The Evolution of Young Adult Literature and Representation with Traci Jones

00:00:00
Welcome to what’s your why. I am your host, Emy Digrappa, brought to you by Wyoming humanities. In this podcast, we talk about culture, community, history, literature, and art and a whole bunch of other stuff, too. But we want to take you on a journey to discover people’s passions and their inspirations and their why. And the why is at the core of the humanities, why we do what we do, why it matters, and why does anyone care?

00:00:26
And today, my special guest is young adult novelist Traci Jones. Welcome, Traci. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s an honor.

00:00:35
Absolutely. So I wanted to one talk about your journey into becoming a young adult novelist, because I did notice in your bio, let’s see, your first degree was what in creative writing? My first degree was in psychology, and I actually started as an English major. And my very first class freshman year was an upper division Shakespeare class that I was not ready for. And I did poorly.

00:01:03
My professor said I was a horrible writer, and so I was getting a good grade in psychology. So I thought, okay, let me just switch to psychology. That is crazy, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah.

00:01:18
So you started out with a degree in psychology, and then where did you go from there? I went to college, and I wanted to be a copywriter for an advertising agency. I wanted to go into marketing. So psychology was a good fit because there’s all these theories of consumer behavior. So I was fine with that.

00:01:38
And then after that, I went to the University of Denver and got a Master of Science in advertising. And then I worked in advertising. And that makes sense to me now because that’s what I was reading in your bio. And I was like, wait a minute. How did she go from a master’s in advertising to becoming a young adult author?

00:01:59
How did that happen? Well, you know, as a kid, I was an avid reader when I was a kid. And then one Christmas when I was in fourth grade, my mother gave me a manual typewriter. Right? So a lot of readers are also writers.

00:02:18
And I think she must have known that about that tie. So she gave, and she had gotten a new electric typewriter that I would just love to mess with. So she gave me my own typewriter, and I spent that Christmas writing, you know, my very first story. Oh, I love that. And, you know, I’d gotten writing awards in junior high, and I’d always done well with my papers in English.

00:02:49
And it just never occurred to me, I think, growing up, that I could. That I could be an author, a novelist, and it could be because there were so few young adult books, period. But there were so few young adult books with an African American female protagonist, so I didn’t really see that on my shelves. I read a lot of L. Frank Baum and a lot of Judy Bloom and back in the eighties, then once you got through, like Judy Bloom and all those, there was like a gap, and suddenly you’re reading BC Andrews, which none of us should have been reading, things like that.

00:03:30
So I was, I grew up right before sort of that big advent of young adult literature. So it wasn’t on my radar until I was flipping through the newspaper. This was how long ago it was. I was flipping through the Rocky Mountain news, and I saw an advertisement for a certificate in creative writing from the university, college at the University of Denver. Okay.

00:03:58
And that just sparked something in me. So I just started taking writing classes. Wow, that is so interesting. And what is your inspiration? Or how do you go about finding your inspiration in your novels?

00:04:14
What inspires you? And, you know, do you get up in the middle of night and get an idea? Well, you get ideas from all sorts of places. My goal always is to write for the kid now who would have been me 40 years ago. So I’m always writing for the average african american female reader.

00:04:40
That’s always my goal, my dream reader. In my mind, the ideas I get from everywhere. My very first novel, standing against the wind, was actually a homework assignment when I was taking those certificate classes. So the very first homework assignment that Andrea Dupuy gave us was to write the first ten pages of a work. And so that first ten pages was the first chapter of standing against the wind.

00:05:14
I had actually a picture of a girl in my head when I started writing. And she was walking home from school, and she was alone and feeling a bit lonely. And she was really, really cold. And I knew immediately that she was in Chicago because she was cold. And I had moved to Chicago in my twenties in January.

00:05:36
And I thought, well, this has got to be the coldest place on earth. And so when she was so cold, I knew she was walking alone home on school from the streets in Chicago. And it was really like a Polaroid picture. So I saw her, and the picture in my mind sort of developed and became clearer and why she was scared to go home or anxious about getting home because of the bullies that were there waiting for her. And it was just really just sort of started small and expanded in my head.

00:06:17
So that was the first one. Wow. And because it had done so well, I kept getting the question, did I base the story on my own childhood. And her childhood was nothing like my childhood. So my second story was, I thought, well, I grew up in the seventies in Colorado during the very beginning of integration and busing.

00:06:43
So I thought I would tell that story as my second book. So that’s how I got the inspiration for those two. My fourth book, standing against the wind, is. I know it’s celebrated by the blue, and silhouetted by the blue is a phrase and a lyric from ragtime, the musical. It was this beautiful song, and I’m a huge musical fan.

00:07:08
So I was driving my son to soccer practice and making him listen to musicals, which I’m sure he loved. And we did a song called our Children. And in the play, it’s just two characters watching their kids play along the Jersey Shore, you know, and one of the lines is that they’re playing and they’re celebrated by the blue of the ocean. And I just thought that was such a beautiful phrase. And I was like, that’s going to be the title of my third book.

00:07:41
And so then I had to back the story out of the title, and I was like, well, blue is a different way to say that you’re sad. So what happens if a child is, her life is sort of defined by the depression of a parent. What happens? And then the fourth, ransoming the captive, I was watching, I think, 60 minutes, and they were doing a profile on Laura Bush, the first lady for George Hw Bush, and they were walking along the streets of her hometown, and they came to an intersection, and the reporter turns to her and says, so this is where you ran the stop sign and accidentally killed, ran into and killed one of your classmates when you were 16? Oh.

00:08:32
Oh, my. I know. I, oh, my God. I know. I hadn’t, I had no idea.

00:08:38
And she was like, yeah. And she’s, she said, I ran the stop sign. I wasn’t paying attention. I ran into this young man I went to school with, and he died from the accident. And I still think about it every.

00:08:50
Single day, I bet. Yeah. Right. And she was, you know, it was happened when I think she was 16, and she was by then well into her fifties for the interview. And I, and I just thought about the guilt that she just carried with her for decades, because how do you get rid of that guilt?

00:09:10
Right? So I came up with ransoming the captive, which is a young girl who she and her friend are coming home from a party. She’s driving. They run into kind of a herd of elk, and her friend had taken off her seatbelt to grab a cell phone. And she flies through the window, and she’s a.

00:09:30
And she’s killed. And I just thought about the aftermath, like, the immediate aftermath for that girl.

00:09:42
So that’s how I came up. So you get stories from everywhere, right? From music, from tv, from newspapers, from your own life, they say, right. They say to write what you know. And that sounds so specific, I think, to new writers.

00:10:03
But I always felt like sort of a misfit. Like I had kind of different tastes than the rest of my classmates. I never felt bullied or anything, but I felt, like, different than. So I always try and write for kids stories about people who are different and how to sort of embrace the quirkiness and the experiences that you have. So that’s how I get my inspiration.

00:10:33
It’s just living, really living life. That’s right, yeah. And do you have any favorite novelists that you like to read? Not necessarily a young adult, but, yeah. I read a ton of different genres.

00:10:49
I really like Christopher Moore. When I feel like humor, it’s hard to write funny. And he writes funny very well. When I’m feeling a little like action. I like Lee child.

00:11:01
I like the Jack Reacher books. I like Jodie Pacold, of course. I like Angie Thomas. I like Jasmine Guillory for romance, for contemporary romance. I like Stephanie Lawrence for historical romance.

00:11:19
I like Ruta Simtis. She does a lot of really interesting historical stories. So, you know, it’s all over the place. Has the number of African American novelists for young adults grown in our country? Has it gotten better for people?

00:11:42
It has gotten better. Okay. What I’m finding now is I was talking to another fellow writer, and they were. And, you know, she was writing. I can’t remember what she was writing, but she was told, well, you need to add, like, a person of color, or, like they were, like, ticking off this strange little list in their head, which is kind of disturbing.

00:12:05
And I also find that, you know, I’m a member of a couple groups, and we have these awards, and. And so I’m looking. You know, the first thing you look at, of course, is a cover, despite. Right. And so then you click on it, and you find that even though there is a child of color on the novel on the COVID the author is not a person of color.

00:12:28
Right, right. So it’s almost now like they’re trying to fill some sort of quota they have in their head, as opposed to just finding good representations of culture and of peoples to write their own stories. Wow. I think in the early two thousands, when there was that big DEI push. And there was all these pushes to have representation.

00:12:57
It worked fairly well, and now it seems to have turned into some sort of quota system in their head just to sort of take off the box. So there has been an expansion, like Jason Reynolds came out, and so there has been a few. There’s been quite a number who have. Who continue to publish. But I don’t know now whether there’s an influx of new people.

00:13:27
As you know, things change. Yeah, I was thinking about Hispanic writers. I think it’s the same thing. Yeah, I think it happens with. Yeah, it’s Hispanic writers, it’s indigenous writers, it’s Asian island Pacific writers.

00:13:48
I think the same thing has happened. You know, I think with African Americans, we’re always at the forefront, and then everybody else kind of comes along, but when ours, our growth stops and everybody stops as well. Right there isn’t. It’s like an all or nothing proposition. So you.

00:14:08
You were born and raised in Denver? I was. Well, I was not born in Denver. I was born in Illinois. I was born in Monmouth, Illinois, which is a small western town right near the hump of Illinois.

00:14:21
It’s the same town that my mother and father grew up and were born in. Okay, so I also read that your father was a senator. He was. He was the second African American state senator for Colorado. He was in the Senate for almost 20 years.

00:14:43
When he first got in, he was one of ten democrats in Colorado. Colorado has made this huge shift from red to purple to blue. But when he.

00:14:58
He was first appointed, he was appointed for an open seat of the first african american senator who became lieutenant governor in the election. So they appointed him to fill out the remainder of Lieutenant Brown’s tenure term. And then he just would run and do that and run for the next 20 years while teaching. So, Colorado, I think Wyoming is the same. They had what they call a part time legislator, so they’re only in session from January to May.

00:15:34
So during the other times, he was a teacher, and then he transitioned to work for the Denver public schools when teaching became a little too hard. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, yeah, I was the daughter of the senator, and so I stayed pretty straight and narrow because. Because he was the only African American senator and because my last name was Groff, G r o f f.

00:16:01
I couldn’t really hide if maybe it was brown or Jackson or Jones, no one would know. But, you know, you would look up in the white pages, the graphs, and there were twelve of us in the state, you know, and three of the three of them were relatives. They were either my mom and dad, my uncle, or Peter and I, my brother and I’s separate line. And then there were nine more graphs, so I couldn’t really hide. So I was a really.

00:16:31
I was a good kid. I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t do anything. I got good grades just because I didn’t want it to be any harder for dad.

00:16:42
Okay, did you save all that for later?

00:16:46
No, I still don’t drink. I still have never smoked. You know, once you get past a certain age and if. And if you spend too many times as the only sober person around drunk 20 year olds, it’s not really a good look, right? They’re not charming like on tv.

00:17:04
They’re not humorous. They’re just a whole mess. It’s never appealed to me. And I don’t like the taste. I never grew.

00:17:11
I never liked the taste. And that burn that you get, that warmth, it’s like medicine to me. So I just never bothered.

00:17:21
Yeah, well, they put plenty of alcohol in medicine, especially Nyquil. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my. Yeah, well, that’s what it all takes. It all tastes like Nyquil to me.

00:17:31
Yeah. Okay. And the people say, you just have to acquire it. I’m like, why would I acquire it? Why?

00:17:36
Why would I know it? Like, why? No, you’re right. At a certain age, just forget it. Yeah, it’s too late.

00:17:42
It’s too late now. I missed my chance in college when I should have really just gone crazy. But I went to a fairly academically strenuous college, and it was a shock to my system. Cause I had kind of coasted in high school, and I had to teach myself how to study. Oh, my gosh.

00:18:03
Yeah. It was just so much more work, and it was just harder. And so that first year was rough, so I couldn’t. I didn’t really do too much because I was, you know, I had scholarships I had to maintain. Oh, my gosh.

00:18:17
Yeah. Yeah. In your career, what do you think is, especially being african american, you know, how do you. How do you reach other, you know, young people? How do you inspire young people to want to learn, want to read, write, want to, you know, want to have critical thinking skills and not necessarily, you know, not.

00:18:41
Doesn’t mean they have to go to college, but be lifelong learners. That’s such a good question because, you know, really, you just. You’re trying to just find the people who are readers. It’s hard to inspire non readers to read.

00:19:00
I think JK Rowling really helped with that because she was, like, on the very forefront of, well, to be hip. Well, not hip or whatever. Cool. Or to be part of the in group, you have to have read. Oh, you haven’t read Harry Potter.

00:19:18
Oh, you haven’t read the Hunger Games. They’re those big, really international, successful books, but those books don’t represent the smaller groups, so you really try and just tap into the kids who don’t always feel seen. And then once you can tap into that, then you just hope that they will. That that will spark an interest in different things. Like, you know, I think reading is a.

00:19:51
Is really a way. It can be like a window into a different world. It can be a door into a different world. And so you just. Once you start them reading, you just have to hope that they will keep reading and encourage them to read things that are not only representative of them, but are totally outside their normal, everyday life.

00:20:15
Because if you can’t travel, then reading is a way to travel. Right. Without leaving your house. That is so true. That is so true.

00:20:28
Do you often go into the schools in Denver to work with, you know, the african american young people who are trying to find their place, trying to find their place in life? And. I have worked with a few book clubs and a few, like, writing programs, honestly, because there’s so many, there’s so much cuts, and there’s always a budget thing. They really don’t have as, I think, as many programs as they should to generate the next generation of writers and readers. It’s all about testing.

00:21:16
It’s all about meeting the numbers. And so there’s just not enough money or incentive for teachers to spend time outside of the classroom during those sorts of things. Right. Sometimes they’ll do it for 45 minutes at lunch, but it’s hard to encourage outside clubs for that. And there used to be a.

00:21:44
There used to be, like, one teen conference in Colorado that I would attend and go to, and I don’t know if they got funding. Again, I had not heard that they’ve had it, especially after Covid. There’s just, you know, if we could just find a first lady or somebody to encourage that sort of extracurricular learning, that would be fantastic. There’s just not that many programs. There’s just really limited.

00:22:17
There’s a couple programs at libraries, but, you know, Colorado has a lot of young adult authors, and so they really have a lot to choose from. And african american population in Denver particularly, has gone down from when I was a kid, it was around 1213, maybe 14%. And now it’s more like seven or 8%. Really? Yeah.

00:22:43
Denver has gotten just so expensive that you can get more bang from your buckley, you know, in the surrounding areas. And so we’ve. Where in Colorado and Denver, there used to be, like, nate black neighborhoods. There’s, like, two black neighborhoods. They have been gentrified and now so expensive to move into that, you know, they’ve moved to these big, beautiful homes in Aurora and Parker and, you know, Green Valley ranch.

00:23:13
They’re sort of outside. They’re sort of gone. The black population is really dispersed here. We don’t have, like, a center neighborhood like we did growing up. Oh, yeah.

00:23:23
Like five points. Yeah, right. And five points is not at all black anymore. It’s not? No.

00:23:31
I mean, it’s still historic. A black historic neighborhood, but, no, they, you know, they’ve either bought up those old, beautiful homes, you know, or they’ve razed them and put up townhomes and, you know, apartment buildings. That’s so interesting. I have. I haven’t been to five points in a long time, but I.

00:23:54
I was born in Denver. Where are you based? In Fort Collins. Yeah. So I.

00:24:00
That’s like my stomping ground that, you know. Yeah. So you just moved further north, huh? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

00:24:08
So I was just. I was just thinking of a story. My mom told me that when my dad decided to go to college, he was the one and only out of five kids to go to college. Oh, wow. And he grew up in Pueblo, Colorado.

00:24:27
His dad worked in the still mill. They were really poor, but his dad really wanted him to go to college. And so he started out in Pueblo, I think at the Emily Griffith opportunity school. Oh, wow. Wow.

00:24:42
And then. Yeah, that was a long time ago. And then. And then they had my oldest sister, Deborah, and they moved to Denver, and the first place they lived was in the five Points area. They could not find a place to live.

00:25:00
And the woman who rented to them, she became friends with them, and she was actually jewish. Oh. And. Wow. I know.

00:25:14
And she said to them, well, she grew to really love them, and they became good friends. And she said to them, I would have never rented to you if I had known you were mexican. So my parents were in their nineties, so you can imagine what it was like. Yeah. You know.

00:25:35
Yeah. That when my dad. So my dad got kicked out of high school, actually, or asked to leave, he likes to say he was asked to leave high school because he was kind of a troublemaker. And then he went to the Air force, and then when he got out of the Air force. He went to college, he went to western Illinois University, got a degree in education, right?

00:26:01
And so he went in and he said that the counselor was like, oh, here. And he handed him a thick stack of a book, here are the school districts that are hiring. And then he goes, oh, wait, sorry. And he puts that aside and he gets out a little stack, a little notebook, and he says, I’m sorry. Here are the school districts that will hire black teachers.

00:26:28
And one of them was DP’s. So, amen. Yeah, he had been to, it was between here and San Diego, and he had been at the air force here in Lowry, in Denver, and he liked Denver. So even though he had sent my mother out to get a house in San Diego, he was like, you know what, nevermind, we’re going to move to Denver. And she was like, really, really?

00:26:57
San Diego? Okay, so that’s how we ended up in Denver. But yeah, it’s, well, I just like to think about that and just remind people that, you know, we’re as a country still learning and changing and growing and discrimination didn’t happen that long ago. And so when I hear a lot of things like, you know, we should be doing this, I mean, I feel just because I grew up in a big hispanic family that we’ve come a long way and we have a long ways to go, but it is not. You know, those two things are not mutually exclusive.

00:27:37
Yes, we have come a long way and yes, we still have a long way to go. Some things are just systemic. And, you know, the people who grew up thinking that people of color were lesser, they’re still around, and a lot of them are still in power, and they still have a lot of the money. Right? Those, the silent generation, the baby boomers, they’re still around.

00:28:04
I find that my daughter, I have four kids, my youngest is 22, and her generation, they are so much more open and accepting. It doesn’t matter who you are. Right. And it’s always interesting to me that they’ll say, oh, well, they, you know, they’re all fine with the pronouns. And my generation is like, okay, I will call you they.

00:28:30
But grammatically, it just really irritates me right there. We still have a little, we’re willing to change, but there’s resistance, and then you get even older and they are just, it’s like a personal insult to be accepting of people. It’s so, yeah, it’s still around. It’s still around. We still have a way to go.

00:28:56
Well, I think. I think that they pronoun is funny. Only because I did an interview with a they and I actually was terrified that I was going to say that something wrong. Right. I, I was like, I feel like our generation, we want to learn, but it’s almost terr, it’s a strange, terrifying.

00:29:22
Don’t want to insult them, you know, you just want to do it. Right. But it’s so counter how we were raised. Well, yeah, I mean, anyway, it was just quite funny and it actually turned out just perfect. Oh, good.

00:29:37
But it really made me laugh so hard because I was so unfamiliar with they them that when I was listening to someone talk about her son and she was talking about they moved, blah, blah, blah, and they did this and they did that, my next question was going to be, what are they? I mean, I was, you know, in my brain it was going that way. Your brain. And it’s 50 years of thinking that way. That has to change.

00:30:11
You know, it’s a hard thing. It’s easy to change behaviors, really hard to change attitudes. Right. You can make people do stuff, but they can be thinking, you know, all sorts of things while they’re being made to do things. Well, I don’t, I don’t think one is exclusive of the other.

00:30:34
If your behavior change, I think your attitude change, I think they follow eventually. Yeah. Follows anyway. But. So what is next?

00:30:44
What are you writing right now? So I have had this fifth manuscript with my agent for about a year. She’s been shopping it for a year and it just, we were getting, they would want the whole thing, but then we were getting turned down and she didn’t want to like, burn through every place. So I had an old editor from one of my, for my second and third book. I had her take a look at it and she made some really good points.

00:31:23
So I’m rewriting it and I’m changing it from third person to first person. And when I did that, the voice suddenly got older than twelve and now it feels 1415. So I got to change that. So I’m in the process of rewriting and generally I don’t have to do a big, huge edit and rewrite because I edit as I go and I always try and make sure that, you know, I have all the right things as I edit. Like, you know, the character arc and all that’s in my head.

00:31:59
But now that I’ve had to rewrite, I’m having motivation has been an issue for me because it feels more like work. You know, on the good days when you’re writing, it’s almost as if somebody in your head is telling you the story and you’re just transcribing it. Those are the really good days. And editing, for me is just like a continual bad day of writing. It’s just a struggle and changing things from first person to third person, you know?

00:32:32
So I have weeks and weeks of rewriting. I’ve only rewritten the first chapter from third to first, and I’m going to have to rewrite everything. So it feels like, it feels like a challenge. This is one of the biggest writing challenges I’ve ever had. So does this, I guess.

00:32:55
Does this happen quite often to writers when they send their work off to be published and then it comes back from their editor and they say, well, we like this, we don’t like that. We want you to rewrite this part, change this. And then, I don’t know. In some ways, I guess just me. But maybe it’s not just me, because maybe that’s why it’s such a struggle for you to go back and rewrite is because the first time you write it, you really put your heart into it, and that’s what you wanted, right?

00:33:30
It’s a piece of art, right? Takes your piece of art and they go, well, we don’t like that color there. We want that color over there. We want you to change this to that. Oh, it’s the worst.

00:33:45
Yeah. It’s almost like someone telling you that your child is wrong and you need to be like you really. I mean, she’d be really perfect if you would just change your hair and add some freckles and then make her taller. Right. You’re really, for me, it’s like this, this almost, this anger.

00:34:05
And so I have to. I have to know that it’s going to make me crazy, and I will hate everything they say. And I have to go. Go away and leave it for about two days and get over myself. You have to, like, just get over yourself, right?

00:34:20
Okay. They’re looking at it so much more objectively. You’re in the weeds. By the time you give it to somebody, you’re totally in the weeds, right? You move.

00:34:28
You feel like you’re just arranging chairs on the Titanic, right? You just have looked over it and looked over it and looked over it. And so you can’t see it clearly anymore. And so you send it out and they say stuff, and then you’re all, at least me as a writer, I’m all irritated. And then two or three days later, I’m like, fine.

00:34:51
And then I look at it again and I’m like, well, they’re probably right about this. So I’ll just do this, and then you can. Once you get obvious, I feel like, yeah, this is going to make it so much better. But it’s really hard to do because it’s almost like putting. Like, you sewed this beautiful dress together, but you’re like, oh, the sleeves are different.

00:35:12
Right. They, like, change. Like, you pull everything apart and redo something. For me, that’s by far the hardest part of writing. Oh, yeah, they just took the scissors to your dress.

00:35:24
Yeah.

00:35:27
Oh, my God. That is so funny. Well, it’s been so great talking to you, Traci. I’m so happy we connected. So am I.

00:35:35
I’m so glad that I didn’t mess up your schedule too much. No, no. And so tell our audience where they can find you, where they can learn about you and your books. I have a website, Traciljones.com. you click on any of those links, and it will probably take you straight to Amazon, but you can also find it@barnesandnoble.com dot.

00:36:00
All four of my books are available, definitely from Amazon. The first and the fourth are easiest to get from Barnes and Noble. Okay, perfect. So. And then, do you have a Facebook or an Instagram or any social media?

00:36:19
I do. I’m really awful at social media, but I have an Instagram and I have a Facebook. I have a Facebook author page. Okay. I keep fairly.

00:36:33
Fairly up to date with things. You gotta put your kids Instagram. I was mostly pictures of my daughter.

00:36:48
That is too funny. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. But my author Facebook page rolled out. You know, I’ll mention, like, cool book fairs, or I’ll mention where I’m speaking at next, so I can.

00:37:03
All right, well, thank you so much for your time, and it was my pleasure. Absolutely. And I hope to see you in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Yes. I was actually just there.

00:37:17
That’s so beautiful there. Okay. Yeah. They have a young writers summer camp, and I did a lesson for them June 26, I think it was. Oh, okay.

00:37:32
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It’s a great program. So any young writers, if you’re near Jackson, Wyoming, absolutely, go, you know, sign up for it.

00:37:43
We had 20, 1918 kids, I think. Good, good. Well, good work. Thanks for the good work. And I’m hoping to be.

00:37:53
I think they’re going to invite me for the thing they have in September, so I should be back, hopefully. Oh, excellent. Yeah. Well, that’s where I am. Yeah.

00:38:03
So then you can see me then. All right. Take care, Traci. Thank you. You take care.

00:38:09
Bye bye.

00:38:25
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