On Writing and Teaching, and the Black Horror Renaissance with Tananarive Due '87

CAT RECKELHOFF: Welcome to Northwestern Intersections, a podcast where we talk to alumni about how key experiences have propelled them in their life's work. I'm your host, Cat Reckelhoff from the Northwestern Alumni Association, and welcome to part-two of our interview with Tananarive Due. Highly recommend, if you haven't already, enjoying part-one, but for those of you who are returning for part-two, we are going to start off by playing the last 30 seconds of part-one, before we jump back in.

TANANARIVE DUE: And I think horror appeals to so many people because so much of it is literally about survival at a time when a lot of us are starting to wonder about our survival financially, our survival in a pandemic, our survival on a planet with more and more indications of climate change going unchecked. So survival is very much on our minds, even when we're not consciously thinking about it, and horror can really-- not everybody. Some people just get more anxious when they watch horror, but for me, I find it soothing.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Yeah. I never thought of horror as a way to process anxiety or as sort of--thinking through the idea of survival and coming together to confront the literal demon, the monster who is wreaking havoc on everyone's lives. That's really incredible. I actually want to ask you a little bit about your UCLA class and then how you developed this course. I mean--it's a famous course.

TANANARIVE DUE: It's so funny you say famous, because I really feel like, despite the fact that I was publishing horror since 1995, the reason I was invited to be an executive producer on Shudder's Horror Noire was because I was famous as a teacher, not because I was famous as a writer. That was really not how I saw things going, but it's actually a funny story. Obviously, like most of the country and the world, I loved Jordan Peele's Get Out. From the time I saw the trailer, I knew that it was going to be something different and something special. I think that when you see the child, a Black child sitting on a bed and he floats through the bottom of the bed into this like open space landscape that I would later learn was the Sunken Place. I know the film was going to be about something important. And it is about something important!

It really is about a version of the way white supremacy looks and feels to Black people who are Black as spectacle, right? You're the only one in the classroom--that's certainly something I've experienced. You're the only one in the neighborhood. You're the only one at the work meeting. You know, and a lot of people don't think about that, what it must feel like to be that person who is like the only one in the room. And obviously Jordan Peele was processing some of that through Get Out.

So when I saw Get Out, I got super excited. I was teaching afrofuturism at UCLA, and afrofuturism to me, I teach as an all inclusive Black speculative arts class which includes music, comics, literature that is science fiction, fantasy, and horror, because is horror is fantasy right. But with the release of Get Out I realized I can just teach a Black horror class. This is a great--Get Out is a great film to be sort of the underpinning of a course that's about the history of Black horror. Much like the documentary Horror Noire.

And I got so excited, you know I spent a lot of time on Twitter tweeting that I was going to teach this class. My department chair said I could teach this class, and within like almost instantly, a reporter was like, I'd like to write a story about your class. And I was like, oh, I don't even have a syllabus yet. Nothing to put pressure on you to get your syllabus written than a reporter wanting to write about your class, but I did.

I got my syllabus together. I sent it to the reporter. I did an interview. The day the interview went live, I was followed on Twitter by Monkeypaw Productions which is Jordan Peele's production company, and I was already following Monkeypaw.

So the rule in Twitter is, if someone follows you, you can send a private message. So you know I'm like, OK, well, it sure would be great if Jordan Peele could come visit my class. You know, put it out there. I'm at that age where nothing ventured, nothing gained. Right? All they can say is no or ignore it.

But within a couple of hours, I was hearing from Jordan Peele's account, himself. I don't know if it was him, but he said, ha-ha, I could surprise them. And I would say, not three weeks later, disguised in a hoodie and a baseball cap, we snuck Jordan Peele into the back of my classroom, and it was like a rehearsed bit.

My husband was there, Steven Barnes, and we like came up with this rehearsed debate. And so following our rehearsed bit, I was playing the scene in Get Out-- spoiler, I'm sorry if you haven't seen it, but it has been out since 2017-- where Rose, the White girlfriend who lured Chris to her family of sci-fi abducting a White supremacist.

Rose is dangling the car keys, revealing that she is not an ally. Saying, you know I can't give you these keys, babe. It's that moment of like that final betrayal, and my class is just livid about it. They're talking to the screen.

So I turn up the lights, and I said, what is the director trying to say about the coveting of Black bodies? Jordan Peele raises his hand from the back row and stood up, and the class went crazy. The class just went-- and one girl was so emotional, she was crying and shaking her hands. She walked out of the room.

It was just pandemonium, and one student captured about 10 seconds of that, as he was walking to the front of the room. But what I find very interesting is, even though another student livestreamed his whole talk to her Facebook page-- she did it privately-- only one clip became public, even though TMZ was calling me by the time I got home. It was a bizarre, because I was tweeting about it. I was tweeting quotes from it and pictures from it.

It was nuts. He talked about it on Colbert. It was really nuts, but that's the genesis of the course, how I met Jordan Peele. He has come back to the course at least twice in person, once for my online version of that Black horror course, which I'll plug briefly here, because he did a Skype. It was even before Zoom really. He did a Skype for that at www.sunkenplaceclass.com, which we created.

Steve and I created that for the public, since so many people were like, how can I take this course? I'm not a UCLA student. It's not for credit, but it's a history of Black horror. And that has been just a fascinating journey.

And from that, Steve and I who collaborate on screenplays and tele-plays went to Monkeypaw Productions and pitched a couple of times and ended up writing a Twilight Zone episode for season two that Jordan Peele literally invited us to write. So that turned out great. That was my first TV credit, actually, that I didn't create myself.

I had a couple of IMDB credits from shorts that were self-produced or appearing as myself in some things. But I had never had a TV credit, and my first TV credit is The Twilight Zone. What? Co-credit, because Steve and I wrote the episode together.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Having that as like your first official credit with your husband is like being in the Twilight Zone in and of itself.

TANANARIVE DUE: You know, you're right.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Yeah. You can't believe it. You can't believe it's real. What a wild moment. Yeah. Can I ask a little bit about your collaborations with Steven?

TANANARIVE DUE: Sure.

CAT RECKELHOFF: And I guess also, can I ask how you met? I'm asking because like you two are co-collaborators. You do all these like you write all these incredible tele-plays and screenplays together. So I really wanted to ask how you two met and how you both started writing together.

TANANARIVE DUE: Well. Sure. Again, it's one of those stories, it sounds like it's from a TV show. On the basis of my first novel's publication The Between, I was invited to maybe a first of its kind conference at Clark Atlanta University called the African-American Fantastic Imagination Explorations and Science Fiction Fantasy and Horror. And there were a handful of people, and I was just lucky to be among them. But the people who were there, Octavia Butler, Samuel R Delaney, her mentor.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Oh my god.

TANANARIVE DUE: Jewelle Gomez, yes, and Steven Barnes. And I had just become familiar with Steven Barnes, because a friend of mine who knew of him thought we should be set up. Kind of like oh, he's a Black writer; You're a Black writer kind of thing.

But on the basis of that bug in my ear, I did watch an episode of The Outer Limits that Steve had written. Well, actually, I won't even say I watched it. I didn't even go out of my way to find it. I was in a hotel room with my mother, happened to turn on The Twilight Zone, which I had never watched before-- I mean, I'm sorry, The Outer Limits.

I think it was the '80s version of The Outer Limits. I had never literally watched an episode. It happened to be on. Someone had happened to have mentioned that Steve wrote for that series, so I was like, well, let me see what the series is like, and it was his episode. Is that bizarre?

CAT RECKELHOFF: That is so bizarre.

TANANARIVE DUE: It's one called "A Stitch in Time." It's actually his best episode. It's called "A Stitch in Time." It starred Amanda Plummer, and it's basically about a scientist who develops a time machine, so she can kill serial killers before they can strike, becoming a serial killer herself, and she won an Emmy for that episode. It's an excellent episode. It was a great introduction to Steven Barnes.

So then a couple of weeks later, I got a letter that had been misdirected, and it was late getting to me, inviting me to this Clark Atlanta conference. And I went, and I saw Steven Barnes give his talk. His aura just seemed to glow from the stage. His love for people, his love for writers, his creativity, all that was just in full display.

And he was also impressed by my talk, when I talked about how I got a blurb for My Soul to Keep from Stephen King which had to do with being a reporter for the Miami Herald. And running into Dave Barry in the cafeteria, and Dave Barry was playing with a group called the Rock Bottom Remainders with Stephen King and Amy Tan and a bunch of other writers. And he invited me to be on stage. I met King. I gave him a copy of the book, and he agreed to give me a blurb for My Soul to Keep.

So that was that story, and he just thought, wow, she used her position in the Miami Herald. She could play the keyboards, that beat all these things. So we were very impressed with each other.

I was writing a dating column at the time for the Miami Herald, and on the basis of that meeting, I wrote a column about love at first sight, which I really did not believe in. I did not believe in love at first sight, and it wasn't technically love at first sight. But by the end of just a long weekend in each other's company now and then, Steve and I were holding hands at Atlanta airport, like high school kids going home from summer camp.

And we were literally saying, we could build an empire, which you know we laughed about in years to come, because for two writers to think they're going to build an empire is a-- that's a stretch. One thing I will say, artists, as romantic as it is to be with another artist, it's also very nice to have someone with a job. [LAUGHING] But in any case, in a roundabout way, I guess I could say we have done that, depending on what your definition of empire is.

We have a lot of writing students that we have through a program we call Life Writing, and we have collaborated on many novels together. I think four novels and a mystery series called the Tennyson Hardwick mystery series, where Blair Underwood, the actor, was basically the cover character. It was a way to get around Hollywood.

Oh, it's hard to get a movie made? It's hard to get a series made? Got it. We're just going to write a book that looks like a movie.

So the first book was called Casa Negra, and we did a whole series with him. And Steve and I also co-wrote two teen zombie novels, one called Devil's Wake and one called Domino Falls. And right now, our teenage son-- he just turned 18-- is reading Devil's Wake as a part of his home schooling program, because guess what, we assigned it. So yeah, that's how we met, and we knew we wanted to collaborate almost immediately.

But collaborating with anyone as a learning process, and I can say having collaborated with both my husband and my late mother-- and some listeners might be thinking, how? I could never. It does take the right temperament, and I'm not going to say that we haven't had some battle royales.

But the ground rule from the very beginning-- and it's hard to keep this-- but the ground rule from the very beginning is that arguments about creative decisions should not touch the relationship. Those two things are separate. And I think the other key to collaborating with anyone is that one person has to take lead and have the kill switch, one person.

I have a graphic novel coming out later this year called The Keeper that Steve and I wrote together. It started as a screenplay. We got very close to setting it up as a film. It's one of my last big heartbreaks in Hollywood. I swear, I'm never going to let myself get set up like that again, where I thought it was a sure thing, and then it didn't happen.

But we're turning it into a graphic novel. So it has its own life as a graphic novel, and then maybe, it'll find the right home as a film. Because a graphic novel is basically a big storyboard for a movie. Right? But I took lead on that, because that was my idea.

Steve's name comes first in The Twilight Zone episode, because when we pitched Monkeypaw, we pitched a list of ideas. Some of which had been generated in-house, that they shared with us, for us to come up with our like a one-line idea that we come up with a story, or we came in with our own. And the one we ended up writing, "A Small Town," was the one that Steve had liked and taken lead on. So his name comes first on that.

And during the collaboration process, I get very passionate. He gets very passionate. The person in the lead, though, has the kill switch and the final say. And I think what you really have to learn how to do is carry that responsibility with grace, instead of being a dictator.

Because I prefer to write prose alone. I still love the solitude of writing my own short story, my own novel. I just finished a novel called The Reformatory that will come out, hopefully, later this year. But for screenwriting, I really do prefer to collaborate, and I almost say that reluctantly, because writers are solitary.

Steve had way more TV experience than I did. He's collaborated way more than I have. It's a much more natural state for him. I had to learn how to be a collaborator.

And what I've learned is that there's something about screenwriting. Because it's so visual, because there are these visual symbols, because of all the structural puzzle pieces you have to put together just right in a very concise way that isn't quite the same as a 500-word novel or 500, rather, page novel. I prefer now to collaborate with Steve, because I consider him another lobe of my brain. So why would I want to have fewer lobes, when I can have all the lobes is my way of looking at it?

So we do continue to collaborate on scripts, where we're revising a pilot script right now, an adaptation of one of my books. We've been doing rounds of pitching for a pilot we wrote together that he took lead on, an idea that others actually brought to us, which is the first time we'd done that. So we're really trying to learn our way through this Hollywood game, not taking it too seriously. We learned a long time ago never to depend on Hollywood for income. The minute you need Hollywood, it will dry up on you. That's the way we look at it.

So I teach, and I love teaching. I teach at UCLA. Even teaching part time at UCLA is a substantial part of the money we need for the month, and then Steve has some passive income that comes in, and we also sell courses. Right? So that's why it is so funny.

I know it's 2022, and podcasts have been around for a long time, but Steve and I have been doing these little audio lessons for years. We actually had probably about 200 recordings on a platform called Talk Shoe that just disappeared for podcasting, and we just decided 2022 is going to be our year. We're going to just make it official and do a podcast, and we call it Life Writing: Write for Your Life!

And the Life Writing system, which we have up, there's a Facebook Life Writing page, that's been up for a while. It has more than 1,000 members, and we just teach little hints for how you complete your work, while also structuring your life as the artist. So that you're more like the hero or heroine of your own story, and it's life-work balance. It's craft tips, and our podcast, though, has turned into a blend of entertainment and information, because we just started and it's www.lifewritingpodcast.com.

We literally only have three episodes, but our first three episodes were Steve and I setting it up. That's just the first one, and then, we were just talking about the fact that we were doing a podcast. We were invited to be on Roy Wood Junior's podcast that he does with The Daily Show, and we just mentioned the podcast. He said, oh, I want to be a guest. So he was our first guest.

Our first guest was Roy Wood Jr. from The Daily Show. And then completely randomly, literally days after booking Roy Wood Jr.'s, before that was even on the air, Patton Oswalt showed up in my Twitter talking about something in his podcast. And I just said, well, we just started a podcast. Again, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

CAT RECKELHOFF: That's right.

TANANARIVE DUE: And he's like, all caps, oh my god, I would love to do that. OK. So our third episode is Patton Oswalt talking about horror. That's the thing, because he's a comedian. So not a lot of people know he's a big horror fan. So he was very excited to have the chance to come on a podcast to talk about horror and the life-work balance, it turns out.

And so that has actually turned out to be pretty incredible. I didn't realize the degree to which podcasting is its own culture, and how people who do podcasts are very supportive of other people who do podcasts. I was just listening to all the comedians who were joking about how much they hate podcasts.

So I'm always a little embarrassed inviting people. Oh, yeah, we have a podcast too, like everybody else. But it's just been a real lesson in carrying yourself with confidence, putting it out there. I still get a kick out of it. I'm a huge podcast fan. So if I open up my Apple podcast, and my new podcast pops up next to all my favorite podcasts, it's just so weird.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Yeah. As someone who's also new to podcasting, it is really exciting to see something that you worked on pop up next to like all of your favorite episodes and all of your favorite podcasters. And it gives you this appreciation for the work that they've done. Like oh, wow, like the way they've incorporated music into this audio is so clean. How do I do that?

TANANARIVE DUE: I know, and we're a one-stop shop. We're doing it all ourselves, right now, so editing, which I hate, all of it. So it's a little bit of a piece here, a piece there. But what amuses me is that so many podcasts have this official sponsorship, Comedy Central presents. It's like we got none of that.

We're like Life Writing Premium presents-- That's us. We present ourselves. Here we are.

But yeah, we always are turning writers, especially, to our lifewritingpremium.com site, which is where we have like a subscription course with different lessons every week. So the podcast is just a taste of us, who we are, how we look at the world. But the course is really designed for people who want to get that project moving. My novel I have coming out this year, The Reformatory, took me seven years to write.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Wow.

TANANARIVE DUE: Because I was writing it here and there, because I was learning screenwriting, while I was writing it. And also, quite honestly, because it's about the Dozier School for Boys, in Marianna, Florida, which is another of these situations where children were killed while in captivity. We're hearing about that with Indigenous schools up in Canada, but it was also happening here.

And I had a great uncle who was buried there which is how I heard about it. And rather than writing a non-fiction book, because there were already survivors, I thought, who were better equipped to do that, I wanted to write a novel, where I could give him a better-- a different ending. I wanted to give him a different ending, but it was so difficult.

The research, just heartbreaking the way these children were abused and how, as old men, they were still traumatized and fighting their demons from those days. And it was a tough book to write. Really, the pandemic I have to thank for that, because in 2020, I was literally afraid I might die without finishing that book. And I put myself on a quota system and a chart, where I could see week by week how many pages I wrote every single day. I held myself accountable, and I got it done.

CAT RECKELHOFF: That's incredible. So like what a great resource to offer from your own personal experiences as a writer and wanting to like hold yourself to task to finish a novel. Although, I can imagine like having to write about-- having to like write about that trauma and that horrible situation for those young boys was also very challenging. And probably, it takes an additional toll on you as a writer, I'm sure.

TANANARIVE DUE: It does, and this is one situation where I feel that making it horror rather than contemporary realism is actually an easier book to read. Right? So it's set in 1950. So it's historical horror, but I didn't want to lean into the violence against children.

That's not fun, for me as a mother, a reader, a writer, it's just like, nothing to brutalize and sexually assault these children, even though that obviously was happening. There was even a rape room even so much, or so it's rumored at this at this facility. So I used horror and metaphor and ghosts as a way to represent that violent history.

There are people who died in the past, and they died young. And they died violently, but we're not there watching them get killed. Instead, the focus is on what do we do now? How do we heal it? How can we get Robert out of this place?

And it's really about a friendship between a ghost and a living boy. It's a weird friendship, and ghosts are not super great friends, by the way. They don't have the same kind of priorities we do, but they make it work. [LAUGHING]

CAT RECKELHOFF: I like that. A very strong through line in your approach to horror is really the survival aspect of it and living in the aftermath and coming out of that. And then dealing with those ghosts and processing that experience, and what does it mean to face your future but also face your present, and where you are, I think is something that gets lost in the horror genre-- and I've certainly gotten lost in it before-- is I think the more violent aspects of it.

But it's been contemporary horror and addressing human dread and human anxiety and human survival, which has turned me back around to the genre as an adult. Where you have writers and directors, like Jordan Peele--I'll even throw Ari Aster out there, because for Hereditary and Midsommar really stuck with me as like survival movies of sorts or movies about cults, more accurately. Spoiler to anyone who doesn't watch those films yet, they're definitely about cults.

TANANARIVE DUE: It's funny you mentioned Hereditary, because my husband and I started it. I've been jonesing to rewatch it. I've seen it twice, and my husband didn't quite remember it. So I was like, oh, OK, let me sneak it past him. Let's watch Hereditary, honey.

But about the scene where they're at the party, and the little girl is having the reaction to the peanuts, and they're about to leave, he's like, wait a minute, I think I remember this. There's a scene that comes up on the road that he's not in the mood to watch again. It's like, ah, I couldn't get him to get through it with me.

So I'll have to rewatch that one on my own, but it's a tough one. That one is a really grim horror, but it's one I come back to, and Midsommar, I come back to both of those, because it does poke that dread place so accurately.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Yeah. It really does. That's why I find myself rewatching those movies as well, because I always notice some like some sort of like detail I didn't see the first time. And it like scratches at that dread that you're talking about. Are you looking forward to Jordan Peele's new movie that's coming out, I think this year, Nope. They just announced the cast for it.

TANANARIVE DUE: Are you kidding? I can't wait. I love Jordan Peele's work. I love both watching his films and learning from his films but also seeing his impact. Because they get out--

Not only was it directly the reason that the horror noire documentary got made and then subsequently the horror noire anthology film that Steve and I wrote two episodes of based on adaptations of our own stories which is out on Shudder now and will soon be out on AMC plus as a series. So they're cutting the movie up into three segments with two episodes each. We're just one example, though, of the impact of Jordan Peele opening the door for marginalized horror creators, who are creators who were coming from a less traditional place maybe than some of the remakes that we're all familiar with in the canon and horror.

But he's really opened so many doors, and Monkeypaw has provided so many great opportunities for women, in particular. With Nia DaCosta directing Candyman. Misha Green is the showrunner for Lovecraft Country. So his impact, you almost can't measure it. I'm a-- fan isn't even the right word. I'm just very grateful that his work exists.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Yeah, and I think the impact is-- his impact is something we're going to be seeing for a very, very long time, especially as you said, we have new directors who are women and women of color who are coming into their own and creating horror, like Candyman and like Lovecraft Country. Lovecraft Country is such an incredible series. I admit, I haven't seen Candyman yet, not for lack of wanting to go. The pandemic prevents you from going to theaters, but it's now available to watch on streaming services.

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TANANARIVE DUE: Absolutely, do watch it.

CAT RECKELHOFF: It is like at the top of my list to sit down and watch it. My friends who are also fans of the horror genre, and we're so excited to watch it. Yeah. I would love to hear a little bit more about your work on, sorry, on the documentary for Horror Noire: The History of Black Horror. What was it like to work on that?

TANANARIVE DUE: Well, that was a unique experience. I never-- I guess, technically maybe, I was an executive producer of the short film that we made called Danger Word, back in 2013. But I never had a group of producers come to me and ask me if I would be involved with their project, and I was more than happy to do it.

So it was not just executive producer in name, but also I did some on camera discussion of the things I was talking about in my Black horror class, spanning from, as Robin R. Means Coleman points out in her book, Horror Noire, Birth of a Nation, which you might not consider horror. But imagine watching that as a Black person, when it came out, in 1915, where it's basically romanticizing the KKK and lynching as the antidote to the Black menace. It is basically the thrust of the film.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Definitely a horror movie by those standards. Absolutely.

TANANARIVE DUE: Right. So it starts with that, but also talking about the way Black characters have been misused in so-called mainstream horror as these tropes. And I'm sitting a little bit of a resurgence in this, ironically, in the push to have more inclusivity in films in general. People are being very lazy sometimes in the way they introduce these marginalized characters. But traditionally, in horror, you could expect to be, well, the monster is one trope, obviously, the monstrous other.

But then there's a spiritual guide who is the character who only exists to give you spiritual guidance, White characters, and has no life other than that. And that can also be a magical negro, as it's called, who is a character, again, who often is a spiritual guide but has magical powers in service, again, to the White characters. The sacrificial negro is that heartwarming character who risks his life to save the White characters, and you shall be avenged kind of thing. And it lets everybody know, oh no, this is real, and this is going to be scary. The real people might get hurt now.

So there are all these lazy tropes, racist tropes really, that developed over the years. And horror noire unpacks those, while at the same time celebrating films that, despite the lack of opportunities. Like William Crain, at 23 years old, how did he get to direct Blacula, but yet, that happened. That was a thing that happened. And yes, it's a Blacksploitation film, but he's also cloaked it with some afrocentric thought and some Swahili and some names and some history and images of Black empowerment against the police.

And so there are all these artists over time, whether it's Ernest Dickerson with Demon Night, Kasi Lemmons with Eve's Bayou who somehow managed to get past the gatekeepers and get some really powerful Black horror made. So it's really a combination of looking at what's gone wrong, what has gone right, and looking forward to the future of Black horror.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Yeah, and I think with as you said, being in a Black horror renaissance and then having Jordan Peele and having Monkeypaw and, of course, having writers like yourself and your husband Steven, I think it's opening a lot of doors for others to come through and to be able to make really meaningful work that disrupts a lot of those harmful and racist patterns that you see in horror and creating something that has just as much impact as movies like Get Out and Us that start to change those conversations.

TANANARIVE DUE: Yes.

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CAT RECKELHOFF: What advice would you give to writers, particularly young writers who are still at Northwestern?

TANANARIVE DUE: Well, I think this is something that we teach in Life Writing and something I really believe and is the path I took, which is start with short fiction. I say this having taught in an MFA program for more than 10 years. I can't tell you how many students walk in like this is the second in my trilogy novel about blah, blah, blah, when on a sentence-by-sentence or paragraph-by-paragraph basis, they still haven't managed basic scene structure.

Like what am I seeing? Who are the people in this scene? What am I learning about this character in this scene? Why is this scene in the story? You know?

And I really feel, because I know of writers who have been so frustrated with novels that they gave up writing altogether, and that to me is heartbreaking. Just because one piece of fiction doesn't work doesn't mean that you can't work as a writer, or that you aren't a writer, or that you can't make it as a writer. Novels are tough to write. I'm a very experienced novelist. It took me seven years to write my last novel. Right?

So maybe that's not the place to start, when you're a new writer. And I think the reason so many people do start there is because that's what they read. They read novels. So they want to write novels.

And when students said to me, I don't think in short stories, I'm like, well, how many short stories do you read? So read those anthologies. Read those collections. Read writers who are writing in the genre that you want to write in, and read writers who wrote classics. Like read everything.

Read 10 times what you write. That's the first step, and then start small, and keep doing that. It's ironic. In some ways I wasn't taking my own advice, because I had never published a short story, before I published The Between, my first novel, but I had sold a short story.

So that was like a little blip from the universe, pretty early on too, after college. A little blip from the universe, I sold a short story, and then the magazine went out of business, before they could publish it. And then, I couldn't sell another one for years. OK?

But the point is I had become, at least for that story, a professional level writer. I just had not found the right vehicle, the right story, that right alchemy to recreate it again, until The Between just hit me like a load of bricks you know, after that interview with Anne Rice, after reading Mama Day and that hurricane, I just got this idea for a novel, and it was, boom, it was there.

But I really would just caution new writers, concentrate on short fiction. There are so many reasons why, but I'll give you one example. In the new horror noire anthology movie, there's a segment called Bride Before You that's adapted from a short story by a writer named Stephanie Malia Morris. So this is her first-- of course, it's her first adaptation.

She's only written a handful of short stories. She was shocked. She was shocked to be reached out, but I've been teaching that story for years in my Black Horror class. So when the executive needed a short story, something else fell through, I said, oh, why don't you read this, and she loved it.

So if it's not for craft reasons, you think it's a good idea to start in short stories, how about practicality. It's IP, Intellectual Property. Short stories get optioned every day, and whether it's published online or in a magazine, you're still having an opportunity to get your work in front of eyes much sooner than even if it's from your novel. I have a former coaching client who struggled for years with a novel. Beautiful writer, she was the most beautiful unpublished writer I had ever read. I just thought it was criminal that she was unpublished.

And I suggested that she break off a piece of her novel as a standalone short story, and boom, it sold immediately. So get the immediate gratification, and not that it's easy. OK? It might take you years to publish a short story. So while you're circulating your stories, yes, go ahead, work on the longer novel.

But get your work out there, because there are three places where writers mess themselves up. The first is what I discussed earlier, you call yourself a writer, but you don't write. When's the last time you wrote anything that wasn't a Twitter post. Right? So develop a practice, even if it's a sentence a day. That's something else we teach in Life Writing, develop a practice.

Secondly, they write but they don't finish, and this is probably the biggest downfall for people who get stuck in novels. They get lost. They don't finish it, or they've written a first draft that's very flawed, and they can't muster the will to work on the next draft.

And then, let's say you've done that, and this is where I was with The Between. I was writing. I had finished it. On the basis of one or two rejections, it sat in a drawer for nine months. I wasn't submitting.

Submit your work. Submit your work, because that's the part that's going to hang you up down the line. You might get all the craft lessons down. You might learn how to revise and finish, but if you're afraid of rejection, which who isn't, you're not going to submit your work. It's the same as not writing.

If you want to be read by other people, it's the same as not writing, if you're not submitting. So that's my biggest advice. Start small, and submit. Get your lumps in. Get your bruises in.

Some of the best advice I got from one of my high school English teachers, Mrs. Eastover, she said, if you want to be a writer, wallpaper your wall with rejection slips. That's a lot of rejection slips. So that to me was like, oh, so when mine started coming, if I had six, seven rejection slips, that didn't seem abnormal.

I put them on my door. I would paste them up and watch them grow. I felt pride in my growing number of rejection slips, because it meant I was trying. And there's only so long that you can work on your craft, if you're reading more than you're writing, if you're writing, and you're finishing what you write, and you're submitting, there's only so long that will go by before you're selling.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Wow. That is really incredible advice. Thank you. Yeah. I think it's so easy to be scared of rejection and to take it very personally and take it as-- and have it be very telling of what you believe your talent is and what you believe and believe what you're capable of. But there have been so many brilliant writers and artists who have been rejected before they sold something or created something that other people really resonated with.

TANANARIVE DUE: And a caveat to that-- because I have a very close friend who's really been struggling to find a home for her manuscript. She's finally now found an agent, and hopefully, that agent will help it find a home. But the fact in the matter is, sometimes that home isn't ready for you.

And we also live in a time when it's never been easier to self-publish. And I don't recommend self-publishing at first, because I think then you're skipping the steps where you get the feedback. And sometimes, a rejection slip is just no, but sometimes, a rejection slip will give you guidelines for how to make this a better manuscript. Those are valuable nutrients you're missing, if you just skip to self-publishing.

But the fact of the matter is, there are gatekeepers in publishing, just like there are gatekeepers in Hollywood. So if it's valid to self-finance a little short film or if you can, a feature, of course it's valid to self-publish. But just don't jump ahead to that too fast. Make sure you're ready.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Thank you so much Tananarive for joining us for this special two-part episode of Intersections, and thank you listeners for tuning into today's episode. For more information about our podcast, please, visit northwestern.edu/intersections. In the next episode, we will be celebrating the beginning of women's heritage month, and we will be joined by Ilana Peña, TV showrunner, executive producer, showrunner, and writer, as she talks about how her experiences studying theater and creative writing for the media at Northwestern culminated in finding her passion in television and so much more. So please, tune back in, and until next time, stay safe, and take care of yourself, your friends, and your community.

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