 Hello, friends. Welcome. We see you filling up the room. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. And I am going to put in our chat box the links for tonight's event and library news and links to our authors. And all right, let's jump in and get started. Welcome, everybody. Welcome. And I want to give a big shout out to Berkeley Public Library and San Mateo County Libraries for partnering with us tonight on this Viva Literary Artist event. So exciting. And I'm not going to be too fan girl, but I'm definitely fan girl. And so welcome. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramayutishaloni peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first persons and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramayutish community. And in that link that I put in the chat box has a great reading list that gets updated often about resources and great books and websites about first persons, particularly in our Bay Area. And I'd like to announce some upcoming events here at our SFPL virtual library. We have Zizava family issue tomorrow. I'm so excited. We will have four readers from this number 121 issue. And this will be starting at, I know this says 7 p.m., it's actually 6 p.m., typos. 6 p.m. tomorrow, virtual library. And then Thursday we partner with the Museum of African Diaspora for Woli Shoinka's conversations across the diaspora. And he is a noble author, laureate, and amazing activist. So please join us for that. And then in the evening at 6 p.m., we have poet Brian Comey Dempster, who will be sharing his new book and it highlights growing, his raising his child with disabilities and how he used poetry to help do this. And then on Friday, we have an amazing panel because it is banned books weeks. So we'll be talking about censorship in prisons in our prisons. And I don't know if you know the San Francisco Public Library has a jail and reentry services department. They do amazing work serving in our prisons and getting information and reading to our community that is behind bars. And it is Viva. So we have lots going on. I'm just going to breeze through this just so you can tell. This event will be October 12th. Ah, another typo. 6 p.m. because we've been going back and forth between should we do virtual, should we do real? This one is real, live, in person, in the Latinx community rooms, which is the lower level of the main library. 6 p.m., not 7 p.m. And then we go into Filipino American History Month, Friday at noon, we have Chef Reina Montenegro, vegan Filipino food. It really can be a thing. And like I said, just lots. We have an amazing panel of nine authors hot off the press talking all about their new books. Eight minutes of reading. It's going to be amazing. It's going to be a literary event. All right. And then are on the same page, which is San Francisco Public Libraries by Monthly Read where we encourage you all to read the same book at the same time. And we are reading The Undocumented Americans by Carla Cornejo-Villabincencio. And Carla and Jonathan Blitzer will be in conversation on October 26th. So please join us for that. And then one shout out for Total SF, which will be at the Coret Auditorium. That's right. November 17th and February 24th, celebrating Bonnie Sweet, Why We Swim, and Charlie Jane Anders of Victories Greater Than Death. All right. For tonight's authors, we are so happy to have both Carolina de Robertis and Julian Delgado-Lopera back at SFPL. I know you have both been with us before and we are so happy to have you and honored. We are celebrating Carolina de Robertis' new book, The President and the Frog. And you can put it on hold right now at SFPL or you can try to find the audio book and we will get it to you. So here we go. Carolina de Robertis is the author of six novels. Her work has been translated into 17 languages. Ken Torres, which is a great book. I love that one and it's available, was a Stonewall Book Award, a Reading Women's Award, a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and was also selected as a New York Times editor's choice. De Robertis is also an award-winning translator of Latin American Spanish literature and is the editor of the anthology, Radical Hope, and recently awarded the California Book Award for Surrender. So I can't wait to dig into this one and this is by Ray Lurgia. In 2017, Yoruba Buena Center for the Arts named De Robertis on its 100 list of people, organizations, and movements that are shaping our future. She is of Uruguayan descent, origins, and she lives, works in San Francisco State, and lives in Oakland with her wife and two children. And joining the conversation tonight is Julian Delgado Lopera and we have had Julian in for their book, Fabre Tropical. And Julian has also, this book from Feminist Press is amazing, definitely check it out. Recently translated fully into Spanish, it's kind of a mix of both already, but what's happening here? Sorry, okay. Julian has received, is the winner of the 2021 Barrow-Grumley Award, a 2021 Lambda Award winner, a 2020 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and the 2021 Aspen Literary Prize. Julian is also the author of Quierme and Quantalamelo, Quantalamelo, Quantalamelo, Quantalamelo. Oh, friends, I'll get it, I'll get it. I'm really, I'm taking Spanish classes, really am. And has illustrated a bilingual collection. It's an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants, which won the 2018 Literary Award and the 2018 Independent Publishers Book Award. Julian's work has been nominated for Pushkart Prize, has appeared in Granata, Teen Vogue, The Kenyan Review, McSweeney's, The Rumpus, The White Review, and many, many more. Julian is also a former executive director of Radar, which is an amazing queer organization that does literary events and is still holding strong and is part of San Francisco Public Libraries. And they get amazing young, new coming authors in and they dig through our archives and just come out with amazing results. So this is still happening and it's a great legacy to have to your name, Julian. All right, I am going to turn it over, Julian, Carolina, it's all yours. Yay, thank you, Anissa, for that introduction. Great, it's so good to see you and thank you, Anissa, that introduction to be here with Debra and the Public Library and everybody who's tuning in. Yeah, thank you, Public Library. I love the idea that there's going to be events at the library again. I miss that basement room, so that's very exciting. I love that room, right? I love that room. Many, many beautiful moments in that room. So thank you, everybody, for tuning in. We're here to celebrate this amazing book, The President and the Frog, that is a wonderful writer who I love and appreciate very much. And so Carolina and I are going to be in conversation and Carla is going to read for a little bit. We're going to talk for like 40 minutes and then you all have an opportunity to have questions. So if you have any questions, you can put them in the Q&A box and I will read them to Carolina at the end of the conversation. All right, are you ready? I can be ready. Get us in. Let's do it. Let's go. And thank you so much, Julian, for taking the time to be in this conversation with me. Everybody here should read The Tropical. Even when I think about that book, I get sort of a zing of power energy, just remembering the language and the inner world of it. It's such a gift. So yeah, maybe that we'll be able to talk a little bit more about what's brilliant, about it and about your work in general through the course of this conversation. We'll see if we can touch that thread again. All right. But I'll read a little bit from the president and the frog. So this is my new book, new novel, and it does feature a character who is a president and a former president and a character who is actually a talking frog, as the title implies. And so this book is inspired by the real life of former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica, who once said when he was in the presidency, and in 2013, when I was actually living in Uruguay for a time with my wife and kids, he said that he in part survived brutal solitary confinement by talking to a frog. And Mujica is kind of a remarkable story because he was in solitary confinement as a political prisoner during the dictatorship of the 70s and 80s in Uruguay. Incredibly bleak time. I was born during that dictatorship in the diaspora of Uruguay. And so it's something that I've been researching and obsessed with for many years for all of my books, actually starting with my first novel, The Invisible Mountain. I sort of became obsessed with understanding that period of Uruguay's history, how the nation got there, how the nation got out and healed. And so just this little detail about he had these conversations with this frog and then somehow went on to move from this top space of total bleakness and feeling like all is lost into becoming a progressive leader of the country who was sort of a beacon of progressive hope, not only in his country, but in other countries as well. So this book moves back and forth in time between November 2016, when there's just been an election in the north in the United States, and he's been interviewed by a foreign journalist moving back and forth between that and 40 years ago, 1976, when he's in this hole. And I just sort of wildly imagine these conversations with this frog and what it might mean to explore your inner world in order to survive bleak times. So this is just a moment in the hole with the frog. I'm just going to descend right into that. Come on, wake up. The frog, a voice so clear it sliced through thought. The sound of it in his ears and rib cage flooded him with relief. It's you. He tried to sit up to better see the creature in the dim light, body stiff and awkward. And no wonder, he thought, I'm past 40 after all, too old for this sort of thing. Ha, maybe I should tell the guards this whole situation isn't age appropriate. That'll show them. I wasn't sleeping. Liar. Really, I wasn't. Your eyes were closed. And why not? There wasn't anything to see. So you were going to droop all day. With a jolt, he realized the ants had gone quiet. Why? How had the frog's appearance led to the relief from the screaming of the ants? Maybe. Well, so? What the hell else am I supposed to do? Get ready. For what? The rest of your life. Laughter rose, rancid, up his throat. There is no rest of my life. I'm going to spend it here or in hole after hole after hole. Not true. And how would you know? The mysteries are a layer and a layer. Mysteries? It was nonsense, of course. But something about the frog's words, the way they hung together was unnerving. What? You're a priest now? Because I don't need any of your frog sermons. Yes, you do. Something clutched at his heart. He fought to ignore it. I hate priests. I hate church. I'm sure I'd also hate frog church. Oh, you would love frog church. And how the F would you know? I know. The frog took a few deep breaths that inflated its throat, then flattened it. I know things. Sure you do. Like that you've barely started. Started what? Life. Ha. Now who's the idiot? My life is over. Over. I'm never getting out of this hole and all the holes after this one. There's nothing left ahead but a long endless string of them. And if I ever do get out, I'll be a wreck. I mean, look at me. Just look at me. I'm starved, bruised, broken. He hadn't seen himself in a mirror in years. Wouldn't want to. Wouldn't dare. I'd be useless to the world. Meanwhile, the dirt. Dirt? Yes. Haven't you seen it? All around you. Look. Yes. Why yes. I'm in a rank hole with a dirt floor. I can see dirt. Thanks so much for pointing that out. You haven't even started looking. You can't see it. You're so blind you cannot even see the dirt. Now you've really gone off the deep end. The thing real is in the deep end. He opened his mouth, couldn't speak, sat gaping, tried and failed to muster a response. He made a sound that didn't coalesce into a word. The frog cocked its head slightly, stared for a beat or two, then hopped into a dark corner and vanished, leaving the future president with new thoughts churning through his mind. Thank you. Thank you. How did you read something with the frog in it? Because I love the frog's voice, and I think she's kind of sassy and bitchy. I mean, I'm claiming her sheet, but we don't really know the frog's gender. And so I, you know, we have this frog that is a little bit of our guide in this story. And so I wanted to just start with like, how do you enter this narrative? Like we have something that actually happened, which is we have this president who is named and known for being the first president in the world. How does that, how does that go for you? And you heard him like say once, but he heard a frog. How does that go from that into becoming like an idea for a narrative? And I, and along with that, I just want to ask about the timing that you, when you're writing this. So let's just start with like, how does, how does it start? So for the great question, thank you. So for me, when I have the idea for a novel, it's something that's just kind of a burning question or an image. I can't get out of my mind. In this case, that one little detail that, you know, was not graphically described about, well, I talked to a frog and that was one thing that can be seen through this brutality. And it just sort of goes into the cauldron and swims around over time, the what if of it. Sometimes I start to gather research, but it can be years before I actually sit down to write that novel. So I think of that as the dreaming phase. And I often have multiple novels in the, in a dreaming phase, you know, before I'm ready to write them. So for some years, it just kind of swam in the back of my mind, right? So what would it take for this conversation of a man in the whole, whether it's with his deepest inner self or with a mystical being, whether it really is a sort of expanded reality or a kind of, you know, reimagining of the conversations we have with ourselves or with our intuition or, you know, or with beings that come and visit us in order to be, in order to be free, in order to stay sane. What would it take, you know, what would it take for those conversations to catalyze awakening, to catalyze the possibilities for resilience and strength? Because those are the things that I'm interested in as a writer and as a human. I'm not just interested in the presence and existence of suffering and trauma and injustice. I am very interested in those realities. And certainly all of my books touch on the fact that we live in a world full of trauma and suffering and injustice, you know, inequity forces that seem bent on our erasure, whether it's because of a particular identity we hold, as queer people, as immigrants, as people of color, so many different ways that that's true. You know, the part of it that I'm interested in and where I feel like there's the dynamism of the story is how do we get through, right? How do we find that resilience, that strength? How do we forge ourselves and forge a meaningful life and a radiant life in the presence of those forces? So that was sort of the question that kind of gave rise to the character of the frog. And I sort of got the sense that the frog would be, yes, a kind of guide, I think, is the word you use, but also a kind of catalyzer, kind of instigator, and that the role of the frog is in a way to offer more possibilities, a way of seeing things, to open to a deeper reality, to be part of a profound inner journey for this character, but in a manner that is sort of prickly, and pricking awake. And so once I kind of saw that that was dynamic, I looked to particular spiritual traditions where those things exist. So Allegwa, who is, you know, Yoruba, Orisha, so a deity who is of the Yoruba African tradition, in terms of roots, and is also very much alive throughout Latin America, within Santeria, Lofumi, Candomblé, Umbanda, these traditions. There's a lot of wisdom stories, Batakiis, and a lot of narratives about how Allegwa is a powerful trickster energy who awakens, but in ways you don't expect, and who might sort of insult you or capsize your idea of reality. So years of deep listening to people in my community, who are members of Odisha community, was part of my sort of gathering and reflecting. And then I also read, like for example, the spiritual text Bhagavad Gita, the Bhagavad Gita is something I've been a student of and read in various translations, particularly the Eknot Eswaran translation, that's my favorite. But that's a, you know, a very old text and Hindu text that is sacred to people who are within the religion, but it's also sacred to other people as a spiritual text in which Arjuna sits down on the battlefield and says, I give up, I can't go on. Why battle? And his charioteer is Krishna, who is his friend, but also a god. And they have a conversation about why live and how to live and how to live meaningfully. And that's the whole book. And so I went back, I went, you know, sort of went back to it too, just to kind of not to, not to replicate it in any way, but, you know, as a kind of point of inspiration about the ways in which having these kinds of conversations. Immuted. You just got muted. Oh my gosh, thank you. Thank you. The conversation has always been part of whether they are conversations external to us or whether they are internal conversations. They've always been part of how we humans have, you know, made meaning and built our own relationship to power and resilience and possibility in a difficult world. I mean, it's really wonderful because the voice of the frog is just so particular, right? And they were kind of thrown into this world that seems very magical at the beginning, even how it starts, you know, it starts just like once upon a time and we're like, okay, like fairy tale lens, but like isn't. And I do think that the frog takes on like different various shapes. I got a lot of kind of like the spiritual undertones, especially towards the end of it. And I was also interested in how it works as like kind of like a structure device in the text too. And so mostly because the frog is the one that is constantly kind of calling attention to the way that the story is being told. And so I, you know, I'm interested about like the development of that voice specifically of the frog, right? Like you have the idea of it and kind of like the spiritual roots that it has on the ancestral roots and then the development of that voice because it's both very playful, right? And it's very like fairy tale-like. But at the same time, I was just saying it's kind of bitchy and sassy. Like I liked her, you know, she was saying like you would love like Frog Church. I loved that moment and I laughed a lot reading it. But I'm just, you know, and the calling attention to the way that story for being told itself, I thought that was so great. I wanted to speak on it. Yeah. I mean, I think that's interesting when we, when we are alone in a room, completely alone in a room. And this is an interesting thing to talk about because I mean, I did finish writing, I wrote this book during the Trump era, the dreaming phase began long before. But by the time I sat down to write it, you know, it was the Trump era and all of the very intense questions of that time were very alive with me in weaving this book. But I did finish writing it before the pandemic hit. I had the chance to visit the copy edits during the pandemic to sort of check and see, you know, whether, how it's still held. But the shaping of it was before the pandemic. But then living through what we all lived through, and I know if people did not have identical experiences, some of us were extremely isolated, others of us never got a moment to ourselves because our kids were home or, you know, in my case, I was in a multi-generational, multiracial, multilingual patriarchy free household. So it was like, we were all just in this one place. I was definitely not alone. But a lot of us were isolated or we couldn't see all of our community. And so thinking about being alone in a room is something very vivid and real for us right now, more so maybe than it was two years ago. But what I'll say about that is that to connect it to your question about story is that when we are alone in a room, we are actually not completely alone. Even if we've been stripped of all of our possessions, like this person, you know, in the sort of physical and metaphorical whole, you have, we have within us our stories. And it's one of the things that we carry with us, no matter where we are, and that accompany us no matter where we are. And it can be hard to awaken to that where we're in a space of isolation, but it is true. And so stories can kind of bring us pull us out of loneliness and bring us out into connection, regardless of what's going on outside of us, and can also keep us connected to who we are and who we want to be, right, through our past and the meaning we've made out of a past. I was just on a panel actually to kick off Latinx Heritage Month with an amazing group of writers, including Patricia Engel, who just published The Amazing Internet Country. And she said something on that panel that was so profound to me, which is she said, you know, when stories are so important to us as immigrants and members of the diaspora, because when we leave, sometimes all we can take with us is our stories, and our stories sort of shape who we are. And so that really hit home for me. And it might be part of the reason that I feel like stories are this kind of inner wealth that we all have, and that we can all draw on in times when things feel fair or stripped down or tough. Yeah. Yeah, there was always like something interesting because there was kind of like a call on softness and a call on paying attention. But the way that the frog was doing it was like, it was really funny and in her space. And so I love that there was kind of like that friction of like calling for something like bigger or soft or just being able to pay attention. I mean, I felt like most of the time the frog was just like, you know, pay attention like you are not alone, like just be able to like pay attention and be here, which is again, where a lot of like this like spiritual undertones for me like part of the shape. And I wanted to ask you going back a little bit, you said that you were doing the copyright during the Trump presidency. How was that like? Because I felt like this was very influenced by having lived through the four years of a Trump presidency. Yes, the book was very influenced definitely by that. No, no worries. They're gonna go off again. You know, I think when we write, something that it took me, it took me until my third or fourth novel to really understand that at least for me the way I see it, when we write what is thought of as historical fiction, fiction that is based in a different historical time, and maybe a maybe a place that's far away from where we're sitting and working and writing, that we're always writing with a double consciousness, that we're writing definitely, so like my novel Cantoras was about, you know, queer women during the Uruguayan dictatorship and after, but it wasn't not about how do we live in the here and now in the contemporary United States. Thematically, I think that those, those consciousnesses are there, we can be true to the historical specificity that we're writing about, while also acknowledging that we're sort of imbuing the work with some of the thematic urgency about our here and now and the way that we, the way that we are alive and what is meaningful to us. And I think with, with this book, it was a very conscious decision. I really wanted this book to be explicitly linked to the Trump era, once Trump was elected. And one of the things that happened for me is in the first week after the election, and so many of us were in a place of, you know, shock and maybe not shock in the sense of surprise, but in the sense of horror and devastation about what was to come. Many of us knew that, that we and members of many of our beloved communities were going to feel the lash, you know, of, of vitriol to be targets in the coming era, even when the mainstream was sometimes saying, well, maybe it will be so bad. Some of us were like, we know that some really devastating things are coming. And I thought about this. I thought it can take from particular about my grandmother, my abuelita Tonita, who was a bohemian poet. She was born in Argentina and then exiled and then lived in Uruguay. And she, when she died, both Argentina and Uruguay were in dictatorships. And she, and it was a very heartbreaking, wrenching thing for her. And she died without seeing those nightmares lift. And I wondered what it would be like if I could go back in time and talk to her and say, you know, there's going to be a better time for Uruguay. The dictatorship won't be forever. And in fact, there's going to be this leader who's in prison right now looking like he's never getting out when all seems lost. And I wondered, well, if that's true, then what are the what are the what are the ways that the seeds of future hope are actually right here, right next to us in ways we can't see. And so that was a sort of cosmic experience for me of sort of linking those things, which is profound because, you know, I grew up feeling like the Uruguayan dictatorship was something, you know, it ended when I was 10. And I learned about it. And I remember it changed my world when I was 10 really transformed my understanding of the world and where I came from. But this had happened. And I always saw it as a kind of a root experience, the past. But once and I don't mean to imply that the Trump era was a dictatorship. But given that there has been a coup attempt in this country that's gotten pretty far and is not completely over. I do think that there can be real power in putting in putting our time in conversation with, you know, with other times from that where there's some hard one lessons, you know, in other cultures too about like, where can we go from here. And I wanted to hear, honestly, when I once I created this character, this president, I wanted to hear his take on where do we go from here. You know, from that moment of, okay, the United States is taking this turn. So I took the book. And instead of setting it during his presidency, I said it after so that it would be in 2016. So that the news of that election would be there so that it's almost like, it's almost like the two countries, the unnamed Latin American country, and the United States could be like in conversation in the book. That's what I wanted to see happen. Yeah. And I think you did that beautifully. I mean, I was thinking about like doing like the present moment, because we have this reporter, you know, who is from Norway, right? She's coming in, and she kind of has this like something that he can really put, like a pin on, but she has this kind of like air to her. So he's able to connect with her. And they have this conversation. And like, one of the things that you and I were talking about that I wanted to bring up because we're talking about the Trump presidency and the leadership of Latin America, it's the way that you bring up revolution and the way that you bring up movement building of the left. And it was, and, you know, cutting over just talking about this, but I, you know, I'm Colombian, I grew up in Colombia, and I was cringing at the beginning with the guerrilla, like groups. And that's because I come from a country that has had also like civil war. And so, you know, I wanted, I wanted you to speak a little bit on creating this any, there's any friction between having people from Latin America read it as opposed to the U.S. Like, it's there, it does this way of talking about the left, which is, you know, you question the intersectionality of it, movement. And there's a lot of questioning also, which I think sometimes that goes, that does not happen in the U.S. Like to me, people in the U.S. don't really question the left in Latin America very much. They, a lot of the times it's like revolution means it's all great. And that's it. But what I appreciate about the book was also like the conversations and the contradictions of movement building and intersectionality and what that did. And so like, I want you to speak a little bit to that, like if you did that, and also like if that has, it doesn't have any difference between people in the U.S. receiving it and people are being a little wide receiving it. Yeah, they're a different impact. Right. Absolutely. So those are like so, it's so many rich layers, right. And also, I mean, I think what guerrilla, revolutionary movements and purported guerrilla revolutionary moments, I mean, you know, like the shining path and Peru to use another example called itself guerrilla revolutionary movement, but they terrorized, you know, you know, ordinary people, right. So there's, there's a, there's a huge gamut of experiences, right, within Latin America. And sometimes they get lumped either in a demonized place or in a romanticized place. And either of those kind of really flattened things. I have been studying and researching in particular the Uruguayan, you know, revolutionary movements, including the communist movement and the Dupamaro guerrilla movement for many, for like 20 years, you know, I have like shelves of out of print books that I've gathered over time for different projects. And it is very tricky because, you know, there are people who still admire the Dupamaro's and then there are people who are very, you know, angry about the way things happened back then and how that history hasn't been seen within, within Uruguay. And those are really important conversations. It is a very different situation in Uruguay in terms of the revolutionaries did not become violent in the ways that it occurred in other countries. I think having Mujica come become president, the closest equivalent I could offer to people in the United States is that it's a little bit like if a former Black Panther became president, which is still something really, really radical in the United States, right? But in terms of, you know, the Black Panther served breakfast, right? To kids, you know, they did so many things that were really about everyday liberation and not about sort of making war on people. So all of that said, though, you know, as a writer, I feel a deep responsibility to lived histories. And I, you know, I knew that there would be different angles on it. And the book is being translated into Spanish. And I hope it'll be able to live in Uruguay. So I'm a big believer in authenticity readers, also known as sensitivity readers, right? So whenever we think there might, we might have blinders around an experience, and especially if we're writing a marginalized identity that we ourselves don't share. So I had an authenticity reader for this book, who is Japanese, bicultural and has a lot of knowledge of Japanese history and culture, that it might be verging on a spoiler to say why, but there's something in here having to do with Japanese history and identities that I made sure that I got an authenticity reader on it, which doesn't mean I'm off the hook for falling short on portrayals, but it does mean I'm going to do as much work as I can. So the same goes for people who, Uruguayans who live in Uruguay, who lived this history, and who are living the sort of contemporary politics and conversation too. So I had a dear friend of mine who is, you know, a historian and Robin Uruguay and has a different relationship there read the book to help me see where the places are, you know, in terms of the sort of the rev, how the revolutionaries are being portrayed and how that might land for different people. Because ultimately, I, it was very intentional for me to use an unnamed president in an unnamed country, and giving that that gives it a little bit of creative freedom, as people have done, as Mohsen Hamid did in Exit West, Salim Haddad did it with Guapa. I mean, there are many examples of books. Daniela Alarcon did it, speaking of the shining path for At Night We Walk In Circles, you know, that there is a tradition of sort of freeing yourself a little bit from actual history to be at a slant a little bit. Because ultimately, I didn't, I don't see this book as weighing in on this or that particular guerrilla revolutionary movement or whether they were right or wrong. That's not the question for me, right? The question is, you know, a person, you know, believed in a moment of fervent ideals that they were doing something to change the world for the better. And it went disastrously. And the government became extremely repressive. And now they are trapped and feel like there's no hope. How did they go from that into something into, into transformation and new possibility? Right? So that was how I, those were some of the strategies that I used, I guess, if that answers your question, to balance the complexities of real history with letting the story be a story and trying to be responsible with it. Because those, those, you know, all of those movements are complicated. And I tried to also really make sure I layered in like, he was like, we didn't get it all right. And maybe this movement was messy. And, wow, maybe we weren't always right with the things that we did. And, you know, they had, they had a top down structure. Was this always positive? Did they listen to women? You know, were they homophobic? You know, there's all of these messinesses that he does look at. And that I wanted him to look at. Because we all have to look at these messinesses if we want to make a world where everyone can be more free. Yeah. And you talk to me. I love, I love all of ideas. You're talking about like the things that I'm thinking about. And I'm just, I want to, I want you to talk a little bit about like writing from the cis male perspective in the specific way, because I know you were like, oh, what is that? Is that for you a little bit? Is there more space? Did you have to do any like labor to arrive there? The male perspective? Yeah. Yeah, I think wasn't such a, well, I mean, I think we always have to do labor in order to radically imagine the consciousness of another. Right. As you know, right, in writing fiction, and I know that in your, here's the moment we can weave in favorite tropical, there's more than one point of view in that book. And, and the work that you do to sink into the consciousness of different lived experiences within one intergenerational family makes for, you know, such a such a powerful, rich kaleidoscope of experience. Right. And there's at some, at some point, we always have to do some radical weeping in order to get in there. The voice of this character did feel natural to me. I think I felt a little bit because all of my past novels, I've been in the perspective either of women or genderqueer people. And, you know, I wondered whether I, you know, what it would be like for me to be in that journey and whether I was somehow, I'm so passionate about feminism and all people being free, including, you know, women being free and queer people being free that I wondered if I was sort of leaving those themes at the door by following the inspiration for this book. And what I found was that no, actually, because queer liberation is one thread in the great tapestry of liberation. Right. And gender liberation for all people is part of is one thread in the tapestry without feminism. There's no liberation. Right. None of us are free until all of us are free. Right. None of us are free until queer people are free. None of us are free until black people are free. None of us are free until immigrants are free and I could obviously go on. And so what I realized is that it was a real opportunity to take this character who's sort of in the beginning of his revolutionary journey had what is very common in his generation in Latin America, in the real Latin America of sort of this one lens, right? It's all a class struggle, kind of Marxism and seeing things through a class struggle and not necessarily seeing liberation as an intersectional reality. And I got to be in his consciousness and kind of explore what is that journey like for him of kind of seeing through new prisms or having people push him to see through new prisms. And then I realized, oh, that's actually very intriguing. I mean, I hope it's intriguing for readers. I found it very intriguing as a writer, you know, who lives in, you know, in this body, having this experience to be to kind of enter his body with compassion and curiosity and ask these questions about how we all get free, right? How we get free inside and then how we kind of foment freedom in the world around us so that we can all live something brighter than the world seems to be designed for us to live. I love that. I love that. I know we only have like very few minutes of you and me, so I want to like maybe close a little bit with some of the stuff around the spiritual undertones that I was mentioning because I love the garden. The garden comes up a lot. So the president really loves the garden. And then, you know, we also have the frog. And there's this really beautiful moment with Mr. Takato and, you know, with the flowers too. And so I wanted you to just speak to that because I think also just like image-wise, it really changes the feel of the book, right? Like we are underground listening to this frog in the darkness, kind of like that's where we are imagining all this stuff. And then the garden just sets up like a very different image and also feel. And so I wanted to talk about this like little shift that happened because also it's only Mr. Takato and Sofia who are named by name, I think. Yes. I think that's true. The journalist named at good point. And the dog, if you count the dog. And the dog. I guess it's, well, I think the dog is part of this like, so I am, I mean, maybe I'm just reading too much into it, but I was just like, oh, this is kind of like the spiritual ecosystem that gets named, right? There's like spiritual ecosystem that we have to rely upon to kind of like grab on to be able to survive. So I want to talk a little bit more about that, about the garden, the role of the garden. And then now that you are connecting like some sort of like, you know, ancestral roots, like if there's anything in there, they are in those shifts that he has. Because I don't think that it's named on the text, but I can feel it. Right. And so there's things that weren't so, so for instance, just like the shift with Mr. Takata with the with the flowers is really beautiful, minimum. And I'm sorry if I'm spoiling it for people to read it. I think it's not a real big, I mean, it may be. It may not just that there is a character called Mr. Takata and he's a Japanese refugee. Yeah. And he's just so proud of his garden and, you know, like being outside and so like, I just wanted, I wanted to just, I want you to speak a little bit more about that connection to, you know, getting dirty and the way that he talks about like, like building his own food, growing his own food with his mother and that connection and what that's doing inside the narrative. Yeah. Well, I wonder what it's doing inside the narrative. But I will say, I think there is a kind of earth. There's a there's a kind of relationship between earth. I mean, even the part that I read, right? He said, oh, yeah, I'm surrounded by dirt. But then later it's like, oh, dirt, dirt is actually sacred, right? Dirt, when we tend the earth, it tends us back. We don't eat without the earth, the dirt. And yet the very, you know, the very thing that we sometimes denigrate by calling it the dirt or dirty is actually, you know, a source, a source of life and a source of renewal. And, you know, the real Jose Mujica is himself an atheist. And yet, you know, comes off as a very, you know, a very spiritually rooted person in his own way for him. It's not about organized religion, but he is really passionate about his garden. And it feels like a real sort of source of healing. You know, there's a story, a real story that I didn't put in this book, where he fought for years to get a little, what are they called, like a little potty, like a kid's little potty to have, because he didn't have anywhere to go to the bathroom in his solitary confinement. And he fought for it for years and he finally got one. And then in the end, he was moved to another cell where a where he had a toilet, and he kept the potty and planted a plant in it, you know, and then, and so, I mean, that is such a profound story, right? So that's why I didn't go in the book, but it really made me think about, you know, the relationship between sort of denigration of what is precious and how we claim what is precious and renewal and also ecosystems, right? I mean, I hope this isn't too much of a spoiler either, but towards the end of the book, there is a big theme about the climate crisis and what it means for us to really root in, you know, what we value and to cultivate that and to not, to not, you know, fall into the luxury of losing hope, right? What does that mean for us? I think a lot of us are asking those questions. I know that I have those conversations in my community and I'm guessing I'm not the only one in that, in the Zoom space for whom that's true. And I think there's just this very, so those were definitely elements of what was true about the real person. And I felt that it was important to bring them into the book and kind of use narrative as an opportunity to dive into them, right? And to really explore, like, what does that look like? Like coming into a place of understanding that a source, a source of healing and a source of renewal and possibility lies in really what is beneath our feet and what is all around us. Whatever the way that we approach it, whatever, you know, whatever our own intimate relationship to nature may be. I'm a terrible gardener. I forget about plants. I kill them. I personally am a terrible gardener. My wife is an incredible gardener, so I live surrounded by beautiful plants and I don't do anything for them. So I'm not like him, right? That it wasn't just me transposing myself, but it was using it as an opportunity to really reflect on, you know, what we cultivate and how whatever we, you know, it's not so much about a religion as it is about, you know, rooting in whatever we hold sacred in the world and defining that on our own terms and then, you know, drawing power from that and, you know, that. I love that. I love that. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you, Carolina, for that. Thank you. If you have questions, you can put them in the Q&A box and I will read them. We have a question from Bill. Bill says, I noticed in your thank you section at the end, you thank the UC Berkeley library, there's the Tecana Tenoza, why? I'm wondering how much research goes into your books, because while they're fiction, they're border on historical fiction, including cantora. Yes, a ton of research goes into my books in enormous amount. It's part of the reason that my first novel took and Bill, hello, and thank you for the question also. Yes, I did thank both of those libraries because I just really owe a debt to them both. The UC Berkeley Latin American section is incredible. There are a lot of out of print books from Uruguay in Spanish that I couldn't find in Uruguay and that are not at the Biblioteca Nacional that are in at UC Berkeley. So I did a lot of cross referencing and finding, especially for cantoras and the books before it. So a lot of research goes into it. In terms of this particular book, I had an interesting experience where I realized that because I was returning to this realm of the sort of the dictatorship era and what came after and the revolutionary era before it, it was a realm that I had already researched for other novels, even though those novels are really different in setting and style and approach, so I could draw from the same kind of inner well of research. And so I realized I'd sort of accidentally been researching for this novel for 18 years. So that was really helpful. So I feel like I did less research for this book, but actually I was able to kind of draw on a cumulative experience of research for this particular book. Yeah. All right. Thank you for that. Jess is saying that you have a really lovely voice. Oh, thank you. This is your first time narrating an audio book, The Death Love, The Frog Boy. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. It's so delightful and honored to hear you say that. I love doing my own audio books and I've been doing it since my second novel. So Perla, The Gods of Tango, Cantoras, and the President and the Frog are all, I narrated all of them. And I also narrated Cantoras in Spanish. So yeah. So I actually have narrated five in that regard. Got to go back into the studio and kind of swim through it again. And I do really love to do that part. And to anyone who's listened to one of my audiobooks, thank you. I know that's a lot of time with my voice. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. Yeah. Ratings are like four hours. Yeah. We did a great job with that. I love The Frog's voice. Okay, so Jarrah says, hi, Jarrah. Carolina, I hope to meet you someday. I would like you to talk about how this book is in conversation with your past book. I have read your other books and I'm excited to read this new one. Oh, thank you. Well, I hope we get to meet live one day too. That would be so lovely. In terms of how they're in conversation with each other, yes, I think they, I mean, I think they all are in their way. I mean, certainly these first five novels, I have this image in my mind of them as kind of like almost like a wheel, like or a circle, a cycle or a circle somehow. You know, there are overlapping themes, even though they're set in very different times. But I did do something very secret, which is that, which I'll just share the secret because why not? Which is I started with my second novel. I just put a little bit of something that connects the fictional worlds to each other. So like a really, really minor character will show up who's related to somebody in the other book. That sort of thing. So when I was finishing writing Cantoras, I knew I was probably going to do the present, the frog next. And so for anyone who's read Cantoras towards the end, I don't want to get too many spoilers, but it's 2013 and a character Romina picks up the phone. And it's Jose Mufika. And I won't say why he's calling, but he's president at the time and she gets a call from the president Jose Mufika. And I put that in there to sort of hook all the books together. So yeah, I can see all your fans like talking about this, like, oh my god. They're like little Easter eggs. And I think they're so subtle, nobody will ever pick up on it, but occasionally people have. Yeah, the hardcore fans will. I'll just put the one more example from this book. If people have read it, there's this, there's a prison escape, which is based on a real historical prison escape that was very dramatic. And they, they, they arrive at a butcher shop. So it's based very closely on history, but the butcher shop part is invented. And the reason that's in there is because the same prison escape takes place in my first novel, The Visible Mountain. And there's an important character who owns a butcher shop across the street from the prison and it happens in her house. So I kept that as a little tie to The Visible Mountain. Oh, I love that. And she makes mathé for them and stuff when they come out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was my favorite thing. I like, she's called a hundred people coming out of like jail and she's like, here's some mathé. Here's some mathé. Oh, are you taking over my house and, you know, requisitioning it for some sort of revolution? Okay, here's some mathé. That actually, in Uruguay it's not impossible, you know. I love that. I love that so much. Okay, we have another question from Dez. Did you have the book plotted out prior to writing? Did you know the whole story? I didn't know the whole story. I didn't know exactly where I was headed or how, like, especially how these conversations were going to have a dramatic arc and sort of resolve into something. I just had an idea. I had read this very small detail about Mr. Takata in a book about Jose Mufika and I was like, it really blew my mind and had me making all kinds of connections about earth and nature and refugees and grief and countries and possibility and migration and all these things. And I hoped that those things would all intersect in a kind of climax. But it's more like that EL doctoral quote. I can only paraphrase it. It's about writing a novel is sort of driving a car at night with the headlights on. You can't see very far ahead of you, but you can see just far ahead enough to get where you're going. So you see this much ahead, this much light. And the next day, you write to there and you have this much light. I sort of knew where I was trying to get to. And then there's a lot of discovery along the way. And then there's a lot of revision after that to make it actually work. Yeah, that's the real work. That's the real work is the revision. Yeah, it's so much. Okay, we have one last question. What are you working on right now? Oh, I, well, for a year with the kids home and Zoom school and all of those things with the pandemic, like many working mothers, I had my hands very, very full and didn't write. And I had to put a project aside that I was hoping to start partly because it involved traveling to do some deep primary research. And so that just went. And for a while, it's like, I don't know what's next. And then I started a novel this year. And I can't talk about it much, but I can say that it is full of queer joy, lots and lots of queer joy. I really wanted to write something with a lot of joy in it and a lot of queer affirmation, sort of enough to light up a town is my hope. So that's, that's where I am right now. Okay, that's a great, that's a great place to be. Okay, all right. So I think we don't have any more questions in the Q&A. We have former minutes. Let me see the chat. Oh, I see a question in the chat box. Anu says, this book is so beautiful, it took me back to Jacob with Timmerman's memoir. Oh, yes. I wonder if you had him in mind when you wrote for the perspective of the prisoner. Yeah, prisoner without a name, cell without a number is a magnificent and harrowing memoir of the prisons and desaparecidos, although he reappeared in Argentina. That book was, I will say, incredibly important to my research for my second novel, Perla, which deals with the aftermath of desaparecidos in Argentina, a ghost of desaparecidos that comes back to Buenos Aires for all these reasons. And so, you know, I don't know that I worked with it very closely this time, but I feel like that book is always with me. And just did such incredible work because, you know, he was already a writer when he was taken. And so he, one of the ways he survived his trauma was by sort of really cataloging the story. We were talking earlier in this conversation about story, right, and how the importance of story. And, you know, that's one thing that Jacobo Timmerman did is he sort of survived by being a carrier of the story and then gave us so much by writing down witness of what it was like. So I would say yes, prisoner without a name, cell without a number was important to me. It is very harrowing, but I think it's, there's a whole body of literature of prison stories. Mauricio Rosamcoff, who was a good friend of Jose Mujica, has written some very beautiful harrowing books about the Uruguayan experience, and many more, but definitely Timmerman's book. Yeah, I mean, I'm so grateful to all of the people. First, you know, people who have eyewitness testimony and have written, you know, memoir, and also people who have brought it to life through fiction, journalism, historians, and these days, documentary filmmakers. But I mean, I rely on the world of scholarship so much for research. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, here's the historians and journalists and anybody who keeps themselves alive, for sure. Yes. And who carries the stories, and yeah, keeps them alive. And you know what, and readers too, I got to say shout out to, well, librarians, here we are. I feel like libraries saved my life when I immigrated to this country. And made me so much when I was 10. The library was like more home than home at that time in my life, just sort of like looking, where am I? You know, I found myself in books. So definitely librarians and also readers. And I feel like, you know, right, Julianne, like writers, we become writers because we're passionate readers. And engaging with the world through reading is continues to be such a profoundly important and beautiful thing. Yeah. Yes, I love that. Okay, just a beautiful place to end. Thank you so much for speaking with me and for the library for hosting it. This is a really beautiful book. Everybody should go and get it or get it on hold from the library. I think that you guys have an e-book now right now, right? We have it. Well, we'll eventually have it on all formats. And both our partners, Berkeley Public and San Mateo County libraries have the book. We also, both libraries also have Julianne's work as well. So get both of them. And if you, you should buy them too, buy them from your favorite local bookstore as well. We have lots of them still in the Bay Area, thankfully. And thank you for ending it with all that library love. And thank you for being such wonderful authors and wonderful people for joining us again and always at SFPL. We appreciate you, Berkeley Public Library, San Mateo County Library. We thank you for partnering with us and love to all of three of our library communities out there. And thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful evening, everyone. Good evening, everybody. Thank you.