 I'd like to thank you. I am Samantha from Bear Pond Books. Thanks for coming to the book launch for our good friend and debut author, Makaya Bay Galt. We are thrilled to host Makaya to celebrate the publication of her fabulous and much-anticipated novel, Good Night, Stranger, which is getting wide attention and has already been long-listed for the Center for Fiction's first novel prize. Congratulations. Plus, I suspect if everyone here buys a copy of the book tonight, it will end up on the New York Times. Right? That's how it works? Another friend and local author, Ann Cardle, who recently had a successful launch for her new novel, Five Midnights, will introduce Makaya tonight. So I'm just going to say, please remember to mute or turn off your cell phones. So it's a good thing to do before a reading. The restroom is located in the back of the store to the right. Also, please help yourself to refreshments. Makaya brought special cookies I am sure she will talk about, and they come with their very own recipe cards that you can take home with you. We will be cutting a special cake after the reading in Q&A tonight. And now to introduce Makaya, please welcome Ann Cardle. Oh, so many. This is so exciting. I first met Makaya ten years ago. I was honored to be on her hiring committee, and I think Gary Moore, who's here, was on it, and for the editor of Hunger Mountain, Vermont College's literary magazine. And I remember I was so impressed as everybody is with her. She was so sweet and gentle and kind, and I kind of wanted to take care of her, you know? Then I read one of her stories, and I will tell you it was an essay about a grave robbing teenager from my town. And it was dark and sensual and intense, and I was like, okay, she is my people. We have that in common. And in fact, that essay ended up being published in Tin House. It was called My Own Private Byron. But in the next few years, we worked together when she was director of the MFA in Writing and Publishing Program. And there are several students from that program or alums here tonight. She was caring and thoughtful and fiercely supported her program, her students and her faculty. And in addition to the professional work we did together, our friendship deepened. And we were on submission at the same time with our books, and we supported each other, read each other's work. We encouraged each other. Actually, I used to send her emails that I wished I could send to my agent, and she would do the same. It's like, what's going on? What's going on? And then we made, she remembered her telling me, but what if this never sells? What if I never publish a book? I was right. So we kept each other going through that process. And we promised each other we'd have a spa day to celebrate when both of our books sell. And I happened to be in Tampa at AWP with her when she accidentally met the woman who would end up being her editor. And it was in classic Makaya brand. She was flustered and confused, but happy, and she brought pastries. And the woman was completely blown away by her. And then she came to me and said, oh my god, I didn't know she was the one who was looking at my book. I was so silly, I had baklava. I was like, you know what, that is completely on brand. You're totally fine. And that is the woman who ended up buying her book. Makaya was not raised landlocked as she is now. She grew up in Sanibel Island and Cape Cod and other places by the sea. She's a graduate of the Syracuse MFA program. She studied with George Saunders. And in fact, he calls her kid. I was there when he called one time about the book and he said, hey kid. And I was like, George Saunders calls her kid. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times. Modern Love, did you read that this week? Spectacular. Just spectacular. Tim House, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Salon.com, among others. But we're here tonight to celebrate the release of Good Night Stranger. And as Sam said, it was long listed for the Center for Fiction's first novel prize. The Cosmos, Cosmopolitan Magazine called it one of the best literary thrillers you'll read this year. It was named one of the 10 smartest beach reads of 2019 by BBC Culture, as well as a must read crime titled by Book Riot. And I'm grateful to say that though she left her full time job as director of the program to produce more gorgeous works, she has stayed on to teach in the MFA in running and publishing program and coordinate the Vermont Book Award. I'm honored to present my friend and brilliant writer, Makaya Bigel. Hi, everybody. Can you hear me? Is it good? I can never really hear myself. This is fantastic. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. Well, some of you know that I'm like a little obsessed with the concept of luck and being lucky. I've always felt my whole life I felt very lucky that great things have happened to me. And I'm not like discounting, I mean I work really hard too. But beyond that, also things happen because of luck. And I don't even mean privilege, which is its own thing. I mean, I am a lucky person. And to the point where I spend a lot of time feeling guilty about it, I'm like, why am I so lucky? Anyway, I've recently read this amazing research about luck that was looking at people who are lucky and it found that actually there are people who are lucky, who are lucky people. And it was looking at, so that is true. That's not just like how you perceive it. And it did all this research to find out what made them lucky. And the thing that made lucky people lucky was that they felt lucky. It was just like an amazing cycle. I feel lucky and then I am lucky, so I feel lucky. But really, I mean all of this is just a saying that I don't think that feeling exists in a vacuum. That the luck is created by having amazing friends and a wonderful family. And in this case, having a bookstore like Verpont and booksellers who are so supportive of writers, I had no idea kind of the power and influence of independent booksellers. Even though as a reader I loved shopping here, I get it now. It's amazing. Booksellers have a lot of power. It's amazing. I'm super grateful for through Verpont but I feel like my luck, you know, so much of that is created by living in this community. So I like look out there. I see like dear friends and I also see people who, you know, merchants I know, people I know from the schools where my kids go. I just feel like so wonderful to be so supported and encouraged in my, you know, pursuits. So, oh sure. A little bit better. A little more volume somewhere. Okay. So I, there's no way sort of for me to thank everybody. It would go on too long. But I need to just thank my family who are here. My kids Lily, Teddy and River are right back there. They've been so, they've been so great. They've been so supportive of me writing this. River said, wait, is your book going to be in the library? He said, I know you're famous mom. That's so great. And my, I have to just thank my husband Jeff because, well, I don't, you know, so, so many of you know, you've read that modern love piece and you know, I didn't really get a wedding like the way other people do. We just got married in our living room with like some people in this room were at that wedding. But it was just like a wedding at midnight in our living room with like 20 people there, strangers. I never really got that like, you know, feeling like this important thing, being witnessed, you know, during this important thing. So actually this feels a little bit like that right now. So it's amazing. Thank you. But he's, but he's, he's been pretty amazing through this. He actually makes me coffee in the morning and brings it to me in bed. But he doesn't even wake me up. He just leaves it by the side of the bed. And I can wake up when I wake up. It's just kind of magically there. That's the best thing. Okay, so I'm, I'm actually going to read only a pretty short, a short thing. I'm going to read a couple paragraphs to kind of set the scene and then just one tiny little scene for you. So I think it'll go pretty quick and I'll talk a little bit in between what I'm going to read. So the, the, it's, I'm just going to start right at the beginning for the first couple paragraphs. This is the beginning of Good Night, Stranger. Baby B was our brother and he'd been dead all our lives. For a long time I thought I'd see him again, but by the time I was 28, I believed that the dead stay dead. I knew that the space he left in our lives would have to be filled in other ways. That summer I was working in the information booth on the landing as I had every summer for 10 years. It was August, which meant that humidity and the smell of dead sea animals hung in the air like fog. Masks clanged and seagulls cried out in the harbor. The water was blue, green, and gray, and the sight of it made me thirsty. The ferry was a little white toy as it rounded the tip of the island, growing larger and more substantial as it lumbered into the landing and let down its planks. Passengers defended, blinking and lugging suitcases, and I leaned back to await their questions. I recognized everyone who stepped off the boat. They all fit into one of three categories, tourist, islander, returning visitor. I was an expert on tourists. They didn't know me, but I knew them. With a glance I could tell why they were here. Some arrived armed with cameras and pocket money trying to capture the island, fitted onto a scrapbook page. Some came because they loved beauty. Some came to remember the past or to refuse the future. And then there were those of us who were born here and never left. That was me and my brother Lucas, and about half the class we graduated with from the tiny island high school. The old fisherman, the Portuguese, and Cape Verdean grandpas and their sons and grandsons, and the shop owners, the bar keeps, the waitresses, and hotel clerks. The people who stayed had various and complicated reasons for staying. For me it was because of my brothers. Lucas, the living brother, who needed me to look after him, but also my dead brother in the little island graveyard. They held on to me the way families do. That love anchored gravitational pull. So I'm going to skip ahead just a little bit. So, you know, basically it's the story of these triplets. They were born as triplets and one of the babies died. You know, it's just a few weeks old. And, you know, he was buried there in the graveyard, lady slippers, covering his grave. But, you know, there's a line about how he didn't ever really pass away the way the dead are supposed to be stayed with them, you know, really. The idea of him, not a memory, because they were infants, but sort of the sense of what could have been, has haunted them all their lives. Now the characters, the siblings are in their late 20s now. So just a little bit about sort of how this particular kind of haunting showed up for them. From the moment we could dream, we dreamed about baby bee. They called him baby bee, which is what he was called during the pregnancy. His name was Colin. From the moment we could dream, we dreamed about baby bee. In Lucas's dreams, he was bright and alive, but nonsensical. He slid down banisters and snake holes, drove giant cars and reindeer, hidden cellars and knot holes. Lucas followed him through rooms that opened into other rooms, chased him along strange beaches where he disappeared into a series of underwater caves, his feet, or maybe fins, flashing behind him. My dreams were logical, like me. In my dreams we were in a classroom and a teacher was calling roll, and Colin was there along with the other children, raising his hand, saying, here, my subconscious was forever trying to line us up, put everyone in order. Lucas's subconscious was attempting to break the rules of reality, create a world in which Colin could return. Those were the ways we dealt with loss, even his children. But it wasn't just that we missed him. There's a kind of peace in missing someone you'll never see again. We didn't have that peace. There was always a sense that we might see him again. Lucas believed with all his heart that baby bee would come back to us, and he wasn't alone. My mother believed it too, and maybe I did as well. I had some small unruly fraction of my psyche that rebelled against order and logic. He's a spirit now, my mother used to say. He lives in the air all around us. He's waiting to be born to us again. Lucas began turning lights on for baby bee when we were still tiny. Three years old, four years old, he left a nightlight on in the hallway in case baby bee came back in the night. Then he started leaving the bathroom light on, then the hallway light, the kitchen light, the closet. We can't sleep when the lights are on, my parents told him. How will he find the house in the dark? Lucas asked. He doesn't need to see you, my mother said. It doesn't work like that. Do you know that for sure? He asked, and of course, he didn't. Then he would forget about the lights for a while. A couple of years later, the lights would be on again. He turned them up all on after my parents had gone to bed, or he'd play music for baby bee. Lucas opened all the windows and blasted Nina Simone. Here comes the sun and Mr. Bojangles, because those were the songs baby bee liked. How did Lucas know baby bee liked those songs? Good question. We were 10 when he started playing Nina Simone, always with the windows open. As if baby bee were a bird who might alight on the sill. Always full blast. He's not deaf, he's dead, I used to tell him. Or he would bake for baby bee. Cinnamon cookies, the spice of them filling the kitchen, drifting out the open windows. So one of the most fun things that has happened has to do with these cinnamon cookies. So my friend Martin Phillip, who's a great writer, but also happens to be the head baker for King Arthur Flower. So he has his book Breaking Bread, a baker's journey home in 75 recipes, this amazing mashup of a cookbook and memoir. He's a wonderful writer. I asked him if he would develop a special cinnamon cookie recipe just for the book that was like baby bee's cinnamon cookies. So he did. He's like, what do they need to be like? I said, the smell has to fill the house. It has to be that intense. So he made this recipe especially for it, which I love on many levels. One, it's like amazing as a writer to write something and have it come alive in sort of a sensory way. Two, I'm not necessarily very gifted in the kitchen, but Martin is like a genius with this recipe. So these cookies that I made, I feel like they're like the best thing I've ever made. They're so good. They're incredible. So I made some and they're here tonight with the recipe card. So they're the like dark looking cinnamon-y ones. They're really intense. Like not all of my kids like them because they're so cinnamon-y. But the other thing I like is just the book is like a little dark in places. And I love the idea that cookies, which are sort of so innocent, are the thing that came out of it. Okay, but anyway, back to this. So the siblings are grown-ups. They've lived their whole life kind of haunted by this, what's not there, this loss. Their parents have died. They're alone. Lydia, the main character, feels like she has to stay on this island to take care of her brother who's really pathologically shy, sort of can't function, can't go in a bank or go out to the grocery store, can't interact with people. So she has to take care of him. She loves her home. She loves this island, Wolf Island, a fictional island. But she also feels trapped by it. Okay, a stranger shows up on the island. He's handsome. She notices him and can't, you know, getting off the ferry. Can't stop thinking about him. She decides she's going to go to the inn where he's staying to see if he's there. The lounge of the island inn was scattered all around with soft armchairs and little low tables. There was a small dance floor by a grand piano near the bar. A pianist in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt was playing take the A train. I wouldn't normally come to this bar. I liked to jacks, but I thought I might see the stranger here. And I did. He was with the tourists at the bar. He was watching the room, taking it in with the same almost possessive look I'd seen at the landing. Mine, all mine, his look seemed to say. To everything in the room, armchairs, bar stools, piano. I crossed the lounge and sat next to him. Hi, he said. I recognized you from the information booth. No, from, he shook his head. Actually, this is convenient because I'm in need of some information. I thought you might be, I said. Laughing, he said. I find islanders very accommodating. Some of us are. I ordered scotch, which was what I liked to drink. I love the way it burned, the way each sip seemed illicit. Even long after I turned 21, the stranger paid for it. Already that force was blooming between us. A kind of invisible presence. Air pressure, humidity, the fullness before a storm. The way the air around you grows arms and legs, a beating heart. He was here from New York. He said, not on vacation, more like a retreat. His name was Cole. He had no wedding ring. He smelled like salt, like cornflour. What kind of information did you need? I asked. He thought for a moment, best lobster roll on the island. Drinks, best pancakes, the diner, mateys. Bookstore, no, sorry, library. Affordable hotel for a possible extended stay. I shook my head considering the sea breeze is cheap, but you can stay here for the same cost if you asked for room 11. What's wrong with room 11 haunted? Yes. I can't wait to find out what that means. He said, do you already have a room? Number five. He said, I've never seen that one. I said, I'd like to. I watched his eyes dilate. That's an opening to the light, darkness, creating space for desire. But he shook his head. I would offer to show you, but everything is everywhere. It's a mess. I like messes. Do you have a room? He asked. I have a house. I would love to see it, but I also have a brother and he will be there. I like brothers. You won't like mine. I'll risk it, he said. I held his arm on the beach. We bumped against each other's shoulders. I felt reckless like someone else, another girl. Lucas could hide in his room all night. He could sleep up on the attic bed. He could spend the night at the lighthouse. I wanted to forget him just for one night for an hour or two. Oh, Cole said suddenly. My house was in front of us and he stopped and stared at it. He looked over his shoulders, if orienting himself. The houses of the island all perched like sea birds on the sand, squatting gulls nestled against the wind or long-legged herons keeping safe from waves on rickety stilts. Our house was among these, looking out across the bay, over vineyard sound towards Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod. It was a rambling house with big, generous windows, shingles the color of the sky on a cloudy day. Now its windows were dark except for one upstairs bedroom and the kitchen. Is something wrong? I asked Cole. Nothing, he shook his head. I think I noticed your house from the ferry today. That's all. Impossible. The ferry comes in on the other side of the island. I guess a lot of houses look alike. Inside the kitchen he took my wrists and pulled me toward him. I closed my eyes waiting to feel his mouth, but a moment went by and when I opened my eyes I saw that he was studying me, examining my face. Is this an inspection I asked? Am I going to pass? Sorry, he said, I was just, you're beautiful. I already invited you home with me so you can relax at the flattery, I said. And then the door from the living room swung open and Lucas walked in. I hated watching Lucas freeze when he encountered someone new. His shoulders hunching into little mounds. I saw his body go rigid, his posture tense like a rabbit. He dropped his eyes. I waited for him to back out of the room and disappear. But instead, Lucas seemed to see something. I saw the little jerk of recognition. He pointed at Cole's legs or feet. He moved toward Cole and then bent over to examine his legs. I'm guessing this is the brother, Cole said. Lou, I said, what's going on? Are you? Lucas looked into Cole's face. Then he turned to me. It's him, he said. His eyes were suddenly glassy and I felt a tremor of fear, something rising up from the earth through the floorboards and during the soles of my feet and racing through my veins along with my blood, is it hurried toward my heart? Lydia, Lucas said, it's baby bee. I mean, I'll take a few questions before we go back and drink the wine and eat the amazing food and eat the cookies. Anybody have any questions? How long have you been away from the vineyard? Yeah, how long have I been away from the cape and the vineyard? So I grew up on the cape and now my family lives sort of both on the cape and the vineyard for complicated marriage reasons. But I lived, how long have I been away? I mean, I graduated high school basically and moved away 25 years ago, but I went back for summers and I still bring, my mom's still there, so I still bring my kids back every summer for at least a little bit. It still feels like a big part of my identity. What I forgot to say earlier, some of the people sitting in the front row were literally at my birth in the room with me. This is like an amazing experience when I said it's like a wedding. It's like, this is incredible, right? I can't believe it came. So how many iterations of the book did I go through before I settled on this one? I mean, my guess at this point is that I did like 70 drafts of this book before this one. You know, with some were really major, like total renovations and some were more like house cleaning, you know? So, but I think probably 70 or more, a lot, so many. I have a question. Yeah, when did the idea come into me? Like 15 years ago, you know, I had like, I read a personal history about, I mean, it was about like struggles with infertility, so that's not related, you know, to this at all, but I, the story is a personal history in the New Yorker. The story was that the couple, you know, lost pregnancy after pregnancy, his heartbreaking, finally one daughter was born. And I got really obsessed with the idea of this daughter. And if she wondered about this life that might have been with these other siblings and if she was kind of haunted. So that sort of, that moment where they're standing, I pictured them in a doorway and their stranger comes and I saw one of them saying, it's him, you know? That was like all I saw. I thought it was going to be a short story at first, but then it just kept going. So, you know, yeah. Well, I'm curious with a job and three kids and a family, when do you find time to write? Yeah. Well, now I don't have my full-time job anymore, so I have a lot of time. But, you know, then I would, yeah. I mean, some days I would get up really early to write in the morning, but, like, I wouldn't turn the lights on because I was afraid it would wake the kids up. They would need to get up really early. So I would literally be, like, writing in the dark. I would read my writing. But we would, like, write. I mean, Anne always wrote on her lunch breaks. You would come in early on, like, Fridays? I came in early, like, two days a week and I would, like, come in to work at, like, seven, but not actually start working till nine. So I just had that time. Lunch breaks. So here and there. Here and there. Yeah. Yeah. That's, maybe that's about two to 15 years. Or, I'm just, oh. Yes. I had a couple moments. So the question is, did I ever have, like, one of those critical moments where I was, like, I'm not going to do this. I give up. Once, I actually had, very early on, an agent was a little bit interested in it and was, like, it's so interesting. We would want to see you change, you know, the point of view or something like that. But we would love to see it again. Like, it was a very encouraging thing. And I just, I don't know what happened. I, like, I panicked. I, like, froze. And I stopped working on it for an entire year. I didn't even pick it up. And then, then I sort of found my agent who I was working with. We were, we were, um, so, well, what happened was we've, she sent, we worked, I worked on it with my agent. She sent it out widely to editors. No one bought it. Uh, and then she was, like, I just, it's not going to happen. But, but again, many of those editors had, um, gave feedback that was encouraging and consistent enough that we could, you know, take that and sort of revise it. My agent was, like, we're going to revise it. She said that every writer has a different story. Don't be discouraged. This could be your story. You know, this will be a great story once we finally get there. And I did another revision and another. And she kept saying, I just feel like it's not quite there. We need to be like, this is our one shot. You know, we're not going to keep getting to send it back to these editors. It's got to be like 1,000%. I was like, I just don't have any to do another. And then she was like, okay, that's fine. You can just shove it and start a new project. I was like, uh, okay. That psychology worked. I'm not going to do that. I was like, no, no, I mean, I'll do one more. And then I got, you know, kind of got back there, got my energy back for it. Yeah. Well, are there pieces that I had to take out of this book that maybe I just kept and provide inspiration for another project? I don't know if there's anything for another project. I had to remove a whole character that I was very fond of. I was very sad about that. But I don't think she like exists out of this story. So maybe I took her out and like the last, the last draft, but it was the right decision. It was definitely the last, the last draft before I sold it. Then I've done a couple more after with my editor. Yeah. Maybe one more. Yeah. Oh, where do I come up with the names of my characters? What? I know that's such a good question. I mean, some of them just occurred to me and they always felt like that. I've looked through the phone book to try to like, you know, the actual, I don't know. I looked through the phone book for last names with this one a few times because I felt like I didn't know the character's last names, but the first names often just show up as like part of the personality or something. Does that make sense? Okay, you guys. Do you have one more? Yeah. I'm wondering, did you go back to the island at all while you were writing this to check on details or just for the feeling that you did for me? Yeah. Did I go back to the island to check on details or just for the feeling? Let's detail us more for the feeling. I remember like being alone on the ferry a few times. I don't know how I happen to be alone about my family, but I remember being alone on the ferry and like trying to sort of take it all in, you know, get the impressions, make sure I had it right. The feeling. The feeling of it, yeah. Okay, well, thank you so much for coming. You're amazing. And now, go ahead.