the process, and I would never say to give up on a novel, but also: write short stories. Give yourself the satisfaction of a beginning, middle, and end. Give yourself the satisfaction of being published for the first time. One of the best writers I’ve ever worked with, I read her novel and was like, “Wait. Why aren’t you published?” She’d been working on this novel. So, she wrote a short story based on the world of that novel, so she’s not even cheating on it—it’s still the same world—but it would be like an epilogue to the world of her novel, and she sold it to a highly regarded anthology. So many writers lose years of their lives trying to learn how to write by writing novels, when novels are incredibly difficult to write. Short stories are also incredibly difficult to write, but they generally don’t take seven years. Even often-published authors like myself, and as an author who is trying to get on that book-a-year system so much, spent seven years working on a novel. If that was all I was working on, I would never know how talented I am writing other scripts. Sometimes, I had to use the sentence-a-day method, because The Reformatory—because it’s about a child’s prison, because it involves the death of someone I was actually related to, even though I never knew about him, I decided to make my protagonist 12, and my son was about 12 when I started writing it—it was hard to write. The research made me cry. It took a long time. I procrastinated. I put it off. But I finally got it finished. I can’t say who’s publishing it, because it hasn’t been announced, but I’m super excited about the publisher. It’ll come out next year. I also want to say, without maybe too much of a spoiler, but the whole point of my writing this novel was to change history. I am not writing a novel about a 12-year-old kid getting beaten up and sexually abused, and that’s the story. It’s really about the frenemy ship, I call it, between my 12-year-old protagonist and the the ghost of a long-dead child, as they have to come together to liberate themselves and expose this warden and his homicides and his horrors at this place. That’s what The Reformatory is about.
Lara Ehrlich
It sounds incredible. This is a good transition back to writer motherhood. As you mentioned, the research was incredibly difficult to do, given the subject matter and with your son being around the same age as the children in the book. Can you talk a little bit about that intersection of motherhood, how difficult certain subjects can be to explore, and the impulse to write and the need to tell that story?
Tananarive Due
Well, I’ve been fascinated by motherhood and inspired by it, even before I had kids, because I had so much reverence for my own mother. The Living Blood, a book I wrote back in the ‘90s, was asking the question: What would it be like to raise a child who is more powerful than you? A child who literally has magical powers and can cause a hurricane? How do you raise that child? I was in Big Brothers Big Sisters before I was a mother, so maybe I’ve always had that in me, that wanting to help nurture children. I noticed when Ghost Summer came out, and I was collecting all my short stories, how many of them had child protagonists. I put a child protagonist on the cover, and I realized, holy cow, all these stories were about children. I’m very fascinated by that coming-of-age moment, when the child has to grow beyond the childishness of who they were because of some trauma they’ve been pushed into, like the protagonist in The Reformatory. People say children are so resilient. Yeah, but don’t beat them. They are resilient in a way, and that superpower that my child has in The Reformatory, and this is why children create movement all over the world, is because their idea of what should be is not fixed to what is. If there’s a sudden change, they can sometimes roll with it with much more grace. You can give an iPhone to a 5-year-old, and they’ll figure it out in two seconds. If you give it to an 85-year-old, not so much, because it doesn’t look like anything else that they’ve seen before. A child expects everything to look like something they’ve never seen before. They figure it out. And that’s what I love about my character in The Reformatory. No matter what I throw at him, it’s like, “OK, so now we’re doing this.” That and I think, maybe partially, I’m mothering through my writing, mothering the child and the story, mothering the readers past their traumas, which is so much of the journey that has made me write this in the first place. I’m mothering myself. The reformatory has a missing mother and a 17-year-old character who has to step into that role, and I think to a degree, that’s kind of how we always feel as mothers, even if we planned it, because it feels so much more immersive than we had the capacity to understand. It’s like, OK, I’m taking on this unexpected challenge, and you want so much to get it right. It just feels like the stakes for getting it wrong are the stuff of deathbed regrets. At my age, I’m just trying not to rack up any deathbed regrets. I want to do it as well as I know how to do it, not phone it in. I really do think, if we can’t have it all, if there are things I don’t do because I don’t have time, I don’t miss those things. I don’t want to be hustling and grinding. I want to be having fun. I don’t I don’t work on anything I wouldn’t do for free at this point, and I want to keep it that way, if I can help it. That includes my teaching job. Don’t tell them.
Lara Ehrlich
That’s the perfect place, I think, to draw to a close. But since we have a few more minutes, you’ve given some wonderful advice for listeners, but just in a couple final words, if you could offer a message to the writer mothers who are listening, what would you say?
Tananarive Due
Well, first of all, be patient with yourselves. Writers are either aggressively not writing or aggressively beating themselves up for not writing or maybe both. Sometimes after a new job or a move or a pandemic, like I said, it’s just not going to be there. That inner child is sort of in a ball and doesn’t want to talk to you right now. And that’s okay during a period of stress, during a period of transition. When it’s not OK is when it becomes the idea that you have of who you are as a writer: I am a writer who doesn’t write because I don’t have time or because I’m too traumatized or whatever. At a certain point, you want to address the trauma, maybe through therapy, maybe through friends, maybe through writing. That’s one of the things I love about writing that teach in a horror workshop—like, here’s a quick prompt, so you could pick a real life trauma that either happened to you or someone you know, something that really stuck with you just, create a premise from that trauma, which can be the thing itself or that same feeling that that trauma created, find the character who’s the best protagonist to interact with that experience, and then figure out what they’re going to do about it. Figure out that story part. How is your character going to interact with your premise to create a change for themselves or for someone else? What can they experience that will give them a greater understanding of the world?
Sometimes horror has a downer ending. It doesn’t have to have a happy ending. But if you can bite off that little trauma and tame it through storytelling, it might help you not feel so paralyzed by any particular trauma. It opens you up to work on other stuff or invites you to engage further with similar traumas, and you realize, “Oh, I like writing horror. I like taking this horrible thing that happened and turning it into Cujo, the dog who’s a monster.”
Lara Ehrlich
Yeah, that’s wonderful. I’m going to try that tomorrow. And I challenge everyone who’s listening now to try the prompt also. And let me know how it goes. Email me at writermothermonster@gmail.com, and tell me how it went. Thank you so much. That’s just been the most wonderful conversation, and we have a comment here from Danielle who says, “What a rich and enlightening chat. I’m a new fan.”
Tananarive Due
Well, great. If you’re a new fan, check out my short story collection, Ghost Summer, for a little taste. And I do have an online writing course called Life Writing Premium at lifewritingpremium.com. It’s about both your work and basically you as a protagonist in your own story. As you work on yourselves, you work on your writing, and it has a synergy, so check that out. There’s a video on the page that explains what it’s about.
Lara Ehrlich
Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure.