 So for those of you not too familiar with the book, it's kind of hard to describe. And I think in a lot of ways it mirrors your own background in terms of a degree in religious studies, also working in terms of social justice, a law degree, your relationships with different cultures and ethnicities. It's very, I would say boundary breaking in a lot of ways. And we'll talk a little bit more about how, it's really hard not to give away too much about what goes on in the narrative because I don't want to spoil too much for you. But basically it's in some ways a horror genre book, post-apocalyptic speculative fiction, a fantasy, there's a lot going on in there. But thinking about it, for those of you who don't know, the post-apocalypse has to deal with the big water. When climate change has brought about, you notice the melting of the polar ice caps is such where millions and millions of people died because of the rising of the big water followed by energy wars. And what becomes kind of interesting is the emergence of life forms that maybe, if I'm describing it well, maybe you can describe it yourself, of life forms that people hadn't thought about before that can become kind of threatening. So I want you to maybe tell us why speculative fiction. It's just so talented as a non-fiction writer. And I know your background with your mother being an English teacher that you read widely. So why this job? Well, I read widely in speculative fiction. So that's my place, that's where I grew up with all my life. I think the first book I really remember affecting me was Dune by Frank Herbert. I read, gosh, David Eddings. That goes a huge fantasy nerd. And so science fiction, fantasy, all of that is just what I grew up reading. And so when it came time for me to write a novel, I knew that's what I wanted to write. That's the genre I wanted to be in. So one of the things that I appreciated thinking about it is that we learn a lot about DNA culture. And that's one of the things I appreciate is that we're moved away from the European mythology into another culture. Right, because I love all those books, but they're all about white boys. Usually white boys questing, white boys winning the day, that sort of thing. And I wanted to write a book where the characters look like people I knew. They look like me or people that I was surrounded by and my family and all of that. But I wanted it to be in the speculative fiction genre. And so I think at the time I was living in Navajo. I'm part of my husband is Navajo. I'm OKa Wenge on my mother's side and African-American on my father's side. OKa Wenge is a tribe in New Mexico. And we are neighbors with the DNA, the Navajo. And my husband is Navajo. And I was living on the Navajo Nation at the time working there in legal aid. And so these were the people that are around me. These are my family and friends. And of course, the culture is so rich in stories and in traditions, but also so real, like in people. So I wanted to bring a lot of that, like the stories and the tradition and the excitement of Navajo culture to the page, because I know a lot of people did not know about that. They know about stereotypes. They know about feathers and braids and that sort of thing. So I wanted to make it real too, like the people that I know, the people that drive old trucks and the people that go to visit their grandpa on the weekends, that sort of thing. So I wanted to balance sort of the supernatural, for lack of a better term, and the very sort of grounded realistic places I knew. And a woman as protagonist. Oh, yeah. You know, that took a little doing. I think I always say the programming is real. Like it's sometimes really hard to write strong female characters if you've grown up reading male characters your whole life. And so I struggled a bit with that at first, just like in the second book, Storm of Locust, the one that comes after Trail of Lightning, it's all about female friendships. And the main character from Trail of Lightning has to really grow, and she's not a real people person, so this is her chance to meet people and make friends and stuff. And that was a struggle to sort of write that through, because you don't see a lot of female friendships on the page. And so when I came to write her as well, like I think Daniel said before me, so much of our writing is autobiographical, like so much of it is pulled from the things that we know. So she's got a lot of me in her. And like you said, a lot of the sort of unique background that I have I think has pulled into her struggles, at least metaphorically. And so yeah, hopefully that turned out okay. So see, now I can't wait until April. Oh yeah. Yeah, because female friendships I think are missing from a lot of pop culture, because usually if there's more than one woman, they're not supporting each other, they're competing. Right, right. So that'll be a nice change. So your book takes place in the sixth world. Can you tell us about what the previous five worlds? So in Navajo traditional stories, sometimes it's four and sometimes it's five, depending on where you are on the res and who you're talking to. But they believe that in an emergent story, so that humans came up through, or beings came up through other worlds. And so we are now in the fifth world, the glittering world. But that world will I assume eventually end and you'll have a new world. Just as the other worlds before it ended, and usually in something cataclysmic like a flood. So when I was thinking about how, I wanted to write in the genre of urban fantasy, but I really like this idea of apocalypse, because I think for indigenous people, I always say that our apocalypse has already happened. We have already seen the end of our world. And all these sort of tropes that you see in dystopian stories where they take your kids and they send them to this rigorous school where they're ground down and all these sort of things, that all happened. That's all real. We don't have to pretend. We don't have to make up a story to tell you how bad it can get. We know. And so I wanted to take those things and I wanted to sort of flip them. And I wanted to say that we know the apocalypse. So when the rest of the world has their apocalypse, we're gonna be okay. This is like a new start. So, and also, if you've spent any time, I'm sure there's some natives out there. If you live on the res or you spend any time there, you know, the people, they work hard. I mean, when I lived with my in-laws, we did not have running water. We hauled our water in. We ran electricity off a generator. There were seven of us in a pretty small trailer. So you're living hard and you're working and that's not an unusual condition. And I think most people don't know that. So, you know, you go ahead and have your apocalypse and you freak out when you lose your electricity and natives are gonna be like, all right, it's just Tuesday, you know, it's just another day. And I wanted to capture some of that too. And you captured it well. Yay, thank you. So I wanted to go back to the character of Maggie because I thought it was interesting that Karen Kusama, the movie director, was talking about her new movie destroyer. And she says she didn't give a shit if anybody didn't like her character. And if you go through the canon of literature, most of those men are not likeable. But women are not allowed to be that way. And so can you talk more, because you talked about that struggle with the character of Maggie. Can you talk more about, so again, I don't want to give away too much about her personality and why you like that rap. Oh yeah, she's terrible. Because as you mentioned with a lot of the traditional fantasy with the quest, as you go to the white white quest, they're not as flawed or as difficult in terms of relationships as Maggie is. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, and I have gotten that. Some people, bless them, are like, I love her, she's great. But most people are like eh, you know, we don't know, we don't want to be your friend. And I agree, you probably don't want to be your friend, but you want her at your back, you know, you want her, or at least by your side. And yeah, you know, I think there are a lot, especially I think for women of color, you know, a lot of things Maggie does, I think if you're right, if it was a male protagonist, nobody would blink an eye. They'd think like oh, he's such a badass, you know. But when she does it, you know, and in the story as she goes through, because they're sort of on a kind of a quest, they're trying to solve a mystery of like who created this monster. You know, she encounters all these men and the majority of them react to her very poorly because she's very difficult, you know, she's not what you would call like, you know, the likable sort of female protagonist. But for me that made her like. Yeah, you know, and I think hopefully, yeah, a lot of women, especially women of color are going to look at that and be like mm-hmm, I know that, you know, that's familiar. So yeah, and I just wanted to keep her real to me. Like my most important thing with Maggie is she's dealing with a lot of baggage. Like there's a lot of shit that went down for her before the book starts. And so, you know, it doesn't go away just because I'm telling a story. You know, that is the thing that the character brings with her and you're gonna see her growth. There is a character arc and it's bigger than just one book. It's a whole series because when people come back to me and are like, what, she's still, you know, yeah, she hasn't, you know, she's not where I want her to be at the end. I'm like, mm, she makes some bad decisions because she's human, you know. So yeah, that was my most important point. I wanted her to be real. Very nice. Okay, so one of the things I was thinking about with all the boundary crossing that you did is also thinking about the way the difference, actually these sort of narrow alleys of genre fall in there, but thinking about horror aspects. Oh yeah. Had people critiqued you for being so raw on some of the violence that shows up? Yes, you know, so the book is, it is, it's sort of a mashup of urban fantasy science. So it follows a lot of the tropes of urban fantasy if you've read those shifts, I'm very familiar. But it's also science fiction, it's apocalyptic and it's definitely horror. There are some scenes that are very violent and dark. But you know, I think for me, especially coming from a native perspective, so there's this whole missing and murdered indigenous women and I don't know if people know about that, but you know, thousands of indigenous women in the United States and Canada go missing every year and are often found murdered and it never makes the news. It's like nothing, like it's like we don't exist. And so the stat is something like one in three native women will be a victim of violence in their lifetime. And so when you are coming from a world like that, you know, your life is violence. Your life can be, you know, very dark and like dangerous. And so I wanted to capture some of that too. I didn't want to gloss over the violence and I have been critiqued for that. Some people think it's too much and that is fair. And you know, if it's not your cup of tea, I totally get it. But for me, it was important to convey the horror of that kind of violence. You know, of, I didn't want to gloss it over. I didn't want, you know, pew pew, fake blood. I wanted you to feel some abhorrence. I wanted you to feel some discomfort in the level of violence that she has to live through. And I think because it's grounded, it's an interesting irony you have going on in that it's grounded in the real while this other reality exists with it. But that was important to keep it that way. I think not only just because of the reality of violence, but also because horror is not entertaining. The things that are happening are not entertaining. And so we need to understand that and not get a pleasurable groupie response to it. Right, right, or gloss it over. I think it would be worse if you read the scenes. There's only like one or two violent scenes, but if you read those scenes and it didn't affect you, if you just turned the page and kept going, then I don't think I've done my job. If it makes you pause and I've had people put the book down, I understand, hopefully they came back. But that's my job. So thinking about the violence committed in the book, going back to thinking about the monsters. Well, we have our human monsters. We have those aspects of ourselves that we may find just tasteful. But thinking about them as a kind of metaphor, and I'm just thinking about the description of the monsters. One of the things I won't talk too much about, but they're described as sort of the teeth that I thought was an interesting kind of metaphor. So that it talks about how these monsters, or at least the one that's described in the book, has even teeth that almost are like old wooden dentures with no scissors, yet they bite. So how did you come up with that idea? Oh, and sort of, what do you think? I don't even know, I like that you interpreted that like really deeply, because I'm not sure that was that deep, but the story is about a monster hunter. The main character, Maggie, is a monster hunter. But I wanted the monsters to be both real in the story and metaphorical, because sometimes people are like, she only hunts like two monsters. And I'm like, she has hunted monsters the whole time. The whole story is her battling monsters. But some of them are internal, some of them are her own demons. But the physical monster that they find like lacks, I'm trying to think if that's a giveaway. I can't remember what all I've said. Well, maybe I won't tell you some details, I'll let you find out. But one of the things it does, yeah, it has the flat teeth. And honestly, I think what I was thinking about that, I was thinking of that line in smoke signals, do y'all know smoke signals, the movie, where they sing John Wayne's teeth? And they're like, you know, John, well, I'm not gonna sing it, because I can't sing. But they're talking about his dentures, his wooden dentures and how they're like, I just thought, oh, that straight line dentures. Like, you think of like the white man who snaps. See, I'm sitting there loving it because I'm thinking about the relationship, right, the colonialism and all that. Yeah, there's a little bit of that, but you can go out. I'll pour that. Me too. But one of the things that was really interesting in the book, when the monster attacks one of the characters, because it doesn't have those sharp teeth, it's like gnawing and gawing and it's horrible, long-eating thing, thinking about how someone had speculated that it was going for the vocal cords. And the fact that it's a little girl, talking about the missing woman and not allowing women to have a voice. Yeah, that's on purpose. I love that. Now I can feel deep, yes. That I did on purpose. Okay, let me see. Oh, yeah, I have tons of questions. So one of the things I thought was interesting about the book, and I appreciate the nonlinear structure, thinking about how the present exists in the book, right, because we're reading it now, thinking about the future, and then also the past. Is that a culturally-based sort of sense of the way time works? I'm just gonna put my ignorance about DNA culture out there, so I was just curious. You know, I think that felt natural to me. I'm not sure I really thought that through. I know that I have argued in other works and nonfiction works that this sort of realm of indigenous futurism, which is sort of a child of Afrofuturism, the term was coined by Grace Dillon and at University of Portland, this idea of indigenous futurism, that there is a melding of the past and the present and the future, that there's not a real separation between time for indigenous cultures, that this is sort of a false thing that is not part of our culture traditionally. So I might have tapped into some of that. Once again, I'm gonna say that this sounds great, but I don't know that I did it on purpose. Yeah, it just felt natural. And natural too, thinking about the wall that shows up. I was curious about that, right? Right, where all this discussion has been going on the last few years. So interestingly, I read this book actually before Trump was elected, and I had originally put in a wall. So in the story, the apocalypse sort of has happened. The world has gone to hell in a handbasket, but the Navajo Nation, the Diné are fine. They're doing pretty good, right? They're a little more prepared. But they've built a wall around the reservation, around the nation to keep the riff-raff out. And I had written it that way before Trump was elected, and then I took it out when I was querying it. But when I was talking to my editor about it, I was like, well, I did write this thing with a wall, and by then Trump had been elected and he was like, put the wall back in, put the wall in. So we added the wall back in. But for the Diné, the wall is sacred. It actually rises with the help of the holy people, which are sort of like the Diné gods, ancestors sort of thing. And the wall keeps them safe. The wall is made from sacred stones and shells and... This is beautiful. Yeah. So it's a play on the idea of the wall, right? So indigenous people building a wall to keep everyone else out, I thought was kind of badass, but that's the idea, yeah. It's too bad they didn't. Yeah, right? Notes to some. Okay, the other thing I really appreciated about the book besides the sort of the way you structured it was it just feels so urgent. The language that you use, the way you structure your sentences and the sort of length of the chapters, I found really interesting and sort of, did you just write it with the mood and tone? It just came out? So that's a craft sort of thing, yeah. So did you have to go back and edit it because you thought it was too light, too dark? So it is a craft decision. I wrote it in first person, present, because I wanted that sense of urgency. The sentences are very mostly short sentences. It was funny, it went through copy edits and the copy editor came back with all these semicolons because I have all these short choppy sentences and I was like, there are no semicolons in the apocalypse. I took those out. So I was like, stat, stat, stat, stat, stat. Just keep it the way it is. I wanted it like that. I want it short and choppy and urgent. Yeah, thank you. I'm glad that. The intensity of it, I mean there were moments when I really, I couldn't breathe, literally. I'm just like, what are you doing? It really came across well. So I appreciate that, especially with giving what goes on in the book. Why do you think people consider it a young adult novel? Well, you know, it is not a young adult novel. It is an adult novel. I think there is sort of a love triangle and look, I love a love triangle so don't even judge me if I put my love triangle. It's the best, but it doesn't work out quite the way you think it would work out. It's sort of a dark and twisted love triangle. I think that's one of the reasons. I think people see a love triangle and they think, oh, it's young adult. I think also women who write speculative fiction, particularly with female protagonists, the strong female protagonists, often get categorized as young adult. It's sort of a phenomenon. And to be fair, hopefully it hits a little bit of a sweet spot. I think I read a lot of young adult. I love young adult, but I also read a lot of adult too. So maybe it sort of hits that sweet spot with my style and the pacing and that sort of thing between young adult and adult. So since we talked earlier about some of your craft issues, can you talk about the difference between writing short fiction versus novels? Do you like, which do you have a preference or they just each have their own use? Yeah, so I write short fiction too. That's what I won the awards for. I think with short fiction, I'm a much more loose. I have a emotion I'm looking for or I have some sort of feeling I wanna capture, something that shorter gives me the freedom to experiment a little bit more. When I write a novel, I'm pretty standard. I follow sort of a three act structure. I wanna hit my plot points here. I'm a planner, not a pancer as they say. And with a short story, I'm a little less so. I often start a short story. I don't know where I'm going. Whereas when I write a novel, I know where I wanna end up. So yeah, I don't think I have a preference. They're just very different. Sometimes it's fun to write short fiction because you can experiment with a lot of different things and you're not as committed ideally. It doesn't take clearly as long to write that. And how long did it take to write trails like that? So I started writing, so I'm a lawyer by day, unfortunately, but no, it's good. I actually, I studied federal Indian law and tribal law in law school and that's how I ended up working on the Navajo Nation. But it was fairly, I find law fairly unfulfilling. So I started writing and I had a baby who's now 11, who's over there, with her headphones on, she ain't even listening to me. Just like mine, she's like me. I know, right? She's like, whatever, I heard it a million times. So, but you know, so she was little though and I just really didn't have anything for myself. And so I started writing and I've always written sort of as a hobby, expected of fiction. I have reams and reams of vampire stories. A lot of them have love triangles, do not judge me. But nobody sparkles. But yeah, so I started writing Trail of Lightning, I guess probably in like 2013 or something. And I was writing it for myself. That was after I put the baby to bed, sitting at the side of her bed late night, typing, doing this thing that was keeping me sane. And then I joined a writing group, I guess I can, oh gosh, I can't remember, maybe like 2015 or so. And they were all published writers and I was not. And they said, well, you can join our group anyway. They probably weren't expecting much, but they were like, it turned out to be pretty good. And they really encouraged me. They were like, hey, you know, you should maybe try to get this published. And I was like, uh-huh, really? So I did. That's my story. Yeah, but yeah, so it took me probably two years to write it and another year to edit it. And then, yeah. So yeah, I noticed that you talked about the writers group a little bit in your acknowledgment. So now that it's published and you're working on the rest of the series and also your other work, you still meet with a group? Is the process different? Do you have to keep it secret and only you and your editor at the publisher? So there are some books that I am writing right now that y'all don't know about, but I'm not allowed to talk about. So those nobody knows about. You will know at some point, but yeah, those are under wraps. Other books like the Epic Fantasy you mentioned between Earth and Sky, I do have a writing group. Now I leveled up and there's actually a lot of science fiction and fantasy writers in New Mexico. You probably know some of their famous names, which I won't mention, but they're in my writing group. So now I have those dudes reading my stuff and giving me feedback. So that's pretty nice, yeah. So I still belong to a writing group, absolutely. So I'm gonna try and transition over to some other things. Any advice for aspiring writers? Oh yeah, well, you know, write what you wanna write. I think if I had thought, so as I really came into writing, I'll be honest with a real high level of like naivete, like I didn't know I wasn't supposed to write what I wrote. You know, I didn't know that I wasn't supposed to write these like sort of strong female characters that give everybody shit. I didn't know that it would be wild, you know, or like really that groundbreaking to write something with, so there's no white people in my book, but there, well there's one white guy and he is dead, but there are black folks and you know, there's obviously Navajo folks and you know, when I sort of set out to write that, I didn't consciously really think, okay, no white people in my book, because I think if I had known or I talked to somebody about that they would have said, oh, that's never gonna sell. Oh, you're never gonna be able to like get away with that. You gotta have at least one or two white people for all the white folks to identify with, right? Cause what else do they get, you know? But it is not true. You write what you wanna write, like, and let the market, and I'm genre, I'm all over the board kind of in genre, you know, like some people call it fantasy, some people call it science fiction. Like you said, young adult, adult, I didn't really worry about any of that. And you as a writer, I don't think you have to write to the market. I think you can write what you wanna write and you let the market work it out. Thank you, that'd be my advice. Okay, I asked if she would be kind enough cause I love to hear people read their work. I love the oral traditions. So if you would read something for us. Right, so since we're here to talk about my novel, I thought I would read you from my short story. Ha. Just like. So I'm just gonna read a little excerpt from actually the short story, Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience trademark. And this is the story that I was blessed to win the Hugo and the Nebula for. It was also a sturgeon, a world fantasy and a locust finalist. Yeah, so I think it's pretty good, but we'll spend out, right? You get to decide. Okay, so welcome to your authentic Indian Experience trademark. You maintain a menu of a half dozen experiences on your digital blackboard. But Vision Quest is the one the tourists choose the most. That certainly makes your work day easy. All a Vision Quest requires is a dash of mystical shaman, a spirit animal, wolf, usually, but birds of prey are on the upswing this year. And the approximation of a peyote experience. Tourists always come out of the experience feeling spiritually transformed. You've never actually tried peyote, but you did smoke your share of weed during that one year at Arizona State and who's going to call you on the difference? It's all 101 stuff, really, these quests, but no other Indian working at Sedona sweats can do it better. Your sales numbers are tops. Your wife, Teresa, doesn't approve of the gig. Oh, she likes you working, especially after that dismal stretch of unemployment the year before last when she almost left you. But she thinks the job itself is demeaning. Our last name's not true blood, she complains, when you tell her about your nom de rev. Nobody wants to buy a Vision Quest from a Jesse Turnblatt, you explain. I need to sound more Indian. You are Indian, she says. Turnblatt's Indian sounding enough because you're already Indian. We're not the right kind of Indian, you counter. I mean, we're Catholic for Christ's sake. What Teresa doesn't understand is that tourists don't want a real Indian experience. They want what they can see in the movies and who can blame them. Movie Indians are terrific. So you watch the same movies the tourists do until John Dunbar becomes your spirit animal and stands with Fisht, your best girl. You memorize Johnny Depp's lines from The Lone Ranger and hang a picture of Iron Eyes Cody in your work locker. For a while, you're really in to Dustin Hoffman's Little Big Man. It's Little Big Man that does you in. For a week in June, you convince your boss to offer a Custer's Last Stand special thinking there might be a tourist or two who want to live out a crazy horse experience. You even memorize some quotes attributed to the venerable Sioux chief that you find on the internet. You plan to make it real authentic, but you don't get a single taker. Your numbers nose dive. Management and Phoenix notices and boss drops it from the blackboard by fourth of July weekend. He yells at you to stop screwing around. Accuses you of trying to be an artiste or whatnot. Tourists don't come to Sedona's West to live out a goddamn battle, boss says in the break room over lunch one day, especially if the white guy loses. They come here to find themselves. Boss waves his hand in the air in approximation of something vaguely prayer-like. It's a spiritual experience we're offering. Top quality, the fucking best. Daran, your Navajo coworker with a pretty smile on the perfect teeth snorts loudly. She takes a bite of her sandwich, mutton by the looks of it. Her jaw works, her sharp teeth flash white. She waits until she's finished chewing to say, nothing spiritual about Squaw fantasy. Squaw fantasy is boss's latest idea, his way to get the numbers up and impressed management. Daran and a few others have complained about the use of the ugly slur. The inclusion of a sexual fantasy is an experience at all. But boss is unmoved, especially when the first week's numbers roll in. Biggest seller yet. Boss looks over at you. What do you think? Boss's pima with a bushy mustache and a thick head of still dark hair. You admire that about him, virility. Boss makes being a man look easy, makes everything look easy, real authentic-like. Daran tilts her head, long beaded earrings swinging and waits. Her painted nails click impatiently against the Formica lunch table. You can smell the onion in her sandwich. Your mouth is dry like the red rock desert you can see outside your window. If you say Squaw fantasy is demeaning, boss will mock you, call you a pussy or worse. If you say, if you think it's okay, Daran and her crew will put you on the guys who are assholes list and you'll deserve it. You sip your bottled water stalling, decide that in the wake of the crazy horse debacle, that boss's approval means more than Daran's and venture. I mean, if the tourists like it, boss slaps the table triumphant. Daran's face twist and disgust. What does Teresa think of that? Hey, Jesse, she spits at you. You tell her boss is thinking of adding savage braves to the menu next. He's gonna have you in a loincloth and hair down to your ass. See how you like it. Your face heaps up embarrassed. You push away from the table too quickly and the flimsy top teeters. You can hear bosses' shouts of protest as his vending machine lemonade tilts dangerously and Daran's mocking laugh, but it all comes to your ears through a shroud of thick cotton. You mumble something about getting back to work. The sound of arguing trails you down the hall. Thank you. There.