Come in and hear from the candidates. Watch live on cspan and cspan. Org or listen live on the freecspan radio app. Your place for an alternate view of politics. Thank you so much. It is so great to be here with debbie, not here here. I wish i was there. I wish all of us were in the same spot but in lieu of that its great to be able to do this and thank you all for joining us as we are having this chat. Again, when we were planning to store i sent to debbie i cant wait to do appearances with you though we can have conversations again. This is not anything we ever would have imagined when we were going towards the end of last year but we are nothing if not adaptable and we will take solace from the fact that we know any of you who are watching right now could not have physically gotten to crowders books tonight but you can join us virtually. Again, i will reiterate what was said that you should treat this as if you were in the bookstore. When youre in the bookstore for reading, you buy books so please do that. Again it would be great if they were debbies books by a lot of books because when youre in a bookstoreyou dont just buy one book, you buy a lot of books. I imagine with this crowd that he needs no introduction but i will just briefly say i think whats great is that you lookat her body of work. You see two very strong teams. The theme of social justice and the theme of defining america and who gets to define america. She has done this in picture books like freedom summer, he got in middle grade with the aura county books and shes done in the interesting intersection of middle grade why a with the 60 trilogy and got so much a claim for that and now in ya she has done it again with cancer. It is a Remarkable Book as anybody who knows me knows. It is i believe one of the best things i worked on as an editor in 25 years. I think its a masterpiece. I think it is again, a book that defies categorization. And basically as with the 60 trilogy, some people they just like the novel form. They just traditionally love 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 and do so rather than just sitting back and accepting a genre and conforming her story to that genre , she will in fact invent your own way to tell the story with this technology, she invented the documentary novel as a way of giving this wide lens look at the 60s and at 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 and so she again invented a form that its the story perfectly. So it is an honor to work with you always debbie. But it is certainly wonderful to get to talk you about this extraordinary book. So before again, i will get to the questions of how did this book come to be in the writing process but i think ill start with the obvious question for now which is just as we did not anticipate us having Virtual Events and being in this world that wherein, the other big strand of where we are right now is the culture of protest and everything that has happened in and think about kent state when they saw everything that was going on. From the peaceful protests, from trunk here gassing people so he could go and hold a bible, it just is theory how it has come all around again. Althoughagain , there is the scary part but theres also the inspiring part of the people who arestanding up. So what has been like . You spent years of your life researching and looking at kent state and interrogating 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 rent lens of thebook . Thats a good first question and before i answer it im going to turn off the light that i think iscausing feedback. Can youstill hear it . I think thats going to help. How is that, better and mark so whats been going through my mind . First of all, its unbelievable. I feel like we couldnt have planned this, we couldnt have planned to publish the book that came out not only during a pandemic that came out at the same time that the United States has invested over the same sorts of issues that we were looking at during kent states time in the vietnam war and Richard Nixon in the white house and allthe protests going on and the war and the National Guard , occupying the campus at kent state and killing fourstudents. Over exercising their First Amendment rights so whats so inspiring to see right now is the people are doing that very thing, getting out there and exercising their First Amendment rights and protesting and rallying and having their voices heard. Free speech and the ability to chart your own course in this country and say what you feeland what you believe in and have the right to do that. Its also scary. Its been scary to watch the National Guard he called out once again and its even more militarized now than it was in 1970. And just to look at the scenario, its the full slap of kent state as we need to talk about this. And here we are again. So were in a surreal time. Im grateful the book is there and the response we had to it so far as been just tremendous as people who are making this up from wordofmouth here and fear and then coasting in various placessaying its just like today, oh no. Echoes of today back to 1970 so its just been, ive just been really humble, i guess is really it. Just humbled by it because the response for it in the middle of a pandemic has been overwhelming. I can put this right back to you to say thank you to scholastic for always being such risk takers with me. I knew this was a risky book and i knew the 60 trilogy books were a big risk because theyd never been done before but one thing hasled to another and consistently , scholastic has said 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 talk to you. Its good to see you. Last time i saw you was i think january and we thought we would be onthe road together. Tears the circuit again with all the festivals area youre here and here. And now its july and for a book to come out, any book as i know youre shepherding a lot of them, any book to come out without full libraries, bookstores, conferences that is supported , where in a particularly interesting atmosphere right now to be able to try and share books and get them out there. And be able to tell our stories with young readers, old readers. Does that answer the question . I think it does and whats interesting is we are looking at and we were talking about this today , looking at what is yelling, what books people want to read and what bookstores arepromoting. Whats fascinating to me is really there is this question of relevance. You want to read books that are relevant which i think i love because i think it shows that people are reading to try to figure things out. At a lot of times we read for escapism but now people are largely readingfor engagements. I think that your book is one where peopleare engaging. Thats good dear. To talk to you again and i witnessed some people talk to you before the book came out about having read it but lets talk a little bit about the response i feel there is that youd hear response here. You are getting some very intense responses from people with very personal connections to kent state also you got an intense responses from people who had no idea about kent take an can you sort of talk about things able have shared with you . Let me back up just a bit with that and say that ive always known about kent take because i was 17, well, i was 16 area three days before my 17th birthday when the National Guard opened fire red i live 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 when he was lying supplies to vietnam and bodies home, bodies, bodies and the protest was from 68 to 70 when we lived there and then at day, may 4, 1970 was when the National Guard was called the campus and opened fire area and it was all we could talk about. We were almost the age of these kids had been killed, they were teenagers pretty much related to 19yearolds and 220yearold and it was so scary that our friends were on the cost of going to this war and the entire country responded to this as one and we did at the beginningof this pandemic. Weve seen that having after the murder of george floyd. We just saw this and the whole country did that and it was just an amazement and its kind of, 50 years have gone by and its faded into the background for younger people especially at one of the reasons i wanted to write it was because tobreak that down with the 60 trilogy , i want young people especially to know that theyre on the cost of change and choice and heres your americanhistory. Heres the myriad of events that fall into an event. Its not just about people, places and dates. Its about all the stuff that happens that makes a mosaic of what happened during that time. So were living through this amazing time right now, its surreal but amazing so i come across people who never heard about what happened at kent state andthey are like really . This is nonfiction, did you make this up . No i didnt, this really happened. Its almost shocking because it was just a part of my life all my life, ever since it happened its been a part of my life so ive never forgotten. Thats why i always wanted to write about it and i always pushed it away because it was horrific and when i wrote and , the last book of the 60s trilogy i kept running into cant state so i created a pinterest board and i kept putting things over there that i would find and saving stuff and i would say ill never write about. And eventually i think i called you or we had a conversation and i said well, i guess i just cant write about kent state now because i talk about it and the kids wouldnt know what it was, they had neverheard about it. And even adults would Say Something happened that cant state but it had gone away. So its so fundamental to we are as a democracy. What happened there is so fundamental to our freedoms and its so important to remember. Lets talk about again probably 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 we genuinely started the conversation having no answer will idea what the answer was going to be and we came to a really answer. Could you talk about that . What you were debating, how you were debating telling the story and what led you to tell it this way. This is the fun part two. The writing of this is excruciating but the fun part is dreaming. You dream about, you imagine it and you have some despair and a lot of us who write anything at that moment where youre like i cant do it, its too hard but i had a vast amount of material, an absolute mountain of material and it was just saying okay, next. It actually was like him, the natural progression from anthem over to cant state anthem is they. Every 60 trilogy book is massive. It has or eight scrapbooks for everyone, and i had all that primary source material at kent state. There was so much of this. The grass and song lyrics and papers and newspaper articles and opinion pieces, there was so much. And there was a place to go, there was Kent State University so when you and i talked i mentioned all this. I said i have no idea how to get into this story and i dont want to be like the 60s trilogy which ends by itself, yet its part of it because theres a thrill at the end of may for that can state. So i did that purposely as i was dreaming already of writing about it. So when we talk, you may remember it differently. For more but one of the things i remember is both of us talking about how to tell a story that has many different opinions because what i did find in that mountain of information was the townspeople said you should have killed more of them. Which was red and the National Guard said we didnt want to be there and people said there were outside educators and others said no, it was just the students and the students were asked a guard off campus and that was the most important thing. And the administration couldnt agree on anything and where you land . How do you tell the story and you and i both read recently lincoln in the bardo by George Saunders and i started resting on that and saying theres all these different disembodied voices, these people who are arguing, talking, agreeing. Everybody just having this conversation throughout the whole and also the giving you American History at the same time. War histories, generational and you learn so much with these little clips of history are all coming to a conversation. We both stopped for a minute and were like you were the one i think you came up with the idea ofcollective memory. And he said in the event in history is a collection of stories. A collection of all the people who were there, all the people who experienced it and went through whatever it was. Ryan so scrutiny and thats when i think it began to gel. Is that your remembrance . Its rare that you can sort of narrow things down a few words but it was that phrase collective memory and the minute we that i was like okay, this is where itsgoing to go. I still didnt know whether you were going to use a firstperson plural, sort of a chorus idea or whether it was going to be distinctive voices and whether you were going to give them names so there were a lot of coefficients that i did not understand when we left. Me neither. But what i did know is that you were, it was going to be sort of the camera from above watching. And what you ended up doing is really its the camera shifting from one person to the next. And you do get the total from the sum of the parts. Another point to make about that conversation was lincoln in the bardo everybody had a name, every character was named but i also mentioned the book you had written, two boys kissing and i had loved that book so much i remember you reading out loud to the me getting so teary and i think we were at this club in st. Peter, the decatur book festival and just thinking my god, this greek chorus, thats it. And only the combination of those sort of things because no one is named, no character is named in kent state but you know whothey are and you know who they are by the placement on the page , you know because of the fonts, its different from each of these distinct figures and you know because of the typeface size. I did use different typefaces for each voice. You should be able to say that this is and this is a student, this is a National Guard, this is a county. This is another student, this is one of the black united students. You should be able to know who everybody is i dont think too many people were confused about. I distrusted the reader come with me and read the book but i can show you you can look at it and youll see theres this conversation but the conversation goes design, everybody talking and forth and that conversational way and then we utilize the poor students and also dont stare any detail untilyou have a guy. Then theres an analogy at the end asking young peopleto get involved , insert your name here. So it all just came together came together as a case. In the initial conversation id love to talk about the choice, telling it from the point of view of the people who died or were hurt is actually there on the table, i tookthat off the table but can you talk about that decision . I tried that and it was obvious before i even got a sentence out it just wasnt right. I cant talk in their voice. Though many of them are still living. There are people who will call themselves victims and the arts, they may not have been shot butthey were in that melee. Theyre still there and one of the wounded has died, i think just one and the others are still there but their sacred and its not for me to put my voice in their story. I wasnt there what i can do is i can take all the research i did which was three trips to kent state and sitting in the archive and going through those mountains of letters and photographs and articles and information about may 4 and distilling it. I can have a conversation from those conversations, all those days i sat thereand photocopied everything. And walking the campus understanding where they fell watching the yearly, every year theres an observance on may 3 and may 4. Theres a vigil and on may 4 remembrance and going to that was very powerful and it stayed with me. Were going to be there this year actually and a hell on to the very last minute before they canceled it and it was sad but i think the virtual celebration was really great to. We allparticipated. More of that informed the storytelling. Since you did go into it with obviously knew what had happened and sort of the outline ofthe story , im curious what surprised you the most when you were doing your research . Was there a part either was the fact or was something that you hadnt understood or didnt know or just something that really didnt take usr as when it was in the abstract. When it was in front of you you really thought much more. Theres a couple of things and personalizing understand the conflict was 4 days because when i heard about it is a 16yearold kid was so shocking that moment and thats what im talking about when we work with young people to and helping them tell their own stories of the context that the story gets sold in area i didnt really understand what it was about all i had to really mix in one and what was the invasion of cambodia and telling the American Public on april 30, then the guard came on may 2 and from there. So that first of all was a surprise but there are key pieces of information in my Research Just slayed me and one was a letter to the editor and there was more than one of these after the event 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 are you okay . And i said number and then to understand the National Guard , a lot of them were 19. They were students that cant take, they were trying to avoid the draft and they did not want to be there. They were scared. They didnt understand. They also didnt understand the role the black united students play. That was an organization of black united students that were told to stay away from the campus on may 4 because they said you see an officer, understanding and there with a gun and white kids couldnt believe those guns were loaded. So those things were just shoc