 Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. You can go to Levy in England, but you cannot become an Englishman. You can go to Levy in France, Germany, or Turkey, but you cannot become a French, a German, or Turk, but anyone from any corner of the earth can come to Levy America and become an American. Welcome back to A Nation of Immigrants. Happy New Year of 2023. This is the second year we have this program. Featuring diversity and inclusion. This program has been produced by Think Tank Hawaii and its Kingsfield Law Office. Every episode, every other week, we invite renowned immigrants or the descendants of immigrants come to this show to share their life stories, immigration adventures, and their contributions to cultural diversity. Thank you so much for spending time with us and we are absolutely thrilled today to have our good friend, Marianne Malone. Marianne is a 12th-generation English-American, 5th-generation Irish-American, and a 4th-generation German-American. She is the author of The 68 Rooms, Stealing Magic, The Paris Corn, and The Secret of the Key, a four-book series from Random House. The books follow the adventures of Russ Stewart and Jack Tucker, two sixth graders in Chicago, as they discover a magic key that allow them to shrink small enough to sneak inside the magical, strong miniature rooms and travel in time to the peers each room represents. Marianne is a mother of three, a former art teacher and a co-founder of the Campus School Middle School for Girls in Urbana, Illinois. The 68 Rooms was an EB-wide reading-allowed finalist, a junior library guild selection, a Keith Indian Next List recommendation book, an Indian Heartland bestseller, as well as 2010 Parents' Choice Recommended Book. Welcome, Marianne. Hello, happy new year. Happy new year to you. Thank you so much for agreeing to be our guest. We are absolutely thrilled to have you because you are one of my favorite authors. And we have known each other for 22 years and thank your wonderful husband, my fantastic mentor, Professor Jonathan Fenberg. And we had these for the 22 years, we have many occasions to discuss art, literature, and your kids, your fantastic kids. Now we are going to use this time to discuss your family stories, your parents and your ancestors. And through our intro, we know that you are a descendant of immigrants. You have your ancestors were English, Irish, and German. And I was absolutely pleasantly surprised. You can, it appears you know your family history pretty well. You know your 12th generation English, 5th generation Irish, and the 4th generation German. Do you know anything about your ancestors? How did they came to the United States? I do know a little bit. Now, there's more. I'm also French and Scottish. In there, and the names were, you know, dead giveaways. And then of course everybody does one of these genetic things, 23 and me or something. And that verified all of those bits of ancestry for me. No surprises for me, sadly. I thought maybe there would be something really exciting that I didn't know about, but it was no surprise. But I do know that on my mother's side, that's the side that has been sort of, I knew the most about growing up. They had sort of kept track of their ancestry. And I know they came to this country from England very early, probably 1629. So like a few boats right after the Mayflower and they came to Massachusetts. However, they were not Puritans. So they left Massachusetts and came to the New York region, which was newly growing. I mean, Manhattan was, of course, New Amsterdam back then. So they were there. And I know that many of them were Quakers. I know that they were not slave holders on that side of the family. And I'm pretty sure on my dad's side of the family, we didn't have any slave owners either. That's been an interesting thing to try and find out about for Americans looking into their ancestry. Who were these people? And what did they do? And how did they survive? And were they good people or bad people? So I've learned a bit. And interestingly, one of the biggest surprises for me in thinking about my own ancestry and being an immigrant to this country or being descendants of immigrants to this country, when I was writing my third book in my 68 Room series, the one that's called The Pirate's Coin. Sorry, this one. My brother was doing a little poking around on the internet and sent me an email about some of our family history. And so my books are set in something, a place called the Thorn Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. And the Thorn Rooms are miniature rooms that were created by a woman named Narcissa Thorn. That's why they're called the Thorn Rooms. My brother sends me this email saying, telling me something about this document called The Remonstrance of Flushing, which was written in 1657. And it's the earliest documented writing and the North American content and possibly even in the world that was standing for the separation of church and state. People of Flushing, New York stated that they would not have an official religion. In order to be a citizen of Flushing, New York, you did not have to sign on to any particular religion at all. And they did that because Quakers had newly come through their town and were being persecuted by Governor Stuyvesant of Manhattan and of New Amsterdam. And so these people in Flushing signed this document. My brother said, two of our ancestors were signers. So I said, well, who are they? What are their names? And he said, their names were William and John Thorn. Oh my goodness. That's a strange coincidence. So then I started poking around and discovered that in fact, my Thorn ancestors are the same as Narcissus Thorn ancestors. Well, what a lovely Thorn. Even though for her it was by marriage, it was her husband who was actually a Thorn. But I had chills. I thought here, you know, well, maybe it was eight or nine generations ago, our families were the same. So it's kind of an American tale. It's sort of a story that I think I'm sure happens all over the world, but since we are a nation of immigrants and we all plopped down in this country and then spread out. And if you can follow the threads far enough back, you get these wonderful nuggets of family history. So that was fun. What a lovely, lovely story. Thank you so much for sharing with us. So you talk about religion and it appears that some of the people in this country that do believe this country was founded on a certain religion. And some people don't believe that. And we don't want to argue that because we are not a historical program, but were you raised religiously and what do your childhood look like when you grew up in the Middle East? I had a very, I'd say, regular childhood and I grew up, was born in the city of Chicago and I was the youngest of four children. And so by the time I was toggling around my parents moved to the suburbs, I think it was just my mom needed a backyard for the kids to run around in. So, but Chicago was my city and we were only a half an hour train ride from the city. So, but I went to the public schools which were wonderful. I went to the same elementary school from kindergarten through sixth grade and I loved it very much, Wildwood Elementary School. My mother was a very religious person. She was very, very devout, not a hardliner. She believed, I was raised Episcopalian. She believed very much in the message of love from Jesus Christ, but she then was also a Quaker. So she loved the church, she loved the mass, she loved the hymns, but she was deeply, I think at heart, a Quaker. So I grew up going to church on Sunday mornings and then I stopped going to church. But then in high school, I would go with her to Quaker meeting, which was more palatable to me. I was not, I never really took to organized religion. But I don't go today. It's sort of, I'm comfortable with religion and around people who are religious, but it didn't sort of, it just never really took root in me. I totally understand, yes. One of the beauty of the United States is you can believe, you can worship whatever you want to worship. That's right. As long as you do not infringe other people's freedom, worship other gods or not worshiping. Exactly. My religious freedom enables your religious freedom. That's well said. Yeah. Well, so since you grew up in Chicago and sober in Chicago, and were you around immigrants case in your childhood, in your junior high school and later when you became our teacher, have you taught immigrants students? Yes. In fact, I think the American suburbs after World War II were filled with immigrants. I see. Many refugees from Eastern Europe, from Germany, from Poland. I had friends who had family members, grandparents or great aunts and uncles who had died in the Holocaust. I had friends whose parents still had their, numbered their tattoos from being in concentration camps. I had one of my dearest friends whose Bubby lived with her, her grandmother, who only spoke Yiddish, had escaped. Not the, she left before the 1930s, but she remembers the horrible, horrible pogroms running for her life out of, I think, Lithuania, but I'm not positive which country she was from. But yeah, no, there were a lot of immigrants, certainly a lot of first and second generation families where I grew up. It was also not, it was a very middle class suburb. So it was a place for people to get started and along the American dream, good schools, good housing, lots of parks to play in. And then when I became an art teacher in the university, in Urbana, Illinois, where the university is, many of my students were the children of foreign graduate students. So they were either temporarily living in the United States or they were gonna stay in the United States and were getting green cards and on their path to citizenship. And they came from everywhere, everywhere, South America, Asia, Middle East, everywhere. And China, including, I'm privileged to have the opportunity to work with Professor Femberg and obviously get to know you and your family. It's just a, it's the best of America. And I'm privileged to came to this country 22 years ago and get to know the best people in America. And, but I'm very conscious, I'm privileged. And as well as some of the immigrants you met in Chicago Thurber, they are privileged. When there is a disaster, political turmoil, the people can get out of their homeland. They are privileged and lucky-wise. So I'm quite aware of that. Let's change to the topic of your works. You have multiple identities. You're an art teacher, you're a novelist, you're a painter and obviously you're a mother and a wife. But to talk about your career choice and you are one of the people hard to define. And I have to admit, I'm hard to define and I can brag about it a little bit. I think all the talented people are hard to define and we don't want to be assigned with one single identity. We want multiple identities. But talk about your, let's start with your art, your painting. And many years ago, you painted a wonderful painting of my sister's dog, Tom Boy, which I babysitted for six or a few months. Now Tom Boy is long gone, but your painting is forever with my sister and it's most cherished memory for her. And every time I visit her, I see the Tom Boy you painted. Tell us about your little bit about your artwork. I know a little bit, but we want you to tell our audience about your art. So, I always imagined that I would be a visual artist as a kid, my mother was an artist and I think all of her children were very creative. I think I got the closest to having a career actually in the arts. It's hard to be an artist. It's not an easy life path. You know, it's just hard to make a living as an artist. So, I feel very fortunate that I've been able to sort of maneuver around and make money doing things and still maintain an identity as an artist. Even though now it's not my, painting is not my primary profession. But I love it. I think once you are, you just are, whether it's your income or not. So, I still paint. I have something going on my easel right now. And I'm so glad that the painting of Tom Boy was such a big hit because fur is one of the most delightful things to paint. There's something about the brush that you're using and the fur that you're painting that's just like the one and the same. So, it's really fun to paint animals. I do enjoy that quite a bit. I've done every dog in the family. Lucky dog. At least once. Yeah, so, yeah, and then, but then I had kids and anybody who's sort of had kids knows that that can slow you down in many ways. And then I fell into this world of teaching which I really thoroughly enjoyed. I was a co-founder with a friend of mine of a girl's school that's still living in Urbana today. It's now 26 years later, I guess, maybe even more. And it was an all girls middle school and for the first couple of years, I was like co-director and did everything that one can imagine you need to do running a little school. And then she stepped forward to be kind of the full-time director, my friend. And I said, you know, that's great because I would like to focus on art and I will be the art teacher. So that was delightful. I love teaching, drawing. I love how teaching art really makes people smarter if it's done right. It makes you more analytical. I know that's counterintuitive. Everybody thinks that art is all about feelings and irrational things but couldn't be further from the truth. It's a real analytic process when you're looking at what you're observing things deeply and questioning your visual assumptions because we all make assumptions all the time but we forget that we make visual assumptions as well. So sort of breaking that down is really interesting. And then that really informed my writing, I must say. And for me, the way my writing process is very similar to my painting process. There's the broad brush strokes at first, first there's the idea and the broad brush strokes and then you're building and layering and editing and cancelling out and painting over and I find a lot of similarity between the two processes. And I never thought I would be a writer so this has been a really exciting journey for me, branching off of my creative self. And you write so well. And remember 20 years ago, you shared your screenplay about the New Jersey Turnpike scandal with me. I was thrilled. I was trying to get it put into production. It's a very sophisticated story and it's entertaining but it's also art film. So you write very well. And now I turn to you. Yes, of course. Now let's turn to your novels. You, the first few books you published that is National Bestseller. And there's one thing I do want to mention, you know, look at your books and appears there for children. But this morning I listened to a podcast by R.F. Kwon at the Asian American author who just published Poppy Wars and the Bible. And she said to the interviewer, let me make it clear, writing for children is much more difficult for writing for adults. And I cannot agree with that more. And for the children books I have read through these years, Little Prince, Pinocchio, and your books, Harry Potter, they all make a huge impact. But your books are few particularly, you know, close to and not only because I know you, but also I feel a strong connection with Swar miniature room as well. I visited that, you know, exhibition many, many times. Every time I'm standing in front of miniature room, I ask myself, what if I can shrink myself and then get to that heat of period? And you realize that. I didn't. Maybe our dreams are materialized. Please, you know, even we don't have a lot of time, but I do want you to share some thoughts and maybe tell our audience what we should looking for when we're reading your books. Well, when they're reading my books, or your own, your own, I don't know what they should be looking for when they're reading my books. I hope they just fall into them and get lost and taken away and swept up in the storyline that the images that I create become living to them. Miniatures of the world right now. And I think during the pandemic apparently all kinds of people discovered they were at home and even like young hipster couples are now making miniatures. This is big world of it. Anyway, Mrs. Thorne was sort of the grandmother of all of all miniaturists in this country and maybe internationally. But you know, I do think that I will say that I think people think that writing for kids is easier than writing for adults. And I don't know if it's harder, but it is certainly not easier. I think it's harder. May I interrupt? I really think it's harder. I can write an article for adults, but it would take me 10 times effort to write something for children. The other thing that I want to mention about children's books, if you ask any great author today or just what they think is like in the top 10 great American novels, almost everybody mentions Charlotte's Web by E.B. White. And if you want to know what makes a great novel, read Charlotte's Web again. It's perfect. It is an actually perfect piece of writing. And E.B. White is one of my favorite authors. His essays are just delightful. But I think also if you wanna really understand yourself, think back to the book or a few books that you loved as a child. And that's sort of the key to your personality. I've said this to so many people. And as soon as I say it, you can see light bulbs going off in their heads like, oh my gosh, you know, and they start thinking about the book they love. And in my husband's case, you know, he's an art historian who spends most of his days looking at images. He loves looking at images. He said, I didn't really read novels. I read comic books. I said them in all pictures. There you go. So I think that things you fall in love with when you're a child, whether they're books or whether in my case, they were the Thorn Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute. If you can tap into that love, it's really powerful. I don't know. I'm not suggesting everybody needs to, you know, create something based on what they fell in love with as a child. But if you understand it, and if you really spend some time thinking about the things you fell in love with as a child, it's really, it is. It's very powerful. So falling in love with the Thorn Rooms as a child and letting myself remember and feel those feelings again enabled me to write these books. So they kind of turned me into a writer. Beautiful, isn't it? Maybe I was a writer already, but I didn't know it until then. Absolutely. It's such a beautiful, beautiful story. I think we'll build a parallel universe. And every novel, every book, it's a different universe and created by the author. And there is a truth about it. And because everything is in, on this planet, everything will finally, will disappear. And people will die. Time will change. Generation will change. However, our states, literature states, novel states, fiction states, even that sounds a little bit, you know, counterintuitive, but at the end of the day, created art and created works states instead of anything we deem the material on this planet. Anyway, we are a little bit behind in time, but we do end our program with two important questions for our distinguished guest. And even we don't have a lot of time, but I still want to ask you these two questions. Number one is if time travel permits, your books is about time travel. And, but if time travel really permitted, you can travel back 40 years from now, 30 years from now, and meet a younger version of you. What advice you're going to give to yourself? Might be different from the advice you gave to your children, you know, Maya, Noni and Henry, but what advice are you going to give yourself in your 20s? Second question, and anything particular you are reading or watching, you're really enjoying, and I want to recommend it to our audience. Well, the advice I would give my younger self is still advice I give myself right now, but I wish I'd really, really thought about it back then is just do not be afraid of failure. It's, I wish I'd known that really young. I was always afraid of failing and forget about that failure. It just doesn't matter. It's just like, you know, shrug it off. So you always learn something. So don't be afraid of failure. No, don't worry. And oh, gosh, what have we, but I, you know, I read a book this year that I was recommended to me by a poet friend, and it was called Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Dorr. And if you're interested, it was really good. I was so surprised by how much I liked it. It's about books, it's about libraries, it's about ideas living on and how we protect ideas. So that's the thing that I would recommend really sort of jumped out at me last year. And I loved the documentary, Summer of Soul, which was won in the Academy Award for Best Documentary. It was directed by Questlove. It's really fabulous. And it, I vaguely remember that weekend as a kid growing up, it was on the news, but just like for two minutes it was on the news. And we sort of didn't know much about it. And he brought it to life. So that was really interesting. What else? I don't know, we're watching all, we watch all the stuff that everybody's watching. Well, wonderful advice and a wonderful recommendations. Again, thank you so much to be on the show, Marianne. And it's a great privilege for me and to get to know you and Professor Femberg and the kids for 22 years. And I look forward to learn more from you and the professor and look forward to read more of your books. And absolutely fantastic books, not only for children, but for adults. 16 years. I do get fan mail from adults. It's true. Yes, including me. Anyway, it's been a pleasure. I love the idea of this program, The Nation of Immigrants. I feel very strongly that it is our strength as a country and everybody's got a really interesting, interesting ancestry story, immigrant story. So thank you for letting me mention it too. Thank you. This program would not be possible with our distinguished guest and our fantastic engineers and at the Think Tank Hawaii Studio. And thank you so much for all of you to make this program successful in the past year where you were named show of the year award by Think Tank Hawaii. And you are our first guest in 2023. And happy new year, Aloha. Thank you so much for everyone and everybody have a fantastic year. Aloha. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tank Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktankhawaii.com. Mahalo.