Denene Millner, DENENE MILLNER BOOKS

[2:02]Zibby Owens: This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, moms don't have time to read books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write a New Publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast.

[2:38]Denene Millner: Danene Milner is a New York Times bestselling author, award winning journalist, and director of the Danene Milner Books imprint. She has written 30 books for authors, teens, and children, Among them, Around the Way Girl, a memoir with actress Taraji P. Henson, and Early Sunday Morning, a children's picture book. Oh my gosh. I interviewed her, and I did not even realize until right now that she wrote Early Sunday Morning, which is like one of my favorite books ever. And I cannot believe I just missed that opportunity to discuss it with her. We discussed so much other stuff. It was a really good interview, but oh my gosh. Oh, well. I try to prepare as well as I can, but sometimes I miss like big things like this, and I'm sorry. But anyway, that was a great book. Okay. She is also the founder of mybrownbaby.com, a critically acclaimed blog that examines the intersection of parenting and race, and the host of Speakeasy with Deneen, a podcast produced by Georgia Public Broadcasting. Deneen lives in Atlanta with her two daughters and their adorable goldendoodle named Teddy. Hi, Deneen. Okay. So let's talk about this amazing new imprint that you have from Simon and Schuster for young readers with all these beautiful books, which my kids and I loved, by the way, especially this one. This was our favorite. Also, this was great. Love the colors. But this was this was so sweet and, like, poignant and awesome. And, of course, you have other books too. Tell me about starting it. Tell me about everything. Oh, goodness. So Deneen Molnir Books was the brainchild or the natural progression from my work as a parenting blogger. So I had I'm a journalist by trade, magazine editor, and I worked for Parenting Magazine. I wrote a column for them when I decided to work from home, be a stay at home mom, a work at home mom, because it wasn't a stay at home, I was work at home. And we all work at home. So that stay at home mom is kind of a moniker that I don't appreciate. But anyway, I And always you're like rarely at home by the way. I feel like you're always out running your kid places. Running. Running, running, running, running. Running at home mom. Let's call it that. Okay. Absolutely. Right. So I had a column called, and I'm taking a deep, deep background. That's okay, go for it. Called Ask Dine. And basically it was a column where people asked me questions and I gave them answers on and on the ethics and etiquette of raising children, making friends, being a mom, being in a relationship and such. And I started My Brown Baby because I found that a lot of the conversation that was being had about motherhood was completely leaving out Black women, Black mothers. And so a lot of it, the only time that we seem to get talked to or about was when we were talking about pathology, right? Like if you wanted to talk about teen pregnancy, then you go to a Black mom. If you wanted to talk about the school to prison pipeline, you go and you talk to a Black mom in poverty, Black mom. But nobody wanted to talk to us about the actual joy and challenges of raising Black children or children in general, and then sort of our nuance of what it means to raise a Black child in America. So I started My Brown Baby. And in the process, it just became like this big gigantic thing. I had this great audience. I'm also an author. And so I was thinking, how fun would it be to try to create some content, some books for this humongous audience that I have, this rap audience with black children. You know, I always found when my children were younger, it was very difficult to find books featuring characters that look like them. This was pre Amazon, my kids are grown now, one is almost 22, the other one's almost 19. What? He looks so young. That's crazy. Okay. Thank you. And so, you know, like it's been a while since I've had to purchase books specifically for my daughters, although I still buy them children's books by the way, because they're just beautiful. They're pieces of art and just jewels and they love them still. And so I went to dinner with the head of an independent publishing house called Agate Publishing based out of Evanston, Illinois, Chicago in Evanston. And my ex husband was having a meeting with him and I kind of hitched on to the dinner to go and pitch to this small publisher, hey, what do you think about doing a children's book imprint? He was already doing some really innovative things with this publishing house. He had a specific imprint geared toward Black journalists, authors. So I was like, I wonder if he'd be down to do a Black children's book imprint. Turns out he showed up to the table with the same idea in mind. You have this amazing platform with all of these parents who are willing and able to buy books featuring featuring characters that look like Black parents or Black children, would you be down to start this imprint with me? So we both came to the table with that idea. That was 2016. We debuted our first books in 2017. Straight out the box, we did Great Crown and Ode to the Fresh Cut won every major award there was to win for children's publishing in 2018, which was a celebration of books that came out in 2017. And then in 2018, Simon and Schuster came along and they were like, Hey girl, would you like to try and come and work with us? And I was like, Yes, please. And I switched to Simon and Schuster not because Agate wasn't doing well for me or that there was anything wrong with that relationship. I treasure it to this day. I am grateful to Doug Seibold, who is the publisher at Agate for giving me that shot and letting me opening the doors and letting me do what I do and have fun doing it. But Simon and Schuster allows me to have a much bigger platform. There's more money, there's more infrastructure, there's expertise with production, marketing and promotion. You know, they have their tentacles just basically in everything because they've been around for forever. They are one of the large, the top five publishers in the world. And so it just made sense to head over there so that I could create these opportunities for Black storytellers and creatives who may not have gotten a shot at a top five publisher if not for imprints like mine. And so this is my debut year with Simon and Schuster. We've done great. Me and Mama is one of the books that was actually the first book that I published that I purchased when I went over to Simon and Schuster. I'd seen it when I was over at Agate, but I didn't have enough money for it. And so when I went to Simon and Schuster and I had a little bit more money, I went back to Cosby Cabrera's agent and was like, so I met Simon and Schuster, was Is that book still available? And she was like, yes, it is, actually. And I was shocked because, hello? Do you see this? Do you see this? It's so gorgeous. I I know. It's just like, I just wanted to show a sense of the pages. Right. I mean, it's so simple, but so beautiful. It looks like Right. You know, this broken cup on this brush heavy brush stroke blue. I'm trying to do a verbal interpretation of this artwork for people listening, but I'm not so good at that. I mean, it's so cute. Like, oh my gosh. It's just so artistic. Right. And Cosby. Like, I I would frame this and put it on my kitchen wall. Thank you. I'm like, I'm trying to decide. Actually, this looks a lot like my kitchen. Isn't it gorgeous? I'm gonna send you a picture of my kitchen after. This has, the same blue Mac slash And and I have this pot. Crazy. Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. Oh, wow. All right. Anyway. Yeah. So, you know, when she wrote that book, she came to me, it was initially a board book and it was just sort of comparing mommy's things to daughter's things. When she came to Simon and Schuster, she was like, yes, it's still available. And I've changed it a bit. I've turned it into a day in a life of this sort of day between mommy and daughter that incorporates sort of the things that our children do when they spend time with us. It's like, oh, your ear is this big and my ears is big. Your nose is this big and my nose is, but my eye is blue, your eyes is brown. My shoe is purple, yours is tall and has a heel. Like that's what kids do when they spend time with the people that they love. They want to connect with them and the way that they do it is to compare, right? And says, I honor you and I respect you and I look up to you. And so I want to see what it is that I can connect with you on. And so she turned it into this slice of life between this mom and daughter. And what I love about the story is that it just is. That's, you know, like those are the days that I still have with my daughters. There'll still be times when my 21 year old comes home and we'll just spend the day together. And it's, you know, a very ordinary day that turns out to be extraordinary because it was ordinary, because we spent time just sort of in each other's space connecting heart and passion and love and togetherness. And something as simple as cooking a meal together or watching a movie or sitting and reading books to one another or just being quiet and still and in the same place. So I really I love that. And I think that Cosby did a great job bringing that magic together. I agree. That makes me sort of almost sad for, like, time. Do you know I mean? Like, I just wish I had that time to sit and do nothing. Like, where's the picture here of, like, the mom totally stressed running around, like, on her phone and sitting at her desk like me all day? Like, there's no happy like, no one's laughing in a picture like that. No. That that doesn't that's funny. Where where is that picture? Get in the bed. I was crying. Get in the bed. Turn the light off. Is the mom, like, crying on the bathroom floor. I don't see her either. Like, what? No. I have a different children's book narrative for myself. Oh my gosh. I cover my face like this. It's not because I'm happy. Oh my goodness. Yeah. I love that book. I just love it. Yeah. I mean yeah. Beautiful. It's like quality time. Yeah. Encapsulated. So are you like, I've always been really interested in starting an imprint. I, like, still have this sort of dream that I'm gonna start my own imprint for, like, women memoirists or something. I almost did it recently. I love it. But, like, what is it actually like? Like, because I feel like I would be so emotionally invested in the books that it would, like, take over my own life and, like, everything else I was doing. Like, I feel like I would almost feel more responsible for their books than I would a book of my own. Absolutely. And that is a very accurate assessment. And there are times when I have to talk myself into, you just have to pull back just a little bit, divest a little bit, because I run an imprint, but I'm still an author. I'm still a working author and a working journalist. And so the imprint is a passion. I don't make a whole lot of money running this imprint, but my bread and butter and tuition is paid by my writing. And so I have to remind myself of that, that, you know, like there is a whole infrastructure of people who are very, very good at their jobs and, you know, enjoy doing them and don't need me to have my hand in every single solitary thing that has to happen in order for this book to be birthed, right? So I look at myself as the doula. And when I look at myself as the doula, it's like, you are doing the work, I am just coaching you through this. I'm helping you, I'm making sure that all the other people in the room who are here to help this baby be birthed are doing their jobs to the best of their ability for the sake of giving birth to this baby. But you are the one who is having the baby. This is your baby, it's not mine. And when I keep that in mind when I'm doing these books, it makes it a little bit easier. I think I come to it in a different kind of way, maybe because I'm an author and, you know, like it's my baby. I sat here and I wrote it and, like I went to sleep thinking about it, I dreamed about it, I woke up, I worked on it some more. I skipped a Saturday afternoon out in the park in the sun because I tied myself to this computer. And so that means something. Every word that's on that page meant something. There's a reason why it's there. And I don't want to just willy nilly, have someone just willy nilly change my words around for their own purposes. Like this is my baby, I decided how her hair would look today. I decided what shoe she would wear today. I decided that she would have Cheerios instead of Froot Loops, or I made pancakes instead of French toast because that's my baby. And so I respect that when it comes to my authors. But boy, is it a lot of work to run an imprint, right? So there's so much work in terms of getting the production, the marketing and the promotion together, getting the illustrators and keeping them on task, getting the authors and keeping them on task that sometimes actually reading through submissions is an afterthought, which is just terrible because it's just like when someone sends you their work and they want you to consider it for publication, they don't want to wait months for you to read 200 pages. They want you to let them know if this is something that you want to publish. And if you are, let's get to it. But there's so much work to be done that sometimes I literally have to put my own work aside, put the imprint work aside and just say, okay, I'm going to sit here and just read everybody else's work and see what's new and what I can purchase, what may not work for me. I'd never want to give a no without saying, giving a specific reason why, which would give you the chance to decide if you're going to work on maybe making what it is that I saw could be a better book better, or if you're going to just take it to someone else who sees your vision, right? But I used to hate rejection letters. I was just like, no, thanks. Like, what am I supposed to do with that? Like, what is it that you didn't like? What is it like, is there some usefulness that you could give me that could make this work better? I'm always down for making something better. And and then there's, like when there's something that I love and I get to say, here's why I love it. Here's what I can convince the company to put behind it. And I am the conduit or the doula who's going to make that happen. And so it's a lot of work. It's a lot All of right, I needed to hear that. I'm always like, I could fit one more thing in, but it sounds like a whole another job. Okay. It is. You know, I was almost conceptualizing it less like a doula and more like a grandmother. You know? Like like, there's that pride of ownership and yet you're not really responsible. Like, you can't really be in charge, but you have the right to kind of hover. Right. Right. But grandma can walk away. Maybe this is just my relationship with my mother coming. Grandmothers can be gully like, yeah, all right girl, I'm finished, take your baby back, I'm done. But a doula, you're paying her to do what she's supposed to do and she has to stick to it until that baby is born. And I think past the six week checkup. Okay, a little more transactional. Yeah, for For sure. I mean, everybody's heart is in the right place, but it is transactional. Yeah. Okay. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. 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[21:59]Denene Millner: Wait. So go back to your own babies, your books that you're proud of yourself and, like, the writing, the the the your day job, if you will. Tell me more about the writing. Oh, goodness. So I am in the throes of finishing up a book called The Beautiful Blood. And it is an epic story about three women, three Black women in America, one who gives birth to a baby and has that baby taken away from her in like the 1960s South or well, she's born in the 1940s. So you see her life in the 40s and 50s, and then sort of what happens to her baby in the 60s. And then the second one is a the mother who adopts that baby who gets taken away. And then the third part is the actual baby as a mother and grown up living her own life and sort of comparing her life to that of her mother and sort of through epigenetics feeling the things that her birth mother went through when she had her own children. And oh my god, daily I wake up, I'm like, what were you thinking? Like, who told you you could do this? Why? Like when I hang up with you, I'm going to sit here like this in front of this computer just like this. I don't even understand what I was thinking when I told these people at St. Martin's Press and these eight other countries that I could do stuff. Of course you can do it. But oh my gosh, yeah, that is a lot of pressure. But here I am. It is That's a great idea. It's a beautiful, beautiful story that's rooted in some form of reality, right? I'm an adopted child. I was left, I'm told, on a stoop. And my parents came along and found me at an orphanage in Manhattan four days after I was brought there from wherever I was found. And my parents are the most loving, hard, caring, giving parents that I could have ever asked for. Like, I am convinced that my birth mother did the absolute best thing she could do for me was to leave me somewhere so that my parents could find me and be my parents. Because if it were not for them, I don't think that I would be where I am today. My parents are Southerners. My mom was from South Carolina. She passed away about almost nineteen years ago. And my dad lives in Virginia. He's 86, still my best friend. And, you know, they lived good lives, right? Not they weren't rich, they weren't poor. They were solidly working class Black people in America who had factory jobs. My mom was in the church. They had their small group of friends that they went bowling with and played bikino with on Saturday nights. And they lived good, quiet lives. And I want to honor in this book, my mother in particular, because I feel like she's in the I wrote an essay for The New York Times that's coming out this Sunday. And in it, I say my mom was of a generation that was in the crook between the civil rights movement and feminism and the feminist movement. And Black women tend to get sort of lost between the two movements. Like feminists of the time tended to fight primarily for white women. And then with the civil rights movement, you fought for Black people, but by Black people, we meant Black men, right? So where do Black women fall in that? And I felt like my mom lived this beautiful life, but she also lived a very invisible life that never gets talked about in any kind of grand way. Like, who was she? Who were her friends? How did they deal with being treated not as an equal to their men and having these expectations of sort of this Ozzy and Harriet kind of you have dinner on the table, you are responsible for the kids, you're responsible for the house. But you also, because your husband is Black and doesn't make a whole lot of money because of circumstances of Black people in America, you know, you have to work too, right? So you're working full time, probably not making as much money as the men surrounding you or the white women surrounding you. And, you know, going through all kinds of different kinds of racist things happening to you. At the same time, you have to go back home and sort of deal with what it means to be a woman in a household with a man who has expectations of you that are very old school, I am man, I take out the garbage and mow the lawn, and then you do everything else kind of thing. Who are those women? And I wanted to honor my mom in that kind of way by actually exploring that on the page, and then exploring who my birth mother may have been and how she may have gotten to that point where she had to either have her baby taken away or give her baby away in order to see a better life for her or what it felt like to have your baby taken away. And then what it's like to be the person who is the recipient of sort of the trauma that comes from both of those things, right? The trauma of being left, right? Because anybody who is adopted can tell you that there's not a day that goes by that you don't think of your birth parents, whether they've been in your life or not, whether you had a great experience with your adopted parents or not, there is something inside of you, inside of your DNA, in your heart, in your gut, in your sinew that is forever connected by blood, by that beautiful blood that runs through your veins. And so I wanted to explore what that means to have that blood running through me and honor that, but also honor the woman who taught me how to be. And so that's what this book and girl, I don't know if it's going to read anywhere like what I had intended, what you just heard coming out of my mouth. But I'm trying. I am trying. You well, first of all, you're an amazing storyteller. I could just, like, sit here, like, with my chin in my hands, like, all day just, like, listening to you tell these tales. A gifted storyteller. I am sure that that is on the page as well. You all you have to do is just say that and like put it down there. But wow. What a wild story. Did you ever try to find your birth parents? No. I have no. No. Never. Oh my gosh. No desire. No. I no. My parents are everything to me. And that's that, you know, it's funny. Watched do you watch the show? This is us? I've seen it. I don't watch it. All right. But I know what you mean. I've I have watched it enough. Once or twice. Right. Okay. So there's a character on there, Randall, who is one of the triplets, right? But he's not really there. He's a baby that they picked up the day that they had these two other babies and the third baby passed away. So they grabbed this baby who had been left at the fire station and bring him home. I have not watched it enough to know that. So I guess never mind. But anyway, go ahead. So Randall is black. Okay. The family is white. And this season, they've been exploring Randall coming to terms with the fact that he was a Black boy who was raised by these white folks. And there were a lot of things that he had to kind of push down and push to the side and not explore growing up because he was just, you know, like not so much, he was happy to be there, but it's not just a matter of being happy to be there. It's being grateful to be there, but understanding that, do I explain it? Because, you know, like the emotions that he's going through, it's like he's taken them out of my mouth. Like, don't want to disrespect the people who basically, you know, like created this space for you to live. Like, so many different things could have happened to me. My mother could have decided not to have me, right? She could have decided, well, maybe I should go see a back alley somebody and just handle this. Or maybe I should put her in a trash bag out on the side of the road and just forget about this. Or maybe I should do what she did is put her somewhere safe so that somebody can come along and take her. And so my parents coming along and finding me means something to me. That is a gift to me. That's the gift of life from three different people, right? My birth mother, and then my mother and my dad. But I don't want to ever have my parents question my loyalty to them and and my loyalty to our family that they graciously brought me into and created for me. And my dad is of the mindset, you're my daughter and that's all there is to it. And that's the way that I live, you're my dad and that's all there is to it. And so I don't have any desire to do that. Yeah. I'm not trying to pressure you, you know. Oh, no, no, no. I mean, this No, is a I'm sure you get this question a lot. Know. Oh my gosh. You know, every time I say, you know, I'm adopted, the first thing that's- I know, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. No, it's not bothersome to me at all to be asked the question. I always, you know, like I like to explain it. And my journey is different from, you know, the next person's, you know, there are people who go out there and they actually, you know, no matter what anybody has to say about it, they're going to go and find their birth parents. And sometimes that story works out great. And sometimes it's really ugly. I have no, you know, like horse in that race. I'm nowhere in the stadium. So maybe there's though some deeper reason why this is your first book, just saying maybe. There is. Gonna just put that out there as your armchair psychologist of the afternoon. Whatever that means to you. Right, right, right, right, right. There is another book that I published in the first season at the same time as Me and Mama. It came out a little bit earlier called Just Like a Mama, And it's by this incredible writer and librarian out of Memphis named Alice Faye Duncan, who wrote a piece about a little girl being raised by a mom who is not her birth mom, right? Just like a mama. And the whole book is about like how this little girl misses her birth mom, her birth parents, but she learns how to really appreciate and love this woman who's raising her just like a mama. No, I did read that too. It's just been a little while. Yes, I remember. There was something with the tablecloth, right? Weren't they sitting in like Yeah, okay. Yes, it's like eat your peas, Caroline. So it's, you know, that book, I think resonates with me even more than me and mama. When I think of me and mama, I think of me and my daughters. But when I think of just like a mama, I think about my mom and dad, and just sort of like this kinship that we have that is not rooted in blood, but is absolutely rooted in heart. I love that. That's beautiful. Okay, last question for you because I feel like I could sit here and listen to you all day. I have to like tear myself away from this conversation. But do you have any advice for aspiring authors? Oh, goodness. Sure. I'm a fount of advice for aspiring authors. And are you talking about authors like children's book authors? Are you talking about authors in general or just authors in general? However you choose to do it. Authors in general. Yeah. Yeah. My biggest advice, my best advice to authors is is two things. Write every day, No matter what, no matter if you're on deadline, no matter if you have a project that you are starting or completing, write every day. I have a friend named Karen Goodmaribel. We spend a lot of time, she's a writer, one of my favorite writers. When I was a young journalist at The Daily News and then became an editor at Honey Magazine and Parenting Magazine, Karen used to write for like Five and Essence and all of these great magazines. And I would literally tear her articles out of the magazine and hang them up like posters. Like she has such a beautiful, beautiful writing voice that echoes her everyday voice. She's from I think Southern people have just like this really beautiful way of using language and telling stories. And she is from Prairie View, Texas. And though she doesn't have an accent, she has very much that sort of storytelling cadence and it comes out in her writing. And I just adore her. And she moved here a few years ago. And so we are constantly communicating with one another when it comes to writing. And she had read something somewhere that suggested that in order to get yourself sort of primed to write, that you sit down every day and just like take a journal and write four pages. Just write four pages, free write. You don't have to sit down and say, Today, I'm going to write about flowers. You just sit down and you you let your hand write. And she said, By the time your hand gets to the fourth page, the truth has no other choice but to come out. And I'm like, Oh, we try it. And so I tried it. And sure enough, whenever I'm sort of at a loss for how to start a chapter or what a character should be thinking or how they're going to respond to something that I put on the page, sitting there and writing for nonstop, hand on a page, not typing, handwritten on a page. Oh my goodness, the things that come out on that page that somehow always have some kind of relevancy to what it is that I think I want to communicate on a page. So write every day, whether it's working on a project or working on an idea or coming up with an idea, just sit down and let your hand touch that page. And then the second thing is read. Like game recognizes game. So you got to read. You have to pick up these books and just, you know, like I'm sitting here, I'm going to, I'm going to be, I had a couple of meetings earlier, so I haven't written today. So I'm going to write as soon as we hang up. And I picked up You Are Your Best can't wait to read that book. Yeah. And I was reading Jason Reynolds, his first story. And yeah, I'm like, okay, what I do is not right. And I need to step my game up. But I feel like, I wanna throw this computer across the room and never look at it again and maybe go pack groceries at Kroger because that's all I'm worthy of right now. I should not be a writer. But when you read other people's work, you see storytelling, you hear cadence, you see how to form a beginning, a middle and an end. You see how to color a sentence, you see how to put together ideas and processes, and you come away from it a stronger writer when you look at somebody else's work and read it and really glom into it. And then you go and put your hand on the page. So it's write every day and it's read every day, period. Amazing. Wow. Well, Deneen, thank you. This has been so much fun and really inspiring, and I hope I get to meet you in real life at some point. We can hang out or something. That would be lovely. I'm thrilled too. If only that I get to, like, lay on that couch and read a book. Come on over. Are you in New York? Are you in New York by any chance? No. I'm in Atlanta. Oh, well. But I'm from New York. What part of New York are you in? You don't mind my ass. Upper East Side, you know. Okay. See, I can come and see you when we, when the world opens back up and I can actually go into the offices of Simon and Schuster, which I've only done once, then I can stop by and Please take do. I used to have authors here all the time. So please come. I would love it. All right. Take care. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Take care. Bye bye. Bye.

[39:03]Zibby Owens: Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com

[39:15]Denene Millner: and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.