Your Hosts: Piper, Dan, and Tempest, with special guests Nisi Shawl and Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Writing stories which feature people who are not like you is, in a word, difficult. In another word? Fraught. But good writers do difficult things, and in this episode Nisi Shawl and Silvia Moreno-Garcia join us to discuss how research can make “writing the other” less difficult, and perhaps even less fraught.
Credits: This episode was recorded by Ross Smith, and mastered by Alex Jackson.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:48 — 15.7MB)
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Find news article or clipping from before 1980 as part of your research into something that interests you.
Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
I wrote a novel about a modern-day fishing slavery in Ghana with all Ghanaian characters. Sort of like an Uncle Tom’s Cabin way of raising awareness. I’m a white guy from Texas. So, from my four trips there and lots of interviews I had it mostly right. The most important piece to all this was Ghanaian beta readers. They’re the ones I trusted to ensure I had this right. It’s called The Fisher Boy and traditionally published with a Ghanaian publisher.
A quintet? That’s right, Piper, Dan, Tempest, Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, and Nisi Shawl rambled through the bibliographies, sources, and other researches needed for writing the other. Mayan mythology, the Congo, libraries, ethnic festivals — all kinds of research, and they talk about their experiences and where you can go. The transcript is available now in the archives.
The transcript is also available over here:
https://wetranscripts.dreamwidth.org/176092.html
I’m an Egyptologist in case you need a reader!
Loved the footnotes/bibliography bread crumb trail description, it’s something too few people know how to do.