 and Angeline Boolie joining me now is Angeline. She is a New York Times bestselling author. Angeline, did I pronounce your name correctly? Yes, you did. Sweet, it's a Friday, I get a prize. Okay, so tell me a little bit about your background prior to your writing career. I'm Ojibwe and I always worked for tribes in Michigan and then I ended up in Washington, D.C. I was the director for the Office of Indian Education at the U.S. Department of Ed. Nice. And so I worked in public schools to try to improve public school education for Native students and about Native Americans. Yeah, so tell me about your, because you have two books, right? Yes. Okay, so tell me about the first one, how you started writing that, the title of the book, all of that. Sure, my debut novel, Firekeeper's Daughter, and I had the idea for that when I was 18. I pitched it as Indigenous Nancy Drew meets 21 Jump Street, but I didn't start writing until I was 44 and it took a good 10 years to finish a draft I felt, you know, good about. And then my second book, Warrior, Girl Unearthed, and that came out in May and I pitched it as Indigenous Lara Croft, but instead of writing tombs of the main characters, writing museums to retrieve ancestral remains and sacred items that do not belong in museums. Sold. I am gonna get these books like right away. I'm so sorry I haven't read them yet, but these sound amazing. So in your journey as a writer, you know, I know a lot of people who are, you know, older, like in their 40s and they wanna write a book, but a lot of times they feel like they're just too old, like, you know, that pass them by. Can you tell me about your process and how you just, you did it? I just had this wake up moment. Maybe it was midlife crisis, I'll own that. And it was like, I've always talked about writing this story. What am I waiting for? And I just decided that I could write the world's worst first draft and I could live with failure easier than I could live with the regret of never trying. Yes. Yeah, and so it took you 10 years. Yes. Yeah, and obviously the second one was a lot quicker. Yeah, I had one year to write that. Yeah, yeah, was that because you had the pressure to do it quick or? I was on deadline. Yeah, yeah, deadline will make you do amazing things. The sophomore novel, probably a lot like a sophomore album or sophomore film like that second effort is that really tests your skill and your ability to become a different type of creative and be able to create on deadline. Yeah. There are, I mean, a lot of some of my favorite authors are Indigenous, but when talking about like, you know, writing and storytelling, you know, Indigenous authors a lot of time don't get the spotlight as much. Can you tell us about like the Indigenous writing community? Just I'm just trying to help the listeners like find new authors and new stories because oh my goodness, like we get a recycle of a lot of the same stories, right? And every time I read an Indigenous author, it just feels like it's taking me to a completely different world. Exactly. I think that, you know, we've always had great storytellers in our Indigenous communities, but we weren't the ones getting the book deals. And I think that, you know, publishing has kind of had a reckoning over the past few years that, you know, Indigenous storytelling is best served by, you know, being told by Native storytellers telling the stories from their communities. And I had a mantra while I was writing and it was I write to preserve my culture and I edit to protect it. And I think that's one key thing about Native authors, that we know when to pull that curtain and what not to share. Yeah, yeah, I interviewed many years ago, Joy Haro, Hariel, and she basically said the same thing. It's like, you know, there are things that we should talk about out loud and there are things that maybe we should hold back and hold for ourselves. And that just really stuck with me all of these years. So you're speaking tomorrow at 10.30, what can we look forward to from your talk? I will be sharing a little bit about my journey, you know, this 38-year path to publication and what my life's like now as a full-time author and where things are going now. I did sell the film rights to the Obamas. They're studio higher ground productions. They're interested in the project for Netflix and so it's just been wonderful. So, and I just, and I love the opportunity to talk with people who love books and, you know, love to talk about writing and especially younger writers. Yeah. Angela Buly, Angela, excuse me, Angela Buly, New York Times bestselling author. She is going to be at the book fest at the main library this weekend. Go see her, go read her books. It's gonna be an incredible event.