The end of last year but were nothing if not adaptable and we know that many of you watching right now probably could not have physically gotten to grow rich books tonight that you can join us virtually. Again, i will reiterate on what was said that you should treat this as if you were in the bookstore. In the bookstore for reading, youll buy books so please do that. It would be great if they were debbies books but really buy a lot of books because were here in a bookstore, you dont just buy one, you buy a lot of books so i imagine with this crowd debbie needs no introduction but i will just briefly say, i think was great is if you look ather body of work , you see two very there is strong themes. The theme of social justice and the theme of defining america and to get to who gets to defineamerica. Used on this and picture books freedom summer and hes done in belgrade county books and she did it in the interesting intersection of middle grade and why a with the 60s trilogy and got so much a claim for that and now in ya she has done it again with kent state. It is a Remarkable Book as anybody who knows me knows. I believe one of the best things iveworked on as an editor in 25 years. I think it is amasterpiece. I think it is again, a book that defies categorization. And basically as with the 60s trilogy, some people like the novel form. A just traditionally like to write novels in a straightforward way but debbie has done in this part of her career is she has decided to push the limits of what a book can do. So rather than just sitting back and accepting a genre and can forming her story to that genre she will in fact invent your own way to tell the story with the 60s trilogy, she invented the documentary novel as a way of giving this wide lens look at the 60s and the people within the 60s and the choices that were being made and all of the conflicts that were there and then with kent state, she wanted to tell the story with not just one voice but many. So she again invented a form that fits the story perfectly. So it is an honor to work with you always debbie. But it is certainly wonderful to get to talk to you about this extraordinary book. So before i will get to the questions of how did this book company and the writing process but i think ill start with the obvious question for now which is just as we did not anticipate having Virtual Events and being in this world that were in, the other big strand of where we are right now is the culture of protest and everything thats happened and think about can state when they saw everything that was going on. From the peaceful protests, from here gassing people so he can go and hold thebible up. It just is eerie how it has come all around again. Although again, theres the scary part but theres also the inspiringpart. So what has it been like . You spent years of your life researching and looking at kent state and interrogating kent state in your mind. And then this is the world we are in. What has been going through your mind looking at our world through the lens of the book . Thats a good first question and before i answer it im going to turn off the mic that i think is causing feedback. Can you still hear it . Is that better . Whats been going through my mind, thanks. First of all, its unbelievable. We couldnt have planned to have published a book that came out not only during a pandemic but that came out at the same time that the United States has elected over the same source of issues that we were looking at during kent states time and the vietnam war and Richard Nixon in the white house and all the protests that were going on to end the war and the National Guard occupying the campus at kansas state and killing four students and wounding nine more. They were just exercising their First Amendment rights to whats so inspiring to see is the people who are doing everything. Getting out there and exercising those First Amendment rights and protesting and rallying and having their voices heard. Receipt and the ability to chart your own course in this country and say what you feel and what you believe in and have the right to do that. Its also been scary. Its been scary to watch the National Guard be called out once again and is even more militarizednow than it was in 1970. And just to look at the scenario. Its on slab of kent state to say we need to talk about this so it doesnt happen again and here we are again. So were in a surreal time. Im grateful the book has been out and the response weve had to it so far is just and tremendous as people who are picking this up through wordofmouth from here, here and here and praising, oh my gosh, its just like today. The echoes of today are amazing so its just been, ive just been really humble i guess, thats really it. Just buy it because response to it in the middle of the pandemic has been overwhelming. And i can put this right back to you to and say due to scholastic for always being such risk takers with me. I knew this was a risky book and i knew the 60s trilogy books for a big risk is a never been done before but one thing has led to another and consistently scholastic had said yes, yes. How can we make this happen, even to the new book that were working on now. So thank you for that. Its good to see you. The last time i saw you was i think january. I wish we could be on the road together this year. Will hit the circuit again,will beat all the festivals. And now its july. And for a book to come out, any book as i know youre shepherding a lot of them. Any book come out with a without full libraries and bookstores , to support it where in a particularly interesting atmosphere right now. You have to try to share books and get them out there. And the able to tell our stories as young readers, old readers. Does that answer the question . It does and whats interesting as we weretalking about this today , were looking at what isselling , what people want and what bookstores arepromoting. Whats fascinating to me is really there is this question of relevance. Who will want to read books that are relevant which i love because i think it shows that people are reading to try to figure things out. A lot of times we read for escapism but now people are largely reading for engagement. I think that your book is one wherepeople are engaging. Thats good to hear. I sort of witnessed some people talk to you before the book came out about having read it so id like for you to talk about the response. That there is a twotiered response. You are getting some very intense responses from people with very personal connections to kent state but also youve gotten some intense responses from people who had no idea about kent state and can you talk about some of the things people have shared with you . Or the path youve been getting west and mark. Let me back up just a bit that and say that ive always known about kent state as i was, i was 16. It was three days before my 17th birthday when the National Guard opened fire. I lived in Charleston South Carolina and my dad was stationed at the air force base there and i didnt see him for two years because he was in and out and he was flying to vietnam and body so. And the protests were growing from 68 to 70 but we lived there and then that day, may 4, 1970 the National Guard called the campus and opened fire. It was all we could talk about at school. We would almost, we were almost the age of these kids have been killed. They were teenagers pretty much, to 19yearolds and two b,20 old and it was serious that we were on the cusp of being drafted and going to war and the entire country responded to this as one. We did that at the beginning of this, weve done that, weve seen that happening after the murder of george lloyd. And the whole country and that and it was just amazement. And its kind of 50 years have gone by and its kind of faded into some sort of background for younger people , and one of the reasons i wanted to write it was because just like ive done with the 60s trilogy i want young people especially to know that there on the cusp of changing and heres your america, heres the myriad of threats that fall into it but not just about people, places and dates. Its about all the stuff that happens that makes a mosaic of whathappened during that time. So were doing that now,were living through this amazing time right now. Its real but amazing so i come across people whove never heard about what happened that can take and theyre like really . Is this nonfiction, did you make this up and no, i didnt. This actually reallyhappened. Thats been, its almost shocking because it was just a part of my life all my life ever since this happened. So ive never forgotten and ive always wanted towrite about. But i always pushed it away because it was or ethic and when i wrote and, the last book of the 60s trilogy i kept running into cant state so i created the interest for and i kept putting things over there cause i would find and saving stuff and i would say ill never write about it. And eventually i think i called you or we had a conversation and i said well, i guess thats the way i cant write about kent state now because i talk about it at school and kids had never heard about it, they didnt know what it was and even adults would say it was just something at kent state and had gone away. So its so fundamental to who we are as a democracy. What happened there is no fundamental to our freedom and its so important to remember. Lets talk about it again, the next conversation we had was how do i write this book . So it was one of the best editorial conversations i think ive had with an author and in that we generally started the conversation having no idea what the answer was going to be and then we basically came to a really good answer. So could you talk aboutthat . Sort of what you were debating and how you were debating telling the storyand what led you to tell you this way . This is the fun part you read the writing of it is excruciating but the fun part is dreaming. You dream about it, you imagine it and theres a lot of us write anything that where i cant do it, its too hard. But i had a vast amount of material, an absolute mountain of material and it was as if theyre sayingthis is it, next. It actually was anthem, it was like the natural progression from anthem to kent state but anthem is big, every 60s trilogy is massive and weve had seven or eight chapbooks in every one area and i have all that primary source for kent state. Ive done so much of it, photographs and song lyrics and tradition papers and newspaper articles and Opinion Pieces and you name it, there was so much. And there was a place to go, Kent State University so when you and i talked i mentioned all this. I said i have no idea to get into this story and i dont want it to be like the 60s trilogy because it ends by itself. Its part of it because theres still at the end of anthem of the day of kent state. And i did that purposefully because i was dreaming already of writing about. So when we talked i remember, you may remember it differently or more but i remember both of us talking about how do you tell a story has so many different opinions because what when i did find nothing of information was that the townspeople and you should have killedmore than. Which was horrific and the National Guard said we didnt want to be there and people said they were outside agitators and others that it was just the students and the students were saying was the most important thing. And the administration agree on anything. Where you land . How do you tell the story . You and i had both read recently lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders and both of us loved it and i started ripping on that and saying in that book theres all these disembodiedvoices. Theres these voices who are arguing, talking, agreeing. Everybody just having this conversation throughout the whole book and theyre all sort of giving you American History at the same time so even before history, generations before you learn much with these bits of history but theyre all coming through conversation and we both fought for a minute and you were the one i think came up with the idea of elected memory. And you said in event of history is a collection of stories. Its a collection of all the people who were there, all the people who went through whatever it was. And that rang so true to me and thats when i think it began to gel. Is that your remembrance . It was area and its rare you can boil things down to two words but it was that phrase, collective memory and the minute we had that i was like okay, this is where its going to go and i still didnt know what are you were going to use a firstperson plural, sort of the chorus idea or whether it was going to be distinctive voices and whether you were going to give them names but there were a lot of coefficients that i did not understand. Me neither. But what i did know is that you were, it was going to be sort of the camera from above is what you ended up doing is really the camera shifting from one person to the next. And you do get the total from the sum of theparts. And another point to make about that conversation was lincoln in the bardo, every character was named but i also mentioned the book you had written, two boys kissing and i loved that book so much as i remember you reading that out loud to me and me getting so teary and i was at this public indicator, it was at the decatur book festival and thinking this greek chorus, thats it so in a way its a combination of those towards the things no one is named, no character is named but you know who they are and you know who they are by the placement on the page. This side of that side. You know because of the response, is different for each of the distinct speakers and besides. So i did see different faces for each voice and you shift into it quickly. You should be able to say to this is an this is a student, this is a National Guard soldier. This is county, this is another student, this is one of the black united students. You should be able to knowwho everybody is quickly. I dont think too many people seem confused about that. I just trusted the reader to come with me and if you look at it youll see that this is a conversation. The conversation of side to side, everybody talking and forth and not conversation of may 4 and when we eulogize the forces we also dont spare anydetail in telling you how they died. Theres an analogy at the end asking young people to get involved. So it all just came together and when it came together, it came. In that initial conversation i love a little bit about the choice, telling it from the point of view of the people who died or were hurt was actually never on the table. So can you talk about that decision . I tried that and it was obvious before i even got it out or type a sentence that it just wasnt right. I cant talk in their voice read so many of them are still living. There are people who will call themselves victims and they are, they were there, they may have not been shot but they were in the mailing. Theyre still there and one of the wounded has died i think and the others are still there but before who died, its not for me to put my voice into their story. I wasnt there but what i can do is i can take all the research that i did which was three trips to kent state and just going through those mountains of letters and photographs and articles and information on about may 4 and distilling it. I can have a conversation from those conversations that i had met, all those days i sat there. And walking to campus and watching nearly every year theres an observance on may 4, theres a vigil and on may 4 theres a remembrance and going to that was really powerful and it still stayed with me. Going to be there this year incidentally. And they held on till the last minute which was sad but i think the virtual celebration was really great. We all participated. More of that informed the storytelling. Since you did go into it with obviously you knew what had happened and sort of the outline of the story. Im curious what surprised you the most when you are doing your research. Was there a part where you said either there was a fact or something you hadnt understood or didnt know or just something that didnt hit you as hard as when it was in the abstract but then when it was in front of you you really had an much more. First of all i didnt understand the conflict was 4 days so when i heard about it as a 16yearold kid was so shocking, that moment and thats what i talk about when we worked with young people open them tell their own stories about the context of those stories and what it did get scolded. I didnt understand what it was about so one of them was wearing the invasion and telling the American Public on may 1 and then those guards along may 2 and it just escalated from there so that was of course, but there are two pieces of information in my research and one was a letter to the editor that was after this that said these kids have destroyed our town. You should have killedmore of them. And i remember standing up from the archive room and the librarian was at the other end of the room saw me just stand up and she said you okay . And i said number and then you understand the National Guard, a lot of them were 19. They were students at kent state and they were trying to avoid the draft. They did not want to be there area they were scared. And also they didnt understand the role the black united students played. There was an organization of organized students and it was told to stay away from the campus on may 4 because theyre afraid was you see an officer, or a soldier standing there with a gun, white kids didnt believe those guns were loaded. So those things were just shocking to me. I didnt understand it. So writing always helps me to understand a story. You understand myself in the frame of the story and to understand it that way. It gives memore of an understanding so i can go on. And it changes me to write something, certainly those are good things. Asking did this point i see were at the 7 30 mark so i will encourage people to speak, i ask all the questions tonight and you may have questions, these with them in the q a. Ill get in there and we will ask questions again either us or about the process, were happy toanswer. So it something and i dont know that ive asked you this , which of the voices is the hardest right . Thats an interesting question. I think were all hard but they all came together in this company. It was mostly separating them out because it was like stop, stop so i can write this down. Because it came very quickly when it finally came but it was so many years ahead of working on it before something opened up. Thats kind of my process but i never trusted the next time in the next time but sepa