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

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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 I am so excited to introduce our guest, Tananarive Due.

Tananarive is an award winning author who teaches Black horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, she has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British fantasy award. And her writing has been included in the best of the year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House.

She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. Tananarive is also an executive producer on Shudder's groundbreaking documentary, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror.

Additionally, she and her husband and collaborator, Steven Barnes, wrote A Small Town for season two of The Twilight Zone on CBS All Access. Welcome to Intersections, Tananarive.

TANANARIVE DUE: Thank you. So excited to be here. Go NU!

CAT RECKELHOFF: Yes. I'm so excited to have you here as well. So I really like to begin all of my conversations with Northwestern Alumni sort of by starting at the beginning. What brought you to Northwestern, and what were some key experiences that shaped you as a student?

TANANARIVE DUE: Well, that's a really easy one to answer. Northwestern, I believe, was the only college I applied to [LAUGHTER]. And I got early admission, so it was a one and done. And it was based partially on this school's reputation in journalism. I wanted to be a journalist.

I was a high school intern for the Miami Herald. So I already had a little front page story under my belt. And I had been working in a suburban bureau and wanted to pursue journalism as my day gig, while I dreamed of being a novelist on the side. But really, I would have to say the thing that clinched it and even made me only apply to Northwestern, was the National High School Institute.

So I was a cherub. And that's a program where you come during the summer, which is such a bait and switch. Let's talk about that. But you come during the summer, and you see the campus when it's all pretty and sunny and warm. And there's a beach. And you're like, oh wow, this is paradise. And then you go and you never see that paradise again for four years, because it's never that sunny or hot ever between May and September, you know or September and May, when you're actually at the campus.

CAT RECKELHOFF: That's very funny. Yeah, it does kind of sound like a bait and switch. You get three months of summer, but normally you're off the internships, or you're leaving school for the summer, so you don't really get to experience the beaches of Evanston in the height of famous Chicago summer.

TANANARIVE DUE: Please beaches, how about wind shear? How about wind chill factor? That's what really would have been the best preparation. But anyway, it's a gorgeous campus, no matter what time of year. It is just kind of funny that it's a naive 17 or 16-year-old, I thought, oh, I'm going to be hanging out at this beach. No, I was not.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Yeah, it is very cold in Chicago. I love that story about the bait and switch being a cherub. Actually could you talk to me about your time in the Communications Residential College. I know that was sort of-- that was a very important experience for you. And I think you said it was sort of like an incubator almost of creative minds.

TANANARIVE DUE: Well because I was from Miami and had never seen snow, and frankly wasn't really impressed with snow, I spent a lot of time in my dorm. And from the time I was a freshman, I applied to the Communications Residential College. It sounded like a dream come true, a bunch of students who are all interested in various forms of communication, journalists, writers, radio TV film, actors. And that's exactly what it was.

It was an incubator. Those I often joke that I didn't attend Northwestern, I attended CRC. You know, I went to CRC. We crossed the street for meals. We came back. And that was my world. Those, I think it was three floors. There was a radio broadcasting booth, film editing room. There was a dark room for photography.

I was-- actually, one of my jobs was to work as a monitor in those rooms. And I once exposed an entire package of photo paper by accident, because I didn't know what I was doing. But CRC was fantastic. It was a very, very close knit group. And I'm still actually in touch with a lot of the people who lived in my dorm.

CAT RECKELHOFF: That's kind of amazing to still be in touch with folks that you were in college with back when you were young and in your 20s. And like I-- that's really wonderful to still maintain those connections and those networks with all those people, where you were like, really able to indulge in a lot of really creative endeavors.

TANANARIVE DUE: Yes, absolutely. And one of them was, and I just saw some videotape resurface behind the scenes. A friend of mine named Craig Shemin, who went on to work for Jim Henson and has since gone on to do his own work as a freelancer and author. He's just a funny, very funny guy.

But he did a behind the scenes video when a student named Robert Vamosi, also a writer, was the first person to look at one of my short stories and say, hey, I'd love to adapt this to film as a school project. So there I was taking creative writing classes, my first opportunity to have an adaptation. And looking back at that video footage, because it takes a village to make a movie, even a short movie and a small movie.

All these-- more than a dozen people, whether it was my roommate, Kate Larrabee, who was the script supervisor, Susan [? Symantec, ?] who was doing camera. Andy Hirsch was the star and DJ Welles. And all these-- some lived in the dorm. Some we had to recruit from outside of the dorm. But we're working on these late hours and the cold. And it's just so impressive to me that everyone came together around this project.

And I'll say just very briefly, The Other Side, my short story, was written from the point of view of two kids, one white and one Latinx. The lead, Carlos, was actually supposed to be a Latinx character. And they-- one of them got sick. And they were on the wrong side of the tracks. And they ran into a couple of Black guys they assumed were in a gang.

And it looks like it's about to turn into a confrontation. But after conversation between them, they found some common ground. And the Black kids actually ended up helping the other kids get back to their side. At which point, the Black kids are like, wait, isn't this where they jump, you know, Jamal last week? This is the other side.

So it's kind of this racial, through the looking glass story about othering and misunderstanding between the races. And you know, it's interesting to me that I wrote that story from the point of view of non-Black characters. I look back on that now and was like, hmm that was an interesting creative decision.

But just in terms of the production itself, it was a really memorable occasion, both the good and the bad. Because it was like, wow, this is so amazing. My friends are so creative. Look what they came together to create based on this little seed of my script. And then also when it takes 90 minutes to get the lights right, and it's super, super cold outside, I'm like, I really don't want anything to do with the film industry.

I thought based on that experience, that I would never. I wondered, would I be interested in being a director. And I kind of thought, no, I don't think so. It's not what it-- it's not as much fun as it looks like. Which is funny, because now I'm coming back around to TV and film. But back then at Northwestern, I was a little put off by the work, the technical aspects.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Yeah, I was going to say, it's sort of like foreshadowing for later in your life, being an executive producer and there being other film adaptations of your work.

TANANARIVE DUE: True. True. I didn't know it at the time, but that's absolutely what it was.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Yeah, I find it really coming full circle there. Are there any other favorite stories from your time at Northwestern that you would like to share?

TANANARIVE DUE: Oh, I'm going to be a little careful here. But we had a radio station. There was a student named Robert Sidney. We call them JD. His radio name was JD Roberts. And he did go on to a long career in actual radio. He's one of these people who came to college already having the radio voice. And he was training us in how to have a clock, and you play these hits at this time.

And our little signal only reached I think our dorm and maybe across the street. So on any given night, we might only have two or three listeners at that. But we treated it like such a professional operation with that kind of mandate coming down from JD that one night-- there's a student named Ian Deitchman, who's now a screen reader and with Kristin Rusk Robinson has gone on to write movies and lots of television episodes together.

But at the time, he was just another DJ at our little WXLO radio station, which by the way, I think is still on the air in a different form. And I was basically the program director, I think, at that time. And I was listening to the show, and Ian went off format. We had this clock, you're supposed to play A hit, B hit, this kind of hit that. He was completely off format, which is so funny, because when you think of college radio usually the point is just eclectic, no kind of structure.

But I was so mad that he had gone off format, that I marched down to the radio station and fired him. And I'm thinking back on it now, like what in the world are you-- that's a really good illustration. That sometimes when you give people a little power, they can really get out of control.

I mean, I don't know for sure I actually fired him. But I definitely-- and I'm not even a confrontational person. But I was so caught up in the spirit of the radio station and the mission of the radio station that I was literally offended that he had gone off format.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Did you really fire him? Did he not come back the next week to do the next segment?

TANANARIVE DUE: I, you know, I don't know if I actually fired him. I don't know how he will remember that story. But I just look back on it now and just shake my head. Like really, was it that deep? Really?

CAT RECKELHOFF: You were defending the integrity of the radio station's position. So I respect that.

TANANARIVE DUE: We were a training ground for-- I mean, we didn't really realize it. But anyone who did want to go into radio., It was a great training ground. You had to hit your cues. And we were queuing up our own LPs at this point. Or was it LPs, or am I exaggerating? It was just-- now I just see sort of a bank of buttons.

I wouldn't be able to make my way through that studio today probably at gunpoint. But I really was learning skills. If I had gone into radio, JD really made sure-- so shout out to Robert Sidney for creating that in our dorm.

CAT RECKELHOFF: That's great. You know, I kind of want to circle back to journalism and writing. I know you came to Northwestern for journalism, but it sounds like you were writing a lot of short stories on the side. Were you taking writing classes where you were able to write a lot of these short stories, or were these really just stories for yourself?

TANANARIVE DUE: Well, I'd always been writing short stories, even before I got to school. I took a community college writing course in high school. That's how determined I was to be a writer. And although, I mean I don't know if it was entirely just to make my parents happy. I had said, OK yes, I will be a journalism major.

Northwestern at the time, I don't know if it's still true, had basically a version of a double major almost, where you could get a creative writing certificate or complete the requirements for a creative writing major. So I took all of the journalism requirements, and I took all the English major requirements. So the old English courses and but most importantly, those workshops, which are really MFA style. I didn't realize it at the time. I mean of course, there are a lot of undergraduate programs that have workshops.

But having taught now at the MFA level at Antioch University in Los Angeles for several years-- I used to anyway. I can see now that those workshop courses at Northwestern were really modeled after masters style courses. And Janet Desaulniers was my first teacher my first creative writing teacher. And the late Sheila Schwartz was my other creative writing teacher. And both of them had just such profound impact on me, just such good teachers.

I remember, Janet Desaulniers, something I have borrowed from her now that I teach, is this idea that so often learning writers like to say they want to be a writer. Oh, I plan to be a writer. I'm going to be a writer. And she told us from the very first class, you are writers. And that always stuck with me. And I think it's an important distinction for people who are learning to make.

Because the act of writing is what makes you a writer. It's not that you've published. Now if you're published, you're an author perhaps. That's the professional designation. Or you're a professional writer. But if you're writing you're already a writer. And then interestingly enough, there are people who self-identify as writers who actually don't do any writing. So that's the flip side of that.

And that, you know, I just remember the joy of being in a workshop with so many other students who were as serious as I was about craft and wanting to be writers or being writers. And then for Sheila Schwartz, who was later, I was very inspired by her. Just so supportive, she was so supportive and encouraged me to submit my final, which was like a 90 page novella, to a publisher, which I did. And I backed away. I got scared, because the publisher said, oh, make it 200 pages, and we'll talk.

And I was-- I had some imposter syndrome. So I didn't feel like I could do that. But she did see that talent in me and encouraged me. So I've always remembered that too.

CAT RECKELHOFF: It's really incredible the impact that the teachers can have on you and how their teaching styles or their encouragement that really sticks with you and you find yourself emulating a lot of those behaviors and habits later, particularly if you enter into the realm of teaching. You find yourself wanting to have a similar impact for the students that you're teaching as well.

TANANARIVE DUE: Yes, and there's so many full circle moments. Just last week, I got an email from Joyce Carol Oates inviting me to be a part of an anthology. And I was like, oh my gosh, that takes me back to Northwestern too. Because that's where I first read Joyce Carol Oates' work as a part of that teaching at Northwestern. So yes, so many, many, many full circle moments.

But you know, but there was an unintended consequence or development, I'll call it, from not just my time at Northwestern but also probably when I was in graduate school as well. I went to the University of Leeds in England as a Rotary Foundation scholar, despite the encouragement of teachers.

Because of both the canon I was being exposed to as a student, maybe that deep dive into old English literature, which obviously favors white male writers and other readings I was doing. Just like with The Other Side, I instinctively did not make that protagonist Black for some reason. I was writing from the point of view of characters who were not Black. And that was a trend that would continue while I was at Northwestern.

That novella Sheila Schwartz loved was an exception. But primarily beyond that, almost all my stories were from the point of view of white characters. And some writers might do that, because they feel like it would help them sell. But I had nothing like that in my mind. I wasn't really even submitting, while I was in college. It was not that I thought it would make me a more successful writer. It was literally what writing felt like to me.

So even as a Black woman who'd been raised by civil rights activists, practically home schooled on Black history, and yes I did read Black literature as a younger person. But even all that wasn't enough to counteract this notion growing in my head that being a writer meant writing these kinds of stories.

And a, there were two parts to that. First, it was ethnicity. I was writing about white protagonists and their journeys and their struggles. And secondly was the sort of tone and pace of the stories. So of course, a lot of MFA programs favor what's considered "literary fiction" without much emphasis on genre. And so it really didn't dawn on me when I was in college or even graduate school that I was going to be writing genre.

I was writing quiet epiphany stories. Like one story in particular was about a white housewife who decides that she misses the theater. And the big climax of the story is that she decides to go back to the theater. OK. You know that kind of story and done well. Those stories can be very, very powerful. I am not trying to diminish the value of literary fiction and all those small moments in epiphanies that we all encounter on a daily basis as humans.

But it hadn't dawned on me to let a ghost in, a demon in, nothing. I mean it was-- and it's not that any of my instructors preached against the genre writing, it's just not something that we were exposed to, not something we were taught. And even from the other classmates, you sort of picked up this sort of anti-genre sentiment.

And one thing I do remember from an early class, with Janet Desaulniers, was she asked us to all go around and say who our favorite writers were. So I said, my favorite writers were Toni Morrison. And everyone's like, oh, OK yeah, Toni Morrison-- The Bluest Eye, Sula, Nobel Prize winner.

And then I said and Stephen King. And there was just this look on people's faces like, oh my God, I can't believe she said Stephen King, in these Ivy halls. (LAUGHING) And you know fast forward to the present, Stephen King has won a National Medal of Arts, still dominating in so many ways, not only now in his books but continuously in his films. There's a whole Stephen King cinematic universe, because his stories do touch such a core with readers. And they're also very well-written. His stories will stand the test of time.

But the students themselves were not willing to accept genre. And I think just unconsciously I took that lead and shied away. So it was years later before I would realize that, that was what I actually wanted to be writing. And that would help me tap into my greatest gifts as a writer.

CAT RECKELHOFF: It's really interesting what you end up sort of internalizing as a student. I actually would love to talk a little bit more about genre and about protagonists. At what point-- when was that flip of the switch for you, so to speak, when you realized that genre was really your strength and when you started to write from the perspectives of Black protagonists. When-- was that a moment, or was that sort of like a series of culminations leading up to this realization.

TANANARIVE DUE: It's actually a combination of like one big moment and a little bit of a series. Like I remember one of the last short stories I was working on before the big revelation was about a character who thought she was the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde, because so many gay men were attracted to her. And that was kind of playing with metaphysics a little bit, just inching toward it, but still nothing to show, you know, what will be coming next with me.

What really happened though was Hurricane Andrew hit Miami in 1992. And I don't know how many of the listeners have been through a devastating event like a hurricane or a tornado that just-- the wind just flattened so many trees, so many weaker structures from mile after mile after mile. It was like a nightmare-scape after this hurricane.

And I got the idea for a story after interviewing the late Anne Rice, actually. I was working for the Miami Herald then as a reporter. And I was assigned an interview with Anne Rice, who at the time, I mean, when she was at the Miami International Book fair, her lines were just around the corner, just a huge figure, in terms of her popularity.

And I--so that gave me the first time to sort of confront my own biases, right, in terms of genre. Because one of the pieces of research I came across preparing for that interview was a magazine story basically criticizing her for "wasting her talents writing about vampires". And that spoke to me.

You know, that unconscious decision I had made in college that I was steering away from genres. Like, well, wait a minute, can I-- because here you have to understand also, is that because my parents were civil rights activists, my father John Due is still living. He's a civil rights attorney. But my mother has passed away.

They were the kind of activists where like if I'm in a history class, and it happens to be about the 1960s, I could look in the index and find maybe my dad's name, very often my mother's name. So I felt like I had this family reputation to live up to. It was in some ways, I thought perhaps bad enough that I was an artist, rather than being a lawyer like both of my sisters went into law in my father's footsteps.

It was maybe, it was bad enough I was an artist. But I was, I think, very worried about being a trivial artist. So that question about wasting your talents really resonated. And when I asked her using that journalism tactic I learned at the Medill School, "how do you respond to criticism that you're wasting your talents writing about vampires?" See, it's not coming from me, you see, this is the criticism from others. How do you respond to that?

And she just laughed. And she said, that really used to bother me. But when you write about the supernatural, you can write about all these grand themes like life and death. And she just went on and on. And she said, my books are taught in universities. That really stuck with me. She's being taught in universities. And I would say, I would couple that with my discovery of a book called Mama Day by Gloria Naylor.

So Anne Rice gave me sort of general internal permission to pursue genre. But it was Gloria Naylor who specifically gave me permission as a Black woman to pursue genre. Because even though Mama Day has metaphysical elements, you know, people might not consider it horror. But it definitely has metaphysical elements.

So that was a real primer for me on how you can write, hopefully as I strive to, beautiful prose on a sentence by sentence basis, but also infuse that with the uncanny, the not real, the supernatural, and really have the best of both worlds, which is what Stephen King does so well, is characters who are completely human and that you completely believe in, but subject them to nightmarish scenarios that serve as metaphors for the real life crises and losses and traumas that we're going to confront over the course of our lives.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Thank you for sharing that. I can't believe you got to talk to Anne Rice.

TANANARIVE DUE: It was a phone interview, full disclosure. It wasn't a face to face. But yes, I did. And it was-- and one of the-- she just passed away recently as the listeners may know. And one of the things that happened in the months or certainly the year before she passed away was that I told that story in Locus Magazine. And it appeared online, and I got to see in real time, because I followed Anne Rice on Twitter. I got to see it in real time that she had seen the story and that she heard it, and she knew about it. And it excited her.

So that was a real gift to me. Because I had never had the chance, or I'm not the sort to maybe write fan letters. And my husband saw her in a restaurant once and tried to get close, but the bodyguard was giving him the side eye, so he backed off. (LAUGHING) But Twitter, Twitter strikes again. And I just happened to be staring at my Twitter when I saw it pop up. And it was this really great, again, full circle moment.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Twitter is both a gift and a dumpster fire. You never really know which one you're going to get when you sign onto that app.

TANANARIVE DUE: That is true.

CAT RECKELHOFF: [INTERPOSING VOICES] incredible joy or incredible sadness and absurdity.

TANANARIVE DUE: Isn't that true.

CAT RECKELHOFF: I think it's really interesting, because it feels like now it's entered into mainstream conversation, sort of the freedom that the supernatural offers, in terms of talking about the human experience and talking about those feelings of dread and that the supernatural offers sort of this like creative flexibility to be able to talk about the everyday horrors that are experienced. And you can kind of frame them in the realm of supernatural but really root them in things that are, rather feelings that are extremely real and tangible.

That's incredible that those conversations are happening. And now they, I think, are happening more commonly, which I think is pretty incredible. And I think we have writers like Anne Rice and you to really thank for sort of bringing that into sort of like mainstream conversations. So you had this--

TANANARIVE DUE: Well, I appreciate that. Times are changing. And I do think for readers who have kind of shied away, especially from horror, because their picture of horror is like blood soaked walls or slasher movies or what not to put any of that down. But maybe some readers aren't looking for that in their literature, right.

CAT RECKELHOFF: Yeah.

TANANARIVE DUE: I think horror is having a renaissance in both film and literature at this point. Writers like Stephen Graham Jones and there are others emerging, Victor LaValle emerging who do have such great skills as prose craftspeople. But they're telling very scary stories. And one thing that's also, I think, helping to fuel the renewed interest in horror is that we are living in such obviously horrific times.

It's not that there haven't been horrific times for everyone everywhere all the time. Of course, there are some people who are living in utopia, while others are living in dystopia. And that's not new. This is just like another version of dystopia. If you're disabled, if you're living in poverty, then COVID is not a new dystopia. It's just a different form of dystopia. It's like, yeah, I always knew my life didn't matter. But now it's just becoming much more obvious that my life doesn't matter, right, and that kind of thing.

So I think more and more people are understanding that engaging with horror films and horror literature can help develop some muscles for dealing with anxiety, you know. So either like in my late mother's case, as a civil rights activist, I believe-- we never talked about this. But in the years since losing her, which was my biggest trauma and loss, I've come to understand that I think she loved horror so much because it helped her process her traumas from the Civil Rights era, being tear gassed as a young college student, to the point where she wore dark glasses 80% of the time, even indoors, for the rest of her life.

Her dark glasses are actually a part of the Florida archives, because they were so much a part of who she was, that injury, the officer saying I want you and throwing the canister in her face, when she was leading a nonviolent protest. So what do you do with all of the anger. But also anger is a mask over fear, the fearfulness of living in a racist society, being fearful that if you have grandchildren, they might be killed by police or whatever, all these anxieties.

I think she-- and she always saw the clock turning back. That was her whole thing. We thought she was being paranoid. And she passed away before the rise of Trump. But that would not have surprised her, let's just say. None of that and none of the circumstances around it and under the white supremacy it was cloaked in would have surprised my mother in the slightest. So she knew what world she was living in. And horror helped take her away from that world in some respects, so she could try to confront monsters that were imaginary, which are way less scary than monsters that are real.

But also, I think there's something about watching characters rise to the occasion, whether they fail or succeed. My favorite moment in sci-fi horror movies is when everyone comes together for the meeting. Like character A saw some weird stuff they didn't mention to anybody. That drives me crazy. Character B saw some weird stuff. They didn't want to mention anybody.

But there's always this moment, or usually there is, when the characters come together. They all share what's been happening. The gaslighting stops. It's just your imagination-- no, it's not your imagination. This is real. Now, what are we going to do. And it's that what are we going to do vibe that I think really attracts me to horror. That's the moment as a writer.

Like I have a novel called The Good House, which is on my mind, because I happen to be teaching it now in my UCLA Black horror class, which is called The Sunken Place. And it came out many years ago. It's a haunted house possession novel about a talent agent from Los Angeles who returns to her small town after her grandmother's death. And her son inadvertently lets out a demon that her grandmother had trapped. It's an intergenerational curse.

One of the themes is secrets. The grandmother never told her about it. So she was completely defenseless. She didn't even know there were demons. She is the reader coming in from the rational world, where she has to confront that these incidents don't make sense. Something happens to her son. And she's just so determined to find out what, that she has to let go of all of her understanding of what the world is and embrace this journey, right, which is to a degree what all of us have to do in life, whether we're raising children who are different than we thought they would be. We weren't-- they're making decisions we never even dreamed of.

And you have to confront that reality and move on and adapt and figure out how to be good parents to your children, who are beyond your imagination, right. And that's kind of what happens with horror. It makes us have to walk out of everything we thought we knew about the world, embrace this new normal. Oh, I guess there's demons. And then rise to the occasion, rise and fight.

So the subtitle of my class is The Sunken Place. It's racism, survival, and the Black horror aesthetic. 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.

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CAT RECKELHOFF: Join us again in two weeks for part two of intersections with Tananarive Due, where she will share how she developed her famous class at UCLA, The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and The Black Horror Aesthetic, and how she subsequently met director Jordan Peele, whose impact is immense and immeasurable and the spark behind the Black Horror Renaissance. Tananarive will also share a meaningful tips for young writers and how she came to meet her husband and collaborator Steven Barnes, and how they have launched their very own podcast, LifeWriting: Write for Your Life!

Until next time, listeners. Stay safe and take care of yourself, your friends, and your community.

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